Friday, June 22, 2007
Opinion

06/24/07 LEFT/RIGHT: Authenticity vs. hypocrisy

Authenticity vs. hypocrisy By Mark Douglas Richard Rorty, who died on June 8, was perhaps the most important American philosopher of the last 30 years, ever since the publication of his ...

Fox News pundit Sean Hannity (top) and “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart CREDIT: Kevin Winter/Getty Images CREDIT: Frank Micelotta/Getty Images

Authenticity vs. hypocrisy
By Mark Douglas

Richard Rorty, who died on June 8, was perhaps the most important American philosopher of the last 30 years, ever since the publication of his groundbreaking book “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” in 1979. He was also my teacher.

Those who knew him only through his writings (which could be both frustratingly nonchalant and deceptively accessible) may have thought of him as a bulldog-ish contrarian—kind of a more erudite and less angry Christopher Hitchens. After all, Rorty was trained in analytic philosophy but spent much of his career disassembling it; he single-handedly recovered the American pragmatic tradition but so transformed it that many fellow followers of John Dewey, William James, et al, felt betrayed by his version of it. He was as wet a liberal as they come, yet he chided fellow liberals for being insufficiently pro-American.

But those contrarian qualities were just parts of the man who thought it was a democratic citizen’s obligation to argue about things that matter—and to argue against talking about things that don’t.

In person, Rorty was laconic but not rude, welcoming but in a distracted sort of way, awkward and surprisingly humble when giving voice to his opinions in small groups. He and his wife, Mary, regularly opened their home to those of us in his doctoral seminars. We’d come expecting intense conversations; we’d get languid questions about home life and literature.

I’d been thinking quite a bit about Rorty of late—even before learning of his passing. In his book “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,” he described two important characters in the liberal tradition: the metaphysician and the ironist. The liberal metaphysician thought that the reasons to pursue certain types of political societies—namely, those that emphasized personal liberties while striving for greater equality—should be tied to some fundamental claims about big ideas like truth, goodness and God. The liberal ironist thought that liberalism was better off without foundations and that the reason to prefer liberal society was that it allowed lots of different people to join public conversations without their having to appeal to big ideas. I was a metaphysician of sorts; he was an ironist. Both of us were pragmatists, though in quite different ways.

The reason I’d been thinking about Rorty has to do with his ironist/metaphysician distinction: I was wondering what he’d do with the contemporary political preoccupation with hypocrisy. Of late, it seems the worst thing a public figure can be accused of is hypocrisy, whether it be Hillary Clinton having accepted money from health-care firms or twice-married-in-rapid-succession John McCain catering to social conservatives. Read the opinion columns of various papers for a while and you’ll notice it: They reek with the scent of hypocrite-baiting.

Based on my entirely anecdotal survey, there are two kinds of responses to hypocrisy: cynicism and outrage. Watch “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” for evidence of the former and Fox News for examples of the latter. And while the parallel isn’t exact, we might think of misdirected Rortian ironists as favoring cynicism and misdirected Rortian metaphysicians as tending toward outrage.

The preoccupation with critique-through-accusation-of-hypocrisy reveals something about contemporary American political culture: namely, that we’ve begun to treat hypocrisy’s opposite—let’s call it authenticity—as a guiding virtue. And this, I think Rorty would say, is not a good thing.

I can almost hear him now: “Authenticity isn’t the kind of political virtue we want to promote around here,” he’d say. “It’s not only freighted with unhelpful metaphysical assumptions—who, after Freud and Heidegger, would presume to even know what all motivated them, let alone try to make all those motivations consonant with each other?—but it promotes a kind of political aphasia. We democratic citizens are not the type of people who want to be governed by a charismatic leader; we think we’re better off when governed by Constitutional law. And law takes no interest in whether someone’s political position matches his personal life. Instead, Constitutional law asks only whether that political position leads to a freer and more equal society.”

Others would argue with this. They’d claim that leaders shape political culture, and that those among them lacking some type of inherent integrity couldn’t be trusted to shape a healthy political culture. Or they’d worry that Rorty was overly dismissive of voter confidence, for which authenticity is the coin of the realm. But Rorty, I imagine, in his own rather blasé way, would hold firm: Authenticity is an unduly emphasized virtue, he’d say; hypocrisy, an overly feared vice. This equation makes admitting error politically dangerous, and so discourages us from trying to think in the kinds of creative ways upon which ever-changing democracies depend. SP

Mark Douglas is a professor of Christian ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary.