Is Hypocrisy What's Wrong?
Miller, Stephen
In the past few years the word hypocrisy has been used increasingly in political discussions. The author of a column last year in the New Yorker wondered, for example, whether some good...
...We would do well to remove the word hypocrisy from political discussions and leave it for our private concerns and the subtle speculations of a La Rochefoucauld...
...But since this is an arduous and hazardous undertaking, I wish fewer people would meddle with it...
...In Scene Five of Part One, Danton complains to Robespierre about the latter's vir a A major portion of the speech appears in Robespierre, ed...
...Is the charge of hypocrisy, then, completely irrelevant to the political realm...
...His hatred of hypocrisy leads to his betrayal of Rome...
...74-78...
...his hands, according to the Convention, were not pure...
...But Robespierre, unlike La Rochefoucauld, refuses to accept these impure thoughts: "Why can I not free my thoughts...
...La Rochefoucauld is usually labeled a cynic, a man who described the vanity, selfishness, and duplicity of people, especially the people he observed at the court of Louis XIV—decadent aristocrats who lived in a world in which "hypocrisy is the homage that vice offers to virtue...
...What methods will they employ...
...The sole foundation of civil society is morality," he said in a speech of May 7, 1794 .6 But when Robespierre speaks of virtue he does not mean one's actions but one's inner purity, and Robespierre wanted a France full of inwardly pure Frenchmen...
...s Robespierre dresses up as The Incorruptible, and in order to convince himself of his own virtue he guillotines others...
...1 These skeptics may speculate endlessly about motives, but they know that man can judge his fellowmen only by their actions...
...How can we know other people's motives, 2 The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans...
...they are strategies for the moment, attempts to placate either Coriolanus or the angry mob...
...La Rochefoucauld respects the complexity of man, a creature whose unconscious hypocrisy makes him almost awesome...
...In the past few years the word hypocrisy has been used increasingly in political discussions...
...Although La Rochefoucauld does at times suggest that some hypocrisy is conscious, his major point is that most hypocrisy is unconscious: the homage that vice pays to virtue may be a way of deceiving ourselves that our good actions are done because of good motives...
...In his last speech, when he addressed the National Convention two days before he was guillotined, he said: "I am here to unmask the abuses which are bringing about the ruin of the patrie and which your incorruptibility alone can restrain...:' 8 France, he continued, was composed of two kinds of people, the party of good citizens and the party of the bad...
...In criticizing the Pharisees Christ is stress ing the mysterious opaqueness of human beings...
...A long tradition of Christian skeptics, a tradition that has had its fullest flowering in France, has made much the same point...
...La Rochefoucauld knew that all thought is impure, that as soon as we begin to look into ourselves we may find motives we do not want to find...
...But Robespierre, unlike La Rochefoucauld, hated hypocrisy and for him hypocrisy became the sin that would undermine all the glorious efforts of the French Revolution...
...The guillotine is your private washtub," Danton says...
...Not only does he hate his own thoughts, but he also hates the idea that other people have such thoughts...
...Far more trustworthy than the examination of our inner motives is the scrutiny of our outward conduct 3 Pascal and Montaigne, like La Rochefoucauld, are forever describing the delusions of man, but their skepticism does not degenerate into misanthropy...
...Not only are other men mysterious, but man is also mys 1 Quotations from La Rochefoucauld are from The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld, trans...
...Menenius is the great but ineffectual diplomat in the play, always acting a part in order to prevent civil chaos...
...Thus the desire to unmask hypocrites is destructive to the political realm...
...Convinced of his own s Quotations from Buchner are from Danton's Death, trans...
...7 Quoted from R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Committee of Public Safety During the Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 275...
...r, In his desire to unmask hypocrites, Robespierre judged men not only by their actions but also by their supposed motives...
...The moralizing style is a rhetoric meant for those who are too bored or apocalyptic to deal with particular issues, a rhetoric that makes a high-minded appeal to our worst self-righteous tendencies...
...Skepticism about the policies of a government is of course a healthy phenomenon, but a frame of mind that thinks of all democratic forms as a facade may lead to the breakdown of such forms...
...Pascal would agree, I think, with Montaigne's reservation...
...The Pharisees of the New Testament played God, for they presumed to judge themselves pious and presumed to judge others impious...
...IS HYPOCRISY WHAT'S WRONG...
...IS HYPOCRISY WHAT'S WRONG...
...The important point is that such hypocrisy on the part of the Pharisees is unconscious...
...In the realm of human affairs, being and appearance are indeed one and the same...
...12 On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963), pp...
...Robespierre, like La Rochefoucauld, was fond of the word mask, for he continually spoke of unmasking the enemies of the country...
...We would do no injustice to Rousseau if we rephrased the famous remark with which he begins Chapter One of the Social Contract—"Man is born free...
...When La Rochefoucauld said that "the world in general is a congregation of masks," he meant that hypocrisy is a basic characteristic of man...
...and everywhere he is hypocritical...
...The arms of liberty," he warned the Convention in his last speech, "must not be touched except by pure hands...
...The most beautiful of all revolutions," he had warned the Jacobins as early as July 1792, "degenerates every day into a shameful system of Machiavellianism and hypocrisy...
...terious to himself, and therefore he should be wary of judging anyone else's inner reality...
...10 And Jan Kott, also comparing Menenius to Polonius, calls him "the ideologue of the patricians, in the sense in which Marx contemptuously used the word `ideologue,' .. . [and] a tactician and philosopher of opportunism...
...T aE EDITORS tually becomes an isolated man...
...Slander and hypocrisy...
...He needed the Terror to convince himself of his own virtue...
...He may want to preserve order, but he hates the customs that are necessary if order is to be preserved: Why in this wolvish toge should I stand here, To beg of Hob and Dick that does appear Their needless vouches...
...He that is incapable of living in society is a god or a beast," Aristotle said in the Politics...
...THE HISTORIANS and biographers have debated endlessly about Robespierre's character, but it is the German playwright Georg Buchner who, in his analysis of Robespierre in Danton's Death, most powerfully conveys the peculiar distortions that a man who hated hypocrisy might have been prey to...
...Robespierre seems to have been such a man, a man who would not have understood La Rochefoucauld's warning that "almost no one is perceptive enough to realize all the harm he does...
...The political realm, in fact, requires conscious hypocrites— requires, that is, people who can put on performances...
...After Danton leaves, Robespierre tries to justify to himself his order for the guillotining of Danton, but he is plagued by the thought that he too is a hypocrite, by the thought that he is killing Danton not as an enemy of the Revolution but as a threat to his own power...
...But Christ invests the word with a new and subtle meaning...
...Speaking of man's self-love, he also said: "There is no plumbing the depths or piercing the darkness of its abysses...
...Robespierre's obsession with hypocrisy cannot be separated from his obsession with virtue...
...His inability to put on the mask of a man who is friendly to the people brings disorder both to Rome and to his own life, a disorder that ends in his isolation and death...
...But Menenius has had a bad press recently...
...we must probe inside and discover what springs set men in motion...
...Danton, like La Rochefoucauld, says that we all need to think of ourselves as good: "Conscience is a mirror for a monkey to make soulful faces at...
...Conscious hypocrisy is a minor virtue, but unconscious hypocrisy, which is common to all men, may become a vice when someone is completely convinced of his own piety and is quick to judge others impious...
...his conscious hypocrisy, self-deprecating humor, and question-begging speech to the mob in Act I, in which he compares the Senate to the stomach, make him a vulnerable figure...
...What custom wills, in all things should we do't, The dust on antique time would lie unswept And mountainous error be too highly heaped For truth t' o'erpeer...
...Summarizing a letter of Pascal's Erich Auerbach said: It is always to be feared that what inspires us is not God but a secret egoism, and selfexamination is far from reliable, but often a source of delusion...
...7 e Quoted from Robespierre, ed...
...Robespierre wore the mask of The Incorruptible before others, but in order to wear that mask when he was by himself, in order to rid himself of the fear that he too was a hypocrite, he had to keep on unmasking others, especially those who seemed to be on his side...
...Biichner's Robespierre loves the idea of mankind but hates men...
...By unmasking the enemies of the country, those people who might appear virtuous and patriotic but who were in reality corrupt and treacherous...
...Ralph Manheim (New York: Har court Brace, 1966), p. xvi...
...Robespierre, however, divided France into two kinds of people: those who were hypocrites and those who were not...
...And if a man hates such performances he will hate the political realm with a fury that has nothing to do with the issues at hand...
...Although his criticisms of the people's desire for political power are often intelligent, his own refusal to play a part with them reveals that he cares more about being true to himself than about the order and health of Rome...
...Our actions are like rhyme-games: we fill out the rest of the lines with whatever motives for the actions we please...
...li Kott wants it both waysMenenius as a vacuous old man and Menenius as a clever spokesman for the ruling class...
...The issues they touch on are serious, but often their response to them is tainted with cant, a word Samuel Johnson defined as "a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms...
...These skeptics are aware, as La Rochefoucauld said, that "to know things really well we must know them in all their ramifications...
...The rich and the corrupt...
...Rousseau thought that conscious hypocrisy was a profound aberration in man's development, and the Reign of Terror, in which Robespierre played a major role, in some respects represents the extraordinary attempt of Rousseau's disciple to rid France of hypocrisy...
...The thrust of La Rochefoucauld's argument is not that the world is full of selfish and hypocritical schemers but that man is an impenetrable mystery...
...Walking to the window, he looks out at the sleeping city of Paris and says to himself: "In one hour the spirit commits more deeds in thought than the lazy organism of the body can imitate in years...
...Conscious hypocrisy becomes dangerous only when it moves in the direction of s "On the Political Theory of Pascal," Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans...
...Unlike Christ, these writers do judge men by their actions, •but they do so reluctantly, knowing that to make a simple correlation between external appearance and inner reality, as the Pharisees did, is foolish and misguided...
...STEPHEN MILLER 502 Robespierre, we should remember, proclaimed himself the disciple of Rousseau...
...The imputation of hypocrisy prevents political discussion because it moves the discussion to a realm where one gets bogged down in an endless and senseless hunt for motives...
...Robespierre truly was The Incorruptible but, as La Rochefoucauld said, "there are bad people who would be less dangerous if they had no good in them...
...Such a man is especially dangerous when he is in a position not only to judge others but also to convict them...
...You wash your dirty linen in other people's blood...
...How to accomplish this...
...Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 244...
...Quoted from Alfred Cobban, "The Political Ideas of Robespierre, 1792-95," Aspects of the French Revolution (New York: Braziller, 1968), p. 173...
...4 And in a series of notes that apparently were written when he became a member of the Committee of Public Safety in July 1793, Robespierre said: "What is our aim...
...He himself had just been accused of hypocrisy...
...Menenius tries to calm the passions of the crowd, tries to prevent Rome from coming apart...
...But Menenius' sententious remarks are not examples of deeply felt wisdom...
...But by this time it was too late for Robespierre to do anything about a national system of surveillance...
...The parts he plays, therefore, are not for his own sake but for the sake of Rome...
...La Rochefoucauld said that "it is easier to know mankind in general than any particular man...
...Rousseau's writings reveal a powerful bias against the customs and culture of urban society, a society that makes man live in a world of appearances—that is, makes man hypocritical...
...It is the use of the Constitution for the benefit of the people...
...La Rochefoucauld realizes that if we are to live with other people we must at times put on the mask...
...After Coriolanus has once again incensed the mob, Menenius says: IT try whether my old wit be in request With those that have but little...
...As Hannah Arendt said: "In politics, more than anywhere else, we have no possibility of distinguishing between being and appearance...
...No wonder Gunter Grass calls him "a comic slyboots a la Polonius...
...James Maxwell (San Francisco: Chandler, 1961) . 504 virtue and convinced of his own piety toward the sacred principles of the Revolution, Robespierre managed to convince himself that his bloody acts were for the good of France...
...His hypocrisy makes him a humane man, whereas Coriolanus' integrity, like Robespierre's, is shadowed with vindictiveness and pride, an integrity that takes its toll in blood...
...I think so...
...Christ judges the Pharisees for their spiritual blindness, and one reason for his condemnation of them is that the Pharisees themselves have presumed to act as judges...
...Halfway between the angels and the beasts on the great chain of being, man is a mysterious chaos of inconsistencies, and the imagination, according to La Rochefoucauld, "could not invent the vast number of inconsistencies with which each of us is naturally endowed...
...The dangers of Robespierre's politics— with himself as both the Messiah who saves France and the God of the Last Judgment who separates the hypocrites from the pure at heart—are apparent...
...He is no mere ideologue of the ruling class but the most able spokesman of the class that should rule if Rome is to be an ordered and harmonious society...
...The cost of doing so has become prohibitive, and we have to announce that from now on we will not return any manuscript unless it comes with a stamped self-addressed en velope...
...El STEPHEN MILLER 506...
...he might say, if we cannot even know our own...
...but at the same time he realizes how dangerous it is to try to discover the motives of others...
...We all dress up as best we can and go out to whatever party we can fit into...
...Coriolanus is a childish and irresponsible patrician who does not fulfill his duties...
...The accusation of hypocrisy is so demoralizing because the accused can say nothing in his own defense...
...Montaigne ends his essay, "Of the Inconsistency of our Actions," with the following remark: In view of this [the inconsistency of our actions], a sound intellect will refuse to judge men simply by their outward actions...
...We must not be too quick in our judgment of others because we may be blind to our very reasons for judging them...
...men have impure thoughts...
...It is they who must be punished for the wrongs and the ills of the world...
...Patriotism is not an affair of party, but an affair of the heart...
...The motives for these actions may be suspect, but he does not want to leave the reader with a sense of moral outrage and with a desire to unmask hypocrites...
...Custom calls me to't...
...The accused is neither innocent until proven guilty nor guilty until proven innocent...
...La Rochefoucauld, whose maxims seem as if they were written to provide a running commentary on this hater of hypocrisy who wore the mask of humility but presumed to play God, said: "We get so much in the habit of wearing a disguise before others that we finally appear disguised before ourselves...
...119 120...
...Louis Kronenberger (New York: Random House, 1959...
...III:i, 252-254.] 10 Introduction to The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising, trans...
...Hypocrisy—the way we unconsciously lie to ourselves—is the human condition...
...fraud, when the difference between one's appearance and one's reality is total...
...When Christ says "Pass no judgment, and you will not be judged" (Matthew 7:1), he is saying that only God can judge whether people are truly pious or not, for only God can know the motives behind the actions of people...
...and everywhere he is in chains"—and said: "Man is born sincere...
...Hypocrisy, in fact, seems to be the American sin for many of the disenchanted young, though the rise in the use of this word suggests that not only the young but also many other Americans no longer believe in the reality of appearances—that is, in the reasons given for certain political actions...
...In Periclean Athens the noun hypocrites meant an actor, someone who professionally plays a part, but in the third century B.C...
...George Rude, op...
...darting in and out of them it escapes the sharpest eye and is often invisible even to itself...
...Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), p. 189...
...Both he and Rome pay a high price for his refusal to put on a mask...
...As J. M. Thompson realizes in his excellent biography of Robespierre, this humorless and priggish lawyer was the most dangerous kind of unconscious hypocrite...
...Anything he says will be considered a lie...
...Whether the body puts it to practice is chance...
...We must make allowances for the inflation of all political speeches, yet Robespierre, I think, was speaking with conviction when he said in a famous speech of February 5, 1794: "We wish to substitute in our country morality for egotism, probity for a mere sense of honor, principle for habit, duty for etiquette, [and] the empire of reason for the tyranny of custom...
...Such vague moralizing has become increasingly common in American journalism, perhaps because many journalists cannot resist the temptation of becoming more "significant" writers by giving us their reflections on American life...
...he is guilty because he is accused...
...these being infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and inexact...
...II:iii, 110-116.] Like Moliere's Alceste, Coriolanus evenTo Contributors Like other periodicals, we have asked for stamped self-addressed envelopes with sub mitted articles but sometimes have returned them when such envelopes weren't included...
...IS HYPOCRISY WHAT'S WRONG...
...This gap exists because we all need to justify our actions to ourselves—need, that is, to cover up any motives that might place us in a bad light...
...2 Montaigne realizes how difficult it is to judge men only by their actions...
...they presumed to judge someone's inner spirit on the basis of his outward behavior...
...Unlike Coriolanus, he is a responsible member of his class...
...93-94...
...Alceste is a comic fool who in the end despises everyone, including himself, and threatens to leave society—the equivalent in 17th-century France of wanting to leave life itself...
...cit., pp...
...This must be patched With cloth of any color...
...If there is a gap between his professed intentions and his subsequent actions, the only useful question—unless we have conclusive evidence that he lied—is whether or not there are good reasons for his change of policy...
...But we do know Rousseau detested La Rochefoucauld and we do know Rousseau thought that Alceste was the hero of The Misanthrope...
...George Rude (Englewood Cliffs, N.7.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 70...
...Coriolanus is a bit of both, and for such a "lonely dragon," for such an unpolitical man, there is not, although he thinks there is, "a world elsewhere...
...Who are likely to oppose us...
...then the betrayer himself is betrayed by the people who welcomed his aid...
...In The Misanthrope, Moliere—his comtemporary—describes how ridiculous a man becomes if he strives to be sincere with everyone...
...He is not a demagogue, for he despises the mob of common people and he tells them so...
...In some ways Rousseau is like the Bible: you can prove whatever you want from his writings...
...they possess a spiritual blindness that comes from their pride in obeying only the law of their religion...
...when he calls the Pharisees hypocrites he is speaking of the difference between their external piety and their inner spiritual emptiness, a difference that is unknown to the Pharisees themselves...
...hypocrites gradually assumed our modem meaning—someone who deceives, especially someone who pretends to virtues that he doesn't have...
...I see a world peopled with dupes and imposters, but the number of the imposters is the smaller...
...tue...
...Ralph Manheim (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp...
...He wants the reader to become tolerant...
...The word hypocrisy has been with us a long time...
...By contrast Menenius, the friend and supporter of Coriolanus, is a consummate politician...
...Sin is in thought...
...12 In judging a politician, then, we can only consider appearances— what he says and what he does...
...11 Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans...
...Let us purify the national system of surveillance, instead of covering up vice...
...But to see La Rochefoucauld as merely a cynic is to forget that he moved in the same circles as Pascal, and that often his analysis of man is similar to Pascal's...
...And the easiest way to moralize is to accuse someone of hypocrisy, a charge that shifts the discussion from particular issues to unverifiable motives...
...Montaigne and Pascal, like La Rochefoucauld, also question our ability either to unmask the motives of others or even to understand our own motives...
...There is nothing particularly awesome, however, about conscious hypocrisy...
...it is a minor but necessary social virtue...
...Shakespeare's Coriolanus, for example, is in many ways an admirable man, but he cannot bear to go through the performance of being elected STEPHEN MILLER consul...
...Coriolanus, as Northrop Frye has rightly pointed out, is not a proto-fascist, for fascism is a disease of democracy...
...The conventional negative view of Robespierre— that he was a conscious hypocrite who pretended to be interested in the virtue of France but was really interested in acquiring power—misses the point...
...Although in The Misanthrope Moliere makes fun of Alceste's desire for complete sincerity, in Tartuffee Moliere warns us that a man who uses his appearance of piety for impious ends can do quite a lot of harm...
...What is it in me that lies...
...5 Quoted from J. M. Thompson, Robespierre and the French Revolution (London: English Universities' Press, 1952), p. 79...
...And while La Rochefoucauld suggests that we are often most hypocritical when we are doing good, he does not deny the worth of such good actions...
...The author of a column last year in the New Yorker wondered, for example, whether some good might come of America's recognition that the Vietnam war is a catastrophe: "Such an admission and recognition," he said, "has helped create a generation that will never entirely lose its disgust for hypocrisy or abandon its search for a sweeter life...
...As such, the word becomes an important noun in the New Testament, where Christ uses it to describe the Pharisees...
...La Rochefoucauld's maxims, like Montaigne's essays and Pascal's Pensees, are not reductive...
...They know that man is, by his very nature, hypocritical—hypocritical in the sense that there is a gap between his actions and his motives...
Vol. 19 • July 1972 • No. 3
