Hypocrisy

When asked what bothers people most, or concerns them the most about another's character, the answer is often hypocrisy.

The word comes from Greek theatre, and essentially it means "acting" or "faking it".  Playing a role and stating the lines rather than really meaning it.  It starts out implying insincerity, but our cultural context makes it even more malevolent: contradicting your morals.  Stating one thing, and doing the opposite. We take it even further: hypocrisy means telling someone else that they are morally inferior for doing something that we're doing ourselves. 

Let me first get this out of the way.  We all do this.

We're all hypocrites. We establish a set of objective rules, then we subjectively rationalize why those rules, under certain circumstances, don't necessarily apply to us.  But God help someone other than us who feels entitled to the same exemption. Because we know we mean well, and sometimes, y'know, you just gotta do what you just gotta do, y'know?

So, obviously, I'm a hypocrite.  That fact doesn't sit right with me, but that doesn't mean it's not a fact. 

But let's say that hypocrisy is not the worst thing ever.  Because I think it does tell us something about ourselves individually, and it can actually be beneficial collectively.

In a recent study published by the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 17% of scientists who also described themselves as atheists attended church more than once a year (implying that a greater percentage went at least once).  It's a take-the-kids thing.  I get it.  "Let the kids decide for themselves".  I think it's marvelous.  Here we have kids who would otherwise be exiled into the odd cultural illiteracy of never having set foot inside a Church, at Easter or Christmas or both, get to take it all in.  "Ah, yes, here's the common cultural context that built Oxford University and the Parthenon and The Last Supper and the Pieta and orphanages and food banks."  But for the kids to have this experience, to actually have the data before them, their parents have to bend their own rules a little.  They have to embrace hypocrisy, if only for a little while.

An atheist friend of mine said "we atheists aren't all joyless drones", and of course they're not.  Because you can state that existence has no objective meaning, you can state there is nothing "right" or "wrong" outside of relative and disposable social constructs – and then in practice you can discern meaning, do something meaningful, discern the difference between right and wrong and choose the right thing for its own sake.  You can deny meaning, even be morally opposed to the very proposition of meaning, and then act in a meaningful way. 

You can denounce myth and culture and anything that can't be dissected and rail against the evils of imagination and magical thinking... and then take your kid to see Santa, because you're not in fact a joyless drone.  You're a well-meaning hypocrite.  That's a good thing.

Hypocrisy rounds out our edges.  It keeps us from being ideologues.  Keeps us human, frail, vulnerable, open.  Hypocrisy exposes us to experiences and connections we'd intellectually repudiate, enabling us to see that emotion, intuition, and circumstance all have their part to play.

The celibate nun who falls in love.  The staunch environmentalist who plants a non-native-species rose in the garden.  The lit snob who reads a trashy novel on the beach.  All of us who see the cracks in the surfaces of our ideals, and dwells in those cracks for just a little while, just this once.  Because it's okay.

A little hypocrisy won't kill you, because there's forgiveness at the other end of that.  We're very good at forgiving ourselves for our transgressions.  We could all use a little help externalizing our forgiveness.  Then we can turn, again, to our ideals and ask why we have them, why we need them, in the first place.

If you're not a hypocrite, your ideals are too close, and you're not thinking big enough.  Elevate your ideals, fail at them, forgive yourself – and others – and try again.  You have a lifetime to do this.