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June 26, 2021 - 8:15pm
There are several good reasons why Matt Hancock was right to resign earlier this evening. But hypocrisy isn’t one of them.
We ought to be soft on hypocrisy for two reasons. First, we are all at it. Maybe not on such a grand stage. But most of us — perhaps all of us — commit little hypocrisies every day. We say one thing and do another. In which case the charge of hypocrisy is itself inevitably hypocritical. The only people who are not being hypocritical are those who admit their own, which is a kind of paradox.
Secondly, hypocrisy is about having higher moral standards that one fails to meet. Better that, it seems to me, than having low or no standards that one can therefore easily meet. The opposite of hypocrisy is a kind of cynicism — it is the deliberate refusal of moral values, a position designed to protect oneself from the accusation of not having met them.
Yet hypocrisy is often thought of as the worst kind of failure going. And I suspect the reason for this is our thoroughgoing subjectivity about morality. In an age where we cannot agree on right and wrong, where we all have our own moral truth, not being true to what you say is the only kind of failure going. When morality becomes so subjective, hypocrisy is the only accusation left.
No, there are objective standards. And Hancock has failed to meet them. He had to go. But not for being a hypocrite. We are all up to that.
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SubscribeWell, there’s hypocrisy and hypocrisy, isn’t there? We may all have our own hypocrisies. But when you’re the guy who’s telling everyone in the country that you can’t meet friends, or family, can’t travel, can’t visit someone in hospital who really wants to see you, then surely we are entitled to hold you to a rather higher standard than your average citizen. Though I would agree that the appalling damage he’s inflicted on his family is morally worse.
What an utterly poor article, wrong on every count.
“We ought to be soft on hypocrisy for two reasons. First, we are all at it. Maybe not on such a grand stage. But most of us — perhaps all of us — commit little hypocrisies every day.”
Come on.. Double adultery, breaking all his covid rules that he, himself, is boss of, all in one go, and you rate that with some one who says they avoid fatty foods having a doughnut?
“Secondly, hypocrisy is about having higher moral standards that one fails to meet.”
No it does not, is not. Hypocrisy MAY be about claiming moral standards, but that is just one of an infinite variety of hypocrisy.
“Yet hypocrisy is often thought of as the worst kind of failure going. And I suspect the reason for this is our thoroughgoing subjectivity about morality. In an age where we cannot agree on right and wrong, where we all have our own moral truth, not being true to what you say is the only kind of failure going.”
WTF???? Have you never heard of Woke? Hypocrisy is only a crime when the little people can use it to attack the bigger people, in its self it is the least of sin. Every single person today, take educators and politicos, they are supposed to LIE, and LIE, and LIE about how they feel when ever it comes to thoughts which are anti-woke. They are supposed to STFU because the greatest crime of all, the ultimate, is saying the wrong thing, especially if you believe it.
ALL are forced to hypocrisy by WOKE, all MUST say what they do not believe, or be fired, flamed, Doxxed, threatened, this is the new normal. Giles, you could not be more wrong.
I agree with much of what you write but hypocrisy is as old as time whereas woke is a recent fashion. While everyone is a hypocrite to one extent or another, not everyone is woke.
I also agree with what you write about adultery but, even if one thinks that his to his family are morally worse than his lies to the country, in some sense they are apart from his job; many people are doing jobs very effectively while having an adulterous relationship with a colleague.
Neither you nor Alison mention the cronyism which seems to have been part of her getting her job.
Many people will look on his behaviour and for a variety of reasons; unfortunately he will be back soon when the furore dies down.
I think Boris should have sacked him – but that would have been GROSS hypocrisy!
“I think Boris should have sacked him – but that would have been GROSS hypocrisy!”
No, it wouldn’t. Be consistent – it’s nothing to do with marriage and morals, but with his behaviour versus Covid rules and guidance. So Boris could easily have sacked him while making it clear that his failure to behave properly with regards to his role as Secretary of State was the cause of his dismissal, and not because of any failings as a man (which we are all guilty of, to greater or lesser degrees).
Boris could have done that, but he really isn’t very good at making those kind of even modestly nuanced arguments.
Woke is as old as the hills, the story of the Emperor and his new clothes from long ago is Woke.
What has changed is the craziness of Nu-Woke, which is twofold, first is it is about ones Private Thought, what one believes, second it is that one must believe that which is utterly preposterous, or at least pretend to.
J Swift had Lilliput as a great example of this, only he had two sides, wile WOKE has only one side because the wicked MSM, Education, entertainment, politico, and Social Media Elites have all colluded to enforce it.
“Lilliput’s Principal Secretary of Private Affairs, pays a visit to Gulliver and explains the faction quarrels between the High Heel Party and the Low Heel Party. The conflict, he says, started over a religious question: At which end should the faithful break their eggs: at the big end or at the little end? The Blefuscudians break theirs, in the original style, at the big end. But, by royal edict, the Lilliputians must break their eggs at the little end. There are rebels in Lilliput, Reldresal says, and already 11,000 of them — Big Endians — have been put to death; others have fled to the court of Blefuscu. He explains further that the Lilliputians have lost 40 ships in the war. The dilemma seems hopeless, for Lustrog, the prophet of their religion, has said, “All true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end.””
Giles I cannot believe you wrote this. After his comments on Neil Ferguson’s failure last year I cannot believe he stayed on. He should have resigned the minute the Sun front page was released. Yes, we all fail in small ways most days, but when one fails to set an example in that sort of job it’s very serious.
I completely agree that Hancock should have resigned (it would have been smarter to do it straight away) or been sacked, but the Ferguson affair wasn’t quite the same. Ferguson had gone to a private residence NOT for the purposes of work (that’s what the rules were). Hancock – leaving aside the rights and wrongs of why his aide was working for him anyway – canoodled while at a place of work. So he didn’t break rules (which Ferguson did) but he did ignore the very guidance he has pushed hardest onto us.
Canoodling whilst in the office is fine if a mask is worn at all times…
When the man is micromanaging the lives of ordinary people in the most intimate ways possible, and in a way previously thought impossible in a democracy, then damned right he had to go, hypocrisy or no hypocrisy. In any case, the video clip has turned him into a complete laughing stock whom no one can take seriously ever again.
Relax, all that’s happening is a Mexican standoff playing out, like the one at the end of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.
Hancock has compromat on Cummings, who has compromat on Johnson, who has compromat on Hancock, who has compromat on…
Just a matter of who draws fastest and who gets shot. Now, has anyone got some Ennio Morricone they can put on to heighten the tension?
“Hypocrisy is the ultimate power move. It is a way of demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules from the ones adhered to by common people.”
Michael Shellenberger
I’m very pleased to see this quote has already made it into brainyquote: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/michael_shellenberger_1114366
Shellenberger is a great commentator. I’d love to see him commissioned by Unherd.
Good article, and from the comments below I feel you need support in this. Morality is very important, and a happy society needs widely-accepted and meaningful morals – I recommend Jonathan Sacks’ recent book. Hancock rightfully went, for breaking the law he made. His behaviour to his wife and family is not good, but is typically human and I wish them all well in confronting and resolving their problems. I wish, probably fruitlessly, the media would exercise some Morality and leave troubled families in peace.
While it’s probably true that no government made up humans can maintain moral standards without a degree of hypocrisy, there’s hypocrisy and there’s hypocrisy. Hancock had to resign.
There are several good reasons why Matt Hancock was right to resign earlier this evening. But hypocrisy isn’t one of them.
I disagree. Hypocrisy is one of them. Here’s why:
A. We ought to be soft on hypocrisy for two reasons. First, we are all at it. Maybe not on such a grand stage. But most of us — perhaps all of us — commit little hypocrisies every day.
Two things must be said about this line of reasoning.
First, the fact that one does something oneself does not therefore make it okay, or right, when someone else does it. It is not okay just because we all do it. If I rape someone, then see other people also raping, then excuse them because I do it—Oh, it must be okay if we’re all doing it!—we rapidly reach the situation where rape becomes an accepted societal norm. It does not matter where the offence lies on the spectrum of shades of grey—whether casual canoodling, steamy clinch or actual bonking—the principle holds. The right or wrong here is not a question of how many people do it (quantitative relativism), nor whether it is oneself or other people who do it (subjective relativism); it is a matter, rather, of an objective moral principle which applies regardless of the person or circumstance.
What is the objective moral principle here? Hypocrisy is only the presenting symptom, not the underlying disease. The root disease is TELLING LIES.
“Thou shalt not…” is a fundamental commandment about how to conduct a human life. One may tease it out a bit according to:
—time and place (2000BC in Egypt or today in the West)
—personal or weather conditions (did they clinch when the weather was hot and steamy, thus ameliorating the seriousness of their transgression?)
—the mutually interacting relationships of the stars (was it their destiny?), or
—the stealth of the stock market (they should have checked first).
But regardless of such secondary conditions, “Thou shalt not…” still applies.
So don’t do it! And if you find that you have done it, then for God’s sake, say you’re sorry and try, try again to do better next time round.
Second, there is a time-honoured principle when it comes to trying to make yourself into a better person:
—have a look at your own behaviour first, before you get stuck into the other guy: Know thyself.
Here Giles Fraser is of course quite right. He is right because he knows that eventually, hypocrisy aka lies will come back to bite you. It’s called the law of karma: every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction. It’s one of nature’s laws to which we’re subject as long as we live here in physical bodies on earth. So it doesn’t matter whether it takes 1000 years or 10,000 years, eventually your bad deeds will catch up with you if you don’t make some effort to become aware of them then try to do something to make amends.
This then addresses Fraser’s point about cynicism:
B. The opposite of hypocrisy is a kind of cynicism — it is the deliberate refusal of moral values, a position designed to protect oneself from the accusation of not having met them.
Once again, I beg to disagree with Giles Fraser.
Cynicism is not the opposite of hypocrisy; it is its foremost example.
The deepest esoteric spiritual teachings I have encountered (Rudolf Steiner) state unequivocally that MORALITY IS AN INBORN FACULTY OF EVERY HUMAN BEING. That is to say, it is an inborn faculty in the same sense as our potential to develop speech and language. It is there in us at birth. We may then choose to develop it, stymy it, kneecap and deform it, or ignore it.
From that, it follows that:
—there is no such thing as amorality; this is a weasel word introduced into discourse by hypocrites or other weak souls who wish to disguise their own immorality by falsely trying to exempt themselves from a conversation from which there are no exemptions on offer.
So, we’re all in this together. Sorry, no vaccination passports available to safeguard against the immorality virus and enable you to escape to sunlit uplands. Amorals will accordingly be sorted and allocated to the appropriate moral/immoral queue.
—cynicism is either intellectually and emotionally lazy, profoundly and arrogantly ignorant, or brutally immoral. Take your pick.
So to pick up on Giles Fraser’s point: one might think one is “deliberately refusing moral values”, but in truth one is just kidding oneself. Here, the sin is not simply hypocrisy; it is wilful self-delusion.
Sorry for such a long post. Sometimes the topic is so important we need to say more. Could Unherd have a role to play in providing a space for longer, more considered posts, extending over a period of days or weeks, not minutes or hours?
You are so right. I cannot believe a Christian priest would take the view Giles has expressed. Yes of course none of us can be perfect. We fail every single day in so many ways. Yet that does not for one second excuse us from holding ourselves and our fellow men and women to the highest possible standards. The very point of life – and certainly of religious belief – is to try ceaselessly to be more than we are. To live according to some higher standard. And to be rightly ashamed when we fail. Sex has come to play far too big a role in all our lives. We confuse it with love. We think it is impossible to resist and almost wrong even to try, in spite of the pain and distress we cause to others, whom we are supposed to love, when we indulge ourselves. How far we have fallen! The fact that Hancock thought it OK to wake an eight year old child to tell him he was leaving him, and then walk out and expect his abandoned wife to pick up the pieces is utterly deplorable. What kind of human being does that? But then Johnson taints everything around him. What we have now is not so much a government as a court and very like the court of Louis XIV. That of course did not end well.
Perhaps a few executions might lead to more honesty in our leadership ?? Are we being told to eat cake because honesty is in such short supply. Any leader caught wilfully lying should be automatically stepped down/executed (a fast process impeachment) because having power over others is a massive responsibility and should not be allowed to be undertaken by liars -full stop, end of story.
I read that in ancient Greece politicians/leaders who did a ‘bad’ job were expected to commit suicide-the greeks obviously had a correct view of the importance of that role . At what point did we compromise so badly-Trump, Nixon, the Bushes , the Stalins, Hitlers etc etc All part of the same compromise. We get the leaders we deserve because we agree to compromise on the truth. Have just been reading about Jimmy Carter who apparently was the most honest ever president-he only got one term because ‘the people’ preferred a good liar ………………
I agree-once an individual decides to compromise truth, he/she usually starts to slide down a slippery slope – whether in personal life, job/career etc. Just look at the scumbags who make commercials. There is no decent excuse for lying-and if humanity had the guts to challenge ALL lying then things would change. However that would take a SPIRITUAL revolution (not necessarily a “god’ thing) and most of us fairly primitive in that sense. Best we can do is to practice truth in our own lives and hope that others might do also and that a groundswell castes out all the myriad habitual liars on the planet……………