Pun Salad

Since Pun Salad makes so much of phonies, especially those running for president, it seemed natural to check out Political Hypocrisy by David Runciman. Those looking for cheap laughs at the expense of hypocrites needn't bother; the book is a serious treatise on how views on hypocrisy have evolved over the past 400 years or so in Britain and America.

Runciman takes it a chapter at a time, in roughly chronological order. He starts out with Hobbes and Mandeville, then moves on to the American founding fathers, concentrating on Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams. There's a chapter on Bentham, followed by an analysis of Victorian authors Trollope, Morley, and Sidgwick, then (most appropriately) George Orwell. A concluding essay wraps things up, and Runciman comments insightfully (for a Brit) on the current crop of American presidential candidates.

Runciman makes the valid-enough point that we are all hypocrites, since we know the good, and uphold the good, and yet do not often enough do the good. Most Christians know this, for as long as they've been able to understand Romans Chapter 7. So hypocrisy is a potentially universal charge, and one that just about anyone can make, and (hence) such charges are likely to be extra-hypocritical themselves.

What a muddle! But Runciman does his best, making fine philosophical distinctions among various phyla of hypocrisy, and showing that it's (OK, fine) a necessary evil—and sometimes a positive virtue—in liberal democratic polities. That doesn't mean we should be resigned to it, but it helps much to be aware of the nature of the beast.

Most interestingly for recent events, Runciman considers the hypocrisy of Bill and Hillary Clinton. He makes the point that they're hypocrites of completely different flavors.

All politicians lie, but some, like Bill Clinton, are able to lie easily because they are able to persuade others, and themselves of their underlying sincerity. Bill Clinton was a faith-based politician, his faith being limitless faith in his own goodness of heart. Hillary Clinton is nothing like this; her public persona is too obviously an artificial construct, designed to protect her from her own weaknesses as a politician and a human being (notably a lack of warmth), of which she is clearly all too aware. This is why, in a semi-confessional age, it will be considerably harder for her than for her husband to get elected. But it also means that there is less danger in her case that there was in her husband's of becoming self-deceived. With Hillary Clinton there seems little possibility that she, any more than anyone else, will lose sight of the fact that she is a hypocrite. Hillary Clinton appears to be a mixture of what Mandeville calls "malicious" and "fashionable" hypocrisy, of personal ambition and a desire to pander to the electorate.

But—reader, beware—it's not all as punchy as that. For full appreciation, the book (early chapters especially) require a familiarity with British political history that I didn't have. The chapter on Orwell was probably easiest going, since I, and I presume many readers, know Orwell's work and history better than (say) Mandeville's.

Runciman makes the interesting point that, for all Orwell's concerns about hypocrisy, his 1984 dystopia is one in which hypocrisy has been stamped out. Big Brother is a brutal liar, but he's not at all concerned with hiding this reality behind a mask. When the populace is told "we've always been at war with Oceania", there's no effort to "spin" the truth that way. Truth is irrelevant and everyone knows it.