A couple of days ago I got myself into a pointless kerfluffle by trying to point out a popular writer’s hypocrisy, and how she was constantly espousing rules and ideals that she would then turn around and claim exception to.
A whole rash of people decided to twist my words into some nonsense about how I was “mandating her behavior” but the funny thing is, they were both right and wrong.
I was not mandating that she follow my own choices or ideas on the subject. I would not do that about something people take personally, and for their own reasons. In this arena, there is no “one right way.”
However, I was mandating was that she be honest about her intentions and stop making excuses for why she can’t bother to live up to her own rules. This, I thought, was a reasonable demand.
You cannot imagine the shock I received when someone whom I thought was reasonably smart and enlightened sent me an angry email that included the phrase (among so much else) that said: “you do not have the right to demand honesty from anyone.”
Well excuse the fuck out of me, but I most certainly DO have that right.
If the idea of “respecting an individual’s choices” has morphed into “you may not criticize anyone, ever, for any reason, not even for LYING” then sign me out of this experiment called humanity. And personally I lump hypocrisy under that umbrella; it is a form of lying about who you are and what you value. It is, at best, a “do as I say, not as I do” mentality which actually encourages falsehood and deception.
Recently my friend and fellow New College alum Ray D. posted a link to a thoughtful article about secular ethics that is very timely to this discussion. You can read it for yourself, and I encourage you to since I’m not recapping it here. What I want to say about that article is that it brings up the ideas of “character” and virtue, two vital aspects of being human that I think secular circles tend to hand wave over.
And this idea, this utter nonsense that “you do not have the right to demand honesty from anyone” is partially a result.
Right vs. wrong is a tricky, tricky thing, and smarter people than I have been hashing it out for, oh, centuries now. But if, as Sam Harris suggests, we use the measure of well-being to judge right vs. wrong, I think we can all agree that lying falls on the side of WRONG. Hypocrisy falls on the side of WRONG. And I’ll be damned if I sit dumbly while someone tries to tell me otherwise.