Shklar on Hypocrisy

Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. This week is the final episode in the current series of history of ideas for watching and partnership with the London Review of Books. In it, David discusses Judith Shuklar, the philosopher who tried to remind us that being cruel is the worst thing we can do. But what did that mean for the other ordinary vices from snobbery to hypocrisy? This is the last in this series of talks about the history of ideas and in many ways, the last book I want to talk about is my favorite, but it's also probably the least well-known. It's by Judith Shuklar, American philosopher, political theorist. She died in 1992. This book, Ordinary vices, was published in 1984. Shuklar was also at Harvard. I hadn't quite appreciated until I saw the list. The last three thinkers I'd be talking about, or at the same university at the same time, but this isn't about Harvard. And Shuklar was a very different kind of philosopher from Nozick and Rawls. In some ways, she wasn't there kind of philosopher at all. She was very interested in history, in literature. She wrote a lot about fiction. Ordinary vices has as much in it about Mollier and Jane Austen, as it does about Russo and Nietzsche. It's probably her best-known book, but it's not that well-known. It's quite hard to get hold of, but maybe it's better known than I appreciated. I was watching the American comedy show, if that's the word for it. I want to call it a sitcom, but it's not really a sitcom. The good place. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's about hell. It's about a group of people who wake up in the afterlife in what looks like heaven, presided over by Ted Danson. It seems lovely. It's almost too nice. And slowly they appreciate that what looks like heaven is actually hell, because hell is just a tweaked version of heaven doesn't take much to make paradise hellish. In this programme, these four people who have lived relatively worthless lives on earth, that's one of the reasons they're in hell. One of them has lived a worthless life because he was a moral philosopher. I think he taught it the so-bon. The idea being that's a waste of time. He gives lectures in this version of hell to try and encourage his fellow hell residents. To think about what it would be to lead a better life, and he talks about some of the classic works of moral philosophy, he's been quite a lot of time talking about Kant. But suddenly I discovered that in one of the episodes he gives them a little lecture about Judith Schlaar's ordinary vices, and he summarises very pithily the central message of the book, which is easy to summarise. Schlaar says that the thing that we should worry about most of all is cruelty, because cruelty is the worst of the ordinary vices. We should, in her words, put cruelty first when we're thinking about the things that we're trying to avoid. Not what would make a good life, but how to avoid life going bad, because cruelty is where the pain is and the fear is and the loneliness is. And in the good place, the idea is that when you're in a hell that isn't that different from heaven, it is worth paying attention to all the little cruelties of life. And that's Schlaar's theme too. This is about the ordinary vices. Her life and her thought was overshadowed by a different conception of hell. She was an emigrated United States. She was born in Latvia, in Riga. Her mother was a doctor. They were German, Jewish, in origin. And in 1939, the family had to flee. First, in Norway, then they took the Trans-Siberian Express to Japan, and eventually they wound up safely in Canada. And Schlaar's thought all takes place against the backdrop of the horrors of the 20th century. Not just the Holocaust, not just fascism, but Stalinism too, all of the totalitarian miseries in their different ways, versions of hell. But she's not a writer who focuses on the worst that can happen. Cruelty is the worst thing, but it can happen anywhere. And her point, which is why I like the fact that she comes up in the good place, is that hell can happen anywhere, or at least a little version of it, which may not be that different from ordinary life, but within ordinary life, there can be pockets of cruelty and misery. And we should be vigilant for them. She also makes very clear in ordinary vices that not only is she interested in the ordinary, so for these vices to take hold, you do not have to be in a death camp. Life does not have to be extraordinary, to be painful. But also, she's writing about vice and not sin, and she says this up front. There can be a preoccupation with sin as the worst thing that people can do and be. But the sins, as she says, are all in origin anyway, sins against God. And you will go to hell if you sin against God. But vice is not about what we do to God or to religion or to faith. Vice is about what we do to each other. Vice takes place in the relationship between human beings and ordinary vices happen anywhere and potentially everywhere. You could say for schlaar if this phrase hadn't been taken by someone else, by Simone de Beauvoir's friend Jean-Paul Sartre. You could say that for schlaar hell is other people, though she didn't mean by that what Sartre seems to have meant by it. I think for schlaar hell is in the ordinary, at least potentially because cruelty is what happens there. So her book is about five vices of which cruelty is one and she puts cruelty first because she says it's the one that we should focus our attention on. But there are other ordinary vices too. They are hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal and misanthropy. And they're ordinary because we all do them. There's no one who hasn't felt at some point in their lives that they have been or could be a hypocrite. We all have some snobbery in us, somewhere we all like to feel we either are or belong to the group that is slightly superior to some other group. All of us have been betrayed and all of us if we are honest, if we can escape from our innate hypocrisy will admit that we've been betrayers too. And misanthropy is a permanent temptation because life is hard and people aren't always that nice and when life is hard and it becomes tough, it's tempting sometimes to think that the problem is just us. Not the human beings are fallen, not the human beings are wicked, but the human beings are intensely annoying and it's easy to despair or at least sometimes feel that it's better off just accepting that we're never going to be that good. And down that road is a slippery slope to giving up. And Schlar thinks that one of the dangers of misanthropy is it can become a kind of nihilism in the end you think it doesn't matter that much because we're just people. And Schlar thinks it does matter and the reason it matters is because if we're not careful, we're all capable of being cruel and misanthropy can be an entry drug to cruelty. If you don't care that much, you maybe don't care or don't notice just how cruel we are all capable of being. So it's a book about the five vices and it's about ranking them. Cruelty comes first. The others don't quite get ranked but they get ranked behind cruelty. And Schlar's point is that if we are not vigilant about the fact that cruelty is the worst thing that can happen, we might spend too much time worrying about the other vices. But if that's all the book said, it wouldn't be saying much just to say that cruelty is the worst. It's a more complicated, it's a much more interesting argument than that. It's quite subtle, it's quite elusive in places. It also touches base with all sorts of writers and thinkers, some of whom are the writers and thinkers that I've been talking about in this course, which is another reason why I wanted to end here. Schlar wrote a book about Russo and she talks a little bit about Russo in ordinary vices. She talks a tiny bit about Samuel Butler. She discusses Bentham. She discusses Nietzsche at some length. She talks about Bentham and Nietzsche in the context of complicating her argument about cruelty. And there is more to be said about cruelty than we should just avoid it. And there is also more to be said about the other vices too than that they simply come behind cruelty. The problem with avoiding cruelty, with being vigilant, with thinking that it's the worst thing that can happen is that there is a way in which that kind of obsession with not being cruel can lead to cruelty coming in by the back door. There is a way in which the fanatic for anti-cruelty shares something with all fanatics, which is a kind of deadening of our sensitivity to the ways in which cruelty can creep up on us, not the cruelty of the death camps, not the cruelty of the most overt political oppression, but small cruelties, everyday cruelties. And what makes cruelty so awful for Schlar is that whatever form it takes on the grand scale, on the human scale, on the micro scale, when you are on the receiving end of cruelty, it feels the same because cruelty is where the fear is. Bentham is there to make two points. One is a point that really I think chimes with some of the things I was trying to say about Bentham, that he has been misunderstood and misrepresented Schlar defends him passionately against as he says the absurd charge that somehow Bentham's utilitarianism lies behind the worst of 20th-century politics, that totalitarianism, the attempt to control, the attempt to regulate, these are all extensions of a kind of warped rationalistic mindset that Bentham got underway with his crazy calculating machine. Schlar says rightly that Bentham was nothing like that, Bentham's obsession was with cruelty. Bentham was a kindhearted man who saw all around him terrible and avoidable suffering, and he wanted to stop it. He didn't want to open the door to control and manipulation. He wanted to make sure that the terrible power that was being exercised over vulnerable people could be reigned in. And yet Schlar says there is a danger to someone being so purely against cruelty as Bentham to being so kindhearted which is that he fell into the trap of trying to systematize his anti-cruelty. He wanted to make sure that he ruled it out everywhere. He was intolerant of cruelty and out of that he built a system. And the trouble with systems is that they can end up treating people as rules would say, as means and not ends, feeding them into the system to protect them, to save them from the worst that could happen, but in a way that has an indifference to it and maybe has some blind spots too. And though Bentham's utilitarianism is not in any sense a road to totalitarianism, it is true for the reasons that rules said that if you try and turn it into the ultimate positive philosophy you can get absurd results. There can be an indifference to human beings in trying to minimise the amount of suffering. Some people suffering might count less than others because of the way the calculation is made. And out of that there is always the risk that the fanatical opposition to cruelty lets cruelty back in. Nietzsche is different for Schlaar and Nietzsche illustrates the different kind of pitfall in the political philosophy of cruelty. What Nietzsche seems to have hated she thinks is hypocrisy about cruelty, particularly the hypocrisy of Christian religion, a religion that he says in the genealogy of morality is founded on cruelty and there is no one who has been crueler than Christian kings. There is no one who is crueler than a Christian trying to convert the heretic. But Nietzsche's response to that is not to say that cruelty is the worst thing. Nietzsche's response is to say that we should therefore be honest and open about our propensity to cruelty, that the worst thing is to cover it up to conceal it to hide it. The worst thing is the Christian version where cruelty lies behind pious talk about nobility and justice. So Nietzsche the anti hypocrite ends up in a way embracing cruelty. Not because he loves it and again Schlaar I think is pretty fair to Nietzsche. Nietzsche is not a monster. Nietzsche is not a sadist. Nietzsche, like Bentham, was a pretty sensitive person. He was finally attuned to human suffering, but he persuaded himself that the worst thing that could happen would be to deny who we really are. He wasn't deep down, a misanthrope, he certainly wasn't a cynic, he was against nihilism. But he thought that there was a danger particularly in the Christian perspective that what we do is pretend that we're better than we really are, and one way to be true to ourselves and therefore to realise our true potential is to accept the reality of cruelty, and Schlaar says we should never accept cruelty. We should always be against it. We have to somehow find a way always to be against cruelty without becoming fanatical, puritanical, enemies of cruelty. And that she says is a question of human temperament and character. There isn't a philosophical system that can tell you how to deal with that puzzle, that challenge. Somehow you have to be as sensitive, as Bentham, you have to be as brilliant and open as Nietzsche, without becoming Bentham or Nietzsche. You have to be yourself, but all of us being ourselves have to recognise that we're never safe from cruelty, both receiving it, but also dishing it out. It's a complicated argument and it gets both more complicated but also clearer when Schlaar talks about the other vices, snobbery, hypocrisy, betrayal. She has a number of things to say which connect to cruelty but also reflect her argument about cruelty. One is that because the challenge of being vigilant against cruelty is so demanding and that there are these pitfalls, it can be tempting to focus on the other vices instead. One of the challenges with cruelty, particularly ordinary everyday cruelty, cruelty in the home, cruelty in the workplace, cruelty in the liberal democratic politics, not just in fascist or Stalinist politics. It's quite hard sometimes to see it, it is often obscured hidden away. And the difficulty is you mustn't be one of those puritanical fanatics who goes around always rooting it out, interfering, sticking your nose in, seeing cruelty when it's not there, and yet you have to be alert to it. Hypocrisy, snobbery, these things are easier to spot. We're hyper vigilant, we're almost instinctively attuned to spotting hypocrisy and snobbery because we hate these things. The odd thing is though cruelty is the worst of the vices, it's not the one that most human beings most recoil from. Most of us, more often, find that we are really affronted when other people talk down to us when they mistreat us not by really damaging us but by seeming to disdain us. And though hypocrisy and snobbery are not where the real fear is, to encounter a hypocrite is not really to touch base with the worst of human loneliness. To encounter snobbery is not to be hurt in the same way that a cruel person can hurt you. If we focus on hypocrisy, snobbery even betrayal, what we might do is take our eye off what we should really be worrying about, and again, let cruelty end by the back door but also there's another challenge, a heightened version of the challenge of dealing with cruelty. If you go after snobbery, if you go after hypocrisy, you often make the problem worse. With cruelty, you don't make cruelty worse by going after it, but if you go after it in the wrong way, you may not actually overcome it. But with snobbery and hypocrisy, if you go after them, you may end up with more of them than you started. And she illustrates this by focusing on democratic societies because democratic societies are finally attuned to things like snobbery and hypocrisy. In a democracy we're meant to be equal. We're more or less meant to be the same, or at least to treat each other the same, and to allow our differences, but not to allow our differences, to enable some people to laud it over others. Democracy is the anti lauding it over at each other, politics, in theory at least. So Shagart says, "traditional snobberies, aristocratic snobberies, family-based snobberies, the idea that one person is better than another because of whom they were born to, or even how they were raised." Democracy's try to eradicate that, and they push back really hard against those people who literally try to laud it because of a family name. And she's thinking, of course, primarily here of the United States of America, not the democracies that still have legacies of aristocracy running through them, as is still the case, in some places in Europe. So this is supposedly anti-Arestocratic, anti snobbish, America. But she says all human societies, and indeed all human beings, nonetheless, are drawn to hierarchies, and drawn to feelings of kinship or belonging that allow them to feel that in that hierarchy there are at least some people lower than them. Even democracies have their ranks, their orders, their casts. But in a democracy, the claim is that this is merited, that those people who are lauding it over others because they have positions of power or authority, because they're better educated, because they have the jobs that really pay, they're going to be snobbs too. There is snobbery in the workplace, there is snobbery in democratic politics, there is snobbery throughout democratic society. But in this case, the snobbery doesn't recognize itself at such, because it thinks it's got real grounds behind it. The educated are incredibly snobbish about the less well educated, but they don't think it's snobbery, because they think their education makes them better. It's an argument similar to the one made by the sociologist Michael Young when he coined the term "meritocracy", which has come to mean something different than he intended. It was intentionally a mocking term, something to be avoided, the idea that you would order a society on merit for young, open the door to the possibility that people would believe that where they stood in the rank ordering of any society was merited, and when that happens, you don't get less snobbery, you get more, and it's both harder to resist, but also, and here's the rub for schlaar, it's crueler. There is a cruelty to the snobbery of meritocracy. There's a cruelty to the way that the less educated are treated by the educated in democratic societies, and out of this cruelty, you will get a reaction too. No one likes to be treated like that. Figilance for snobbery, we won't allow it, we won't allow these aristocrats to laud it over us, can open the door not just to more snobbery, but to cruelty too. When it comes to betrayal, schlaar says something similar, though she illustrates it in different ways. Betrayal is a very ordinary vice, but it's also sometimes something that's dressed up as an extraordinary event, then it gets called treason. In aristocratic societies, betrayal was routine. If you live in a medieval court, in a principality, in a close condition of an elite circle of people with personal power jockeying for position, betrayal is a fact of life, and because it's a fact of life, because essentially, you expect to be betrayed one day or another. There is a tolerance for it, there's not a complete tolerance for it because nobody likes to be betrayed, and the betrayers will always try to cover their traces, no one either is completely open about being a betrayer, but under aristocratic conditions, pre-democratic conditions, betrayal is something that is simply woven into what people expect and how they learn to live. You can have more of it, or less of it, and when it happens, there are different ways of responding, but there isn't a kind of hysterical witch hunt quality, when the betrayal happens, you may seek revenge, you may seek to betray back in return, but often, under aristocratic conditions, the betrayal doesn't seem like the end of the world. But in democracies, certain kinds of betrayal are seen as all or nothing events, betrayal of the community, betrayal of our values, betrayal of the society, the language of betrayal gets ratcheted up, not down, and there are witch hunts, against Laura's thinking of the United States of America, which was not a totalitarian society, but sometimes in its attempt to root out the possibility of alien philosophies getting a foothold, American society did have a propensity for witch hunts, it did have a propensity for seeking out the traitors, and sometimes it treated them with terrible cruelty, McCarthyism of which Schlar was very, very conscious, was very, very cruel. But as always with Schlar, there's no simple solution here, so she also quotes EM Forster and his famous line, I'll just paraphrase it, but essentially Forster said, he hoped that if it was a choice between betraying a friend and betraying his country, he would have the courage to betray his country, that there are worse betrayals than public betrayals. And in that sense, Forster is echoing Schlar's view that there can be a hysteria around public betrayal, which allows for cruelty. But Schlar says, and this is one of the things that's so great about ordinary vices that she doesn't accept any bullshit from anyone. Schlar says, if you look at what Forster says, it's nonsense. The idea that somehow there is a ranking, and betrayal of a friend is worse than betrayal of your country. It's not. There are betrayals of your country that can be the worst thing that anyone can do. And there are ways of being a traitor, not just of handing over secrets, but abandoning the values of the society in which you live, which open the door to the worst kind of cruelty. Schlar is vigilant against anyone dressing up contingent choices as matters of principle, because she thinks once you do that, you always create blind spots, and Forster had his blind spots too. And then there's hypocrisy. In some ways, hypocrisy is the most interesting of the ordinary vices, because it is so ordinary. It is so commonplace. We're all hypocrites. None of us live up to our higher values. All of us sometimes do not practice what we preach. It's so ordinary, and yet it's so annoying. There is almost no one who hasn't at some point found themselves driven almost to distraction by finding that a politician or a friend or a partner or a work colleague is somehow expecting standards of others that that person does not live up to themselves. Is somehow leading a masked or double life that seems to suggest that it's one rule for them and one rule for the rest. And when we find politicians who live like that, who break their own rules, we absolutely hate it. In Britain, the kind of collective public revulsion against Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister's advisor, when it was discovered that having helped to set the COVID rules, he seemed to have broken them, was something close to a witch hunt. Just in the intensity of it, and the intensity was entirely understandable because there is no one who didn't look at Cummings and think, "How dare you treat us like that? How dare you think that we have to obey the rules?" And you don't. And in democratic societies, that is often the thing that most aggravates the most people, and it can kill a political career to be found out as someone who does not live up to his or her own principles. As this last week, the politician Ed Miliband was on TV saying rightly that we need to move to electric cars that a lot depends on people being willing to give up their petrol or diesel cars. It's true what he said. In some ways, it's unalguable, but his interviewer asked him, "So you have an electric car yourself?" And he said, "No, it's just a work in progress." And he was then held down, in the studio, by his interviewer, who just said to him, "Practice what you preach, practice what you preach." We hate hypocrisy. We try and root it out. When we discover it, we revile it. And yet, as Shkla says, it's completely self-defeating to do that. The crusade against hypocrisy is the most self-defeating crusade of all, for two reasons. First, if we demand openness, if we demand that people do live up to their principles, that they don't try and hide things from us, that they don't have private places and secret clubs where they play by their rules. We won't create an open, honest, transparent society, because everybody needs some of those places, including maybe even particularly politicians. The demand for that level of openness, of honesty, of being who you seem all the way through, drives politicians into greater secrecy. Transparency, as a crusade, does not produce open politics. Transparency, as a crusade, forces politicians and others to find places even more secretive where they can hide. If you have things that you do not want to be consumed publicly in a culture and a climate that demands complete openness, the result won't be openness. The result will be deeper, darker secrets. And the second reason that anti-hypocracy as a crusade is self-defeating is that at the end of it, there will be more hypocrisy in the world. And the reason there will be more hypocrisy is because it makes us all hypocrites. If we demand of politicians, a kind of set of standards that we cannot live up to ourselves, if we say of them, you have to be open and honest and transparent all the way through when we know in our family lives, in our personal lives, that we aren't capable of doing that. Any of us who are parents know that the first rule of parenting is do as I say, not as I do. In that world, demanding of politicians, something that we can't do ourselves, makes us hypocrites. Anti-hypocracy is a hypocritical philosophy. And we do see evidence of this, and also of Schlaz's fear, her fear with hypocrisy, her fear with snobbery, her fear with betrayal, which is if we become too intolerant of these things, we open the door to cruelty. I think, I hope, I've got through these talks without discussing Donald Trump, but I'm afraid I'm going to break that rule now. Trump was, and is, a cruel politician. Cruelty is one of his calling cards. He's cruel in how he treats people around him. He's cruel often in how he uses Twitter when he was allowed on Twitter. To respond to criticism, he goes for the weak spots of his opponents, and he takes no prisoners to be in Trump's orbit was to be vulnerable to humiliation and fear. But Trump was not a hypocrite, indeed that was one of his great appeals as a democratic politician. He was, as he seemed, indeed one of the ways in which he was not a hypocrite is that he was willing to be as unpleasant in public as he seems to have been in private. The accounts I've read of how he treated the people who worked for him in private in the Oval Office, in the West Wing, in his business, was very reminiscent of how he treated people in public, how even he treated his political opponents. Cruel all the way through. Cruel all the way through is to be sincere. The opposite of hypocrisy on some measures anyway is sincerity, and there is a case for saying that Trump, though he was a liar, was also a sincere politician. He was sincere about being a liar. He didn't try and hide it. There was a brazenness to it. And yet, the intolerance of hypocrisy is one of the things that allowed Donald Trump to wind up as president of the United States. He brilliantly exploited the instinctive public revulsion against politicians who seem to have a secret private code, a set of rules for themselves, closely connected to the suspicion they may not just be hypocrites, but be corrupt too. Hillary Clinton was very vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy, meaning that she didn't quite mean it. That when she gave a talk to a Wall Street bank and took money for it, she gave the lie to her public protestations of belief in progressive politics and equality. And though we sort of know it shouldn't matter, there's no reason to think that just because someone occasionally doesn't live up to their own standards, that that person can't be trusted by anything, there is part of the human psyche that just allows the doubt to creep in. And Trump exploited it in part by going after it and in part by appearing to be something other than a typical hypocritical politician. Trump didn't appear to be a politician at all, because he was more open about cruelty and he was less of a hypocrite. And there is an argument in Schlaz ordinary vices that suggests that if we do get the rank ordering wrong, if we don't put cruelty first, if we become preoccupied with the risks of hypocrisy, we wreck our politics. And I'll leave it to you to decide whether Trump is a good illustration of that. But more broadly, it's also true, I think, that Schlaz arguments which were written and published in 1984, the year, the year in theory anyway, of all Wells Big Brother, actually hold up very well in what's happened to the information technology age since then, the age of the internet. Twitter. I'm always amazed by how much kindness there is on Twitter, how much time people spend boosting each other and bolstering each other and talking each other up. There's almost an obsessional kindness on Twitter, and it seems to go along with an extraordinary amount of cruelty. Twitter is both the anti-cruelty machine that lets in cruelty by the back door. There is as much if not more snobbery on Twitter than there has ever been anywhere else in the human condition. Twitter is a machine that allows people to feel tribal loyalties, to rank, to create hierarchies, to pull up the drawbridge, to put other people down. There are betrayals all the time on Twitter. And there is hypocrisy too. Indeed, the internet is a giant hypocrisy generating machine. First of all, because it allows us to expose each other's hypocrisy. One of the problems that democratic politicians now have is because almost everything they've ever said or done is recorded somewhere online. It's so easy to find something that seems to give the lie, whether it was five minutes ago or five years ago, to something the politician is saying now. There's hypocrisy everywhere, but there's also double standards everywhere. People will pile on and tear someone down, and then when you're on the other end of that, to be on the receiving end of that kind of witch hunt, is to know that the way that we all behave when we're not on the receiving end is intolerably hypocritical. I think Schglas' arguments really hold up in the age of the internet. So what does Schglas think we should do about this? What actually is her answer beyond putting cruelty first, and it's not an easy thing to say or to answer, because it's always complicated for Schglas, but she's also always clear, and she does have a series of lessons to take away from this. One is that we should be more tolerant of the other ordinary vices, not completely accepting, you tolerate things not because you think they're okay, but because you think they're not okay, but you have to live with them. We should tolerate more hypocrisy, not accept it, we're still allowed to hate it, we're still allowed to wish there was less of it, but we have to stop trying to root it out. She also thinks that the focus is better placed with the ordinary vices on the institutional versions of them than on the personal versions of them, so we focus all the time on the hypocrisy of individual politicians, has this person or that person lived up to his or her standards, and we root into their personal lives, there has always been, in democratic society, a slight obsession with the personal lives of elected politicians once. We had the means to find out about them, and once we did, we almost couldn't stop looking and trying to find in their evidence, sometimes of sexual misbehavior, but just as often of other kinds of misbehavior, the person who is against illegal immigration, but uses an illegal immigrant to mohise or her lawn, and even as I say it, I'm aware, of course we're going to hate that, and to ask for toleration of that sounds crazy, because we shouldn't tolerate that in our politics. So for Schglare, it's a question of balance, but also saying that there are worse things than personal hypocrisy, and not just cruelty, institutional hypocrisy is worse. There are some institutions that do not live up to their own values, and an example of that would be the United States of America. The United States of America was founded on hypocrisy, the original hypocrisy of the constitution, which was dressed up as a document to defend freedom and equality, and also treated some human beings as worth less than others, and put a figure on it, on slavery, and the diminishment of the human condition. And that hypocrisy is worth rooting out, and it's not being rooted out yet. The hypocrisy of institutions can be a focus because it is not self-defeating to try to make institutions live up to their standards. You'll never get there, no institution will be perfect, but relative to the obsessive personalization of hypocrisy, institutional hypocrisy makes sense politically as a target. And Schglare also says that in the end, and this is what makes her book in many ways unfashionable, these are a question of character or temperament. There aren't rules here, creating rules about the ordinary vices is dangerous because too many things will leak through the rules. It's about an approach to life, it's about a way of being, and in the end it's about a willingness to lead a kind of double life, the double life of the modern citizen. One of Schglare's heroes in this book is Montagne, the 16th century French essayist and also politician, and she takes a lot of her ideas from his ideas about ordinary vices, about the perils of cruelty. Montagne, as she said, lived a kind of double life. He was prone to misanthropy, he dispaired sometimes of his fellow human beings. He wanted friendship and he saw how hard it was to sustain. He often seemed to say that he felt happiest withdrawing from the world, retreating into a tower, writing, thinking, cutting himself off from other human beings because dealing with human beings is hard, it's easier to think about them than to live among them, and yet he also lived a political life because he knew that you couldn't simply withdraw from the human condition and study it. You had to engage with it and experience it. He hated politics and he did politics. When he was in his tower, he felt the pull of the world. And when he was out in the world, he felt the pull of the tower. And then we can't all live like that. There is a little bit of that in all of us. And recognizing that doubleness is one of the ways in which we could come to tolerate even if not to accept hypocrisy, because there will be some hypocrisy involved in that kind of double life. And the great glory of the modernity that was to come after Montagne was that it created a politics that allowed the space for people to move between the public and the private, to live out their lives on the stage and to hide away. And in that world, there is always going to be hypocrisy, there will be snobbery, there will be betrayal, and we should accept it, because that world is still a better one than the alternatives. I want to finish though with something from another writer, not a political writer, it's from a short story written by David Foster Wallace, was published in The New Yorker, and I heard it recently on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, and it made me think of Judith Schlaar and ordinary vices. And it poses a challenge to Schlaar, and challenge to Schlaar's view, and I have to say my view, which is that we need to be more accepting of hypocrisy, because it's a fact of life, and if we can accept it as a fact of life, even if we don't like it or welcome it, if we can at least tolerate it, we will end up better off. In this short story by David Foster Wallace, he's writing about a young Christian man whose girlfriend is pregnant, they are not married, and they are trying to wrestle with, that we see it all through the man's point of view, the terrible question, or whether she should have an abortion. And for this man, the dilemma is almost unbearable, because he believes he doesn't love her, and he doesn't want to marry her, and if he were to marry her, it would be a marriage not based on love. And in that sense, were she to have the baby, and he to marry her, he would betray his principles in himself, because he believes in love. But he's also a Christian, and he believes there's something abhorrent about abortion. Abortion is intolerable, but in this case the alternative is intolerable too. And David Foster Wallace describes some of the thoughts that this boy has, he's probably 19 or 20, as he wrestles with their sitting opposite from his girlfriend, and this is what he writes. Sitting here beside this girl, as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed in facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor, or never a battle. The armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other and seeing therein, something so different and alien from themselves, that they could not understand, could not hear each other's speech, as even words, or read anything from what their faces look like, frozen like that, opposed, and uncomprehending, for all human time, too hearted. A hypocrite to yourself, either way. There is an account of hypocrisy as a version of hell. What would glass say to that? What would I say to that? Well, I think one response is to say there is a difference between being a hypocrite and accepting, or at least tolerating, some hypocrisy. What is so hellish about that vision is its frozen quality, the idea that there is this category of person, the hypocrite, the capital H hypocrite, and you can be that thing. Once you are that thing, you are trapped with these two uncomprehending armies in your soul, facing each other, for all time, to be a hypocrite is to be frozen in your too hearted state. I think what Schlar would say is she doesn't mean anything like that in advocating the leading of the double life. The point of the double life is that it is unfrozen. The point of the life that moves between the public and the private, where standards are believed in but not always upheld, is that there is a freedom in it, but also there's a capacity to change in it. That it is, I think, for Schlar one of the lessons of the history of ideas, that no single idea has to grip us and keep us in its grip. That we can become lots of things, but we don't have to think we are something. Snobbery doesn't mean that you are a snob. Hypocrisy doesn't mean that you are a hypocrite. An act of betrayal doesn't mean that you are a traitor. What these things mean is that you're human. And what Schlar, I think, wants us to understand from her history of ideas, is that this kind of toleration of ordinary devices not only protects us from cruelty, but also can keep us free. It's not the only way of reading the history of ideas. This is not the only idea that we should take from it, but it is one of the things that the history of ideas can teach us. We really hope you've enjoyed this series of talks. There's more on Schlar and all the authors featured on the history of ideas page at talkingpoliticspodcast.com. The book version of series one of history of ideas, starting with Hobbes and called Confronting Leviathan, will be coming out in September, and we'll be back to discuss that with David. We'll also be answering your questions about this series soon. Do please join us for those extra episodes, and until then, thank you very much for listening. [Music]