EMILY GILL

“Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.” Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld, a seventeenth-century French writer and moralist, meant that people who disguise their less-than-worthy thoughts in their speech and writing are implicitly admitting that there is a better way, even if they themselves refuse to adhere to it. Similarly, in a 1941 essay on socialism and democracy, George Orwell wrote, “Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard.” Although today we tend to condemn hypocrisy, our current political divisions suggest that in many circumstances, a bit of hypocrisy might itself be a virtue.

Scholar Charles McCrary in his recent book, Sincerely Held, points out that in the twenty-first century, individual character is often judged by the sincerity with which a conviction is held. And sincerity often takes precedence over whether the conviction is true. Former president Donald “Trump’s public and private vulgarity show character because they are both vulgar. He’s consistent, or sincere. Sincerity … becomes a moral good in itself, regardless of content.” In other words, Trump has never pretended to be “a model of Christian piety.” But his religious supporters like the fact that he is the same in public as he is in private and that he has consistently supported his version of religious liberty.

The point here is that appearances matter, even when some hypocrisy may be involved. In a November New York Times column, Jamelle Bouie argues that although political institutions are crucial in providing the right incentives for citizens, the cultivation of civic virtue, or the values of public spiritedness, decency, and forbearance, is also necessary. “Even if it is insincere, the performance of virtue helps inculcate those values in the public at large.” When the desire for power is all that seems to matter, voters adopt this trajectory as modeled by their leaders.

This development carries real-world consequences. Current acts of violence against the Jewish and the LGBTQ communities, for example, have resulted at least in part from the seeming normalization of antagonistic sentiments by members of the political establishment and the culture that they have played a part in shaping. The attacks on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and recently on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, may be regarded similarly. Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, speaking after the fourth anniversary of the murder of eleven there, said, “Speech is just the beginning. It moves from speech to action.”

Some hypocrisy may even carry long-run benefits. Aristotelian scholar Aryeh Kosman, writing some years back about Aristotle’s ethics, pointed out that for Aristotle, behavior shapes convictions. For example, an individual who starts out by engaging in a practice for appearance’s sake but whose heart is not really in it, may change so that eventually he is doing so from a sense of conviction, or for the “right reasons.” But similarly, an individual who engages in a questionable practice, perhaps simply to be popular or to accommodate others in her circle, may also change so that over time she decides that the practice is not so reprehensible after all.

Hypocrisy is linked to an absence of sincerity and transparency. Sometimes, however, sincerity is overrated, and the uses of hypocrisy are underrated.