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Home truths on political humbug Samuel Brittan Financial Times 12/05/08 Review of Political Hypocrisy The Mask of Power from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond by David Runciman François de La Rochefoucauld, the French essayist, reached near the heart of the matter when he said: "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue." There are artificial virtues, such as refraining from telling lies, that are not obvious moral imperatives but that are important in facilitating the working of society. Similarly, political hypocrisy is not a first-order vice like cruelty or hard-heartedness. Carried to excess it can poison political discourse. But, like telling lies, it can be a lesser evil. Take the American use of torture in Iraq and elsewhere. It would be far better if it did not happen. But would the world be a better place if a US president professed a hard-boiled attitude, saying - as some people do in private - that most governments engage in torture when their backs are to the wall and we should not be hypocritical? Is it not less bad that actual presidents try to play it down with weasel words such as "rendition", equivocate about how often it takes place and call attention to the prosecutions instigated against some of the worst offenders? The lip service still paid to traditional US ideals makes it a little less likely the next president will permit such practices on the same scale. Similarly, it is hypocritical for western leaders to denounce atrocities in Zimbabwe, Darfur and - more half-heartedly - Tibet, while ignoring horrors in other places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia or Saudi Arabia, to name but a few. At least they are setting up a standard by which they can be held to task. It is thus high time for the reexamination of the subject provided by David Runciman, a Cambridge political theorist. He proceeds by examining the doctrines of historical figures and, in the Cambridge tradition, locates them in the circumstances of their time. This is refreshingly different from the more avowedly analytical writers who tend to become bogged down in what Mr X thinks of Dr Y's critique of Professor Z, all three of whom will be forgotten in a decade or two. Runciman's book is highly readable and contains a plethora of shrewd and quotable remarks, for instance: "Hypocrisy is currently perceived by much of the rest of the world as the American vice, which from an American perspective simply serves to emphasise the far greater hypocrisy of America's critics." The price paid is an avoidance of firm conclusions. The author is closer to the realist than the politically idealist school. The nearest he comes to a doctrine of his own is his distinction between first- and second-order hypocrisy. "First order hypocrisy is the ubiquitous habit of concealing vice as virtue." The second-order variety arises when practitioners conceal from themselves that that is what they are doing. He suggests that this second form is the really vicious one, while the first is indispensable for social existence. He does not need to be told of the elusiveness of the distinction in practical application. It is because of their implicit recognition of some such dichotomy that even hard-boiled writers such as Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham denounced some kinds of hypocrisy towards the end of their careers. The Victorian era was par excellence the one for agonising about hypocrisy. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians could equally have been entitled Eminent Hypocrites. John Morley, William Gladstone's official biographer, wrote a book, On Compromise, which Runciman summarises as saying: "Liberal cant is preferable to Tory hypocrisy," which in my view it is. Runciman's real hero comes from a different period. He is Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch physician turned English political writer, whose Fable of the Bees was regarded in the 18th century as the most scandalous of contemporary documents. This fable is known to those economists who still read books for its honourable mention, in John Maynard Keynes's General Theory, as a precursor of modern underconsumptionist doctrines. The fable tells of the appalling plight of a previously prosperous community in which all citizens abandon luxurious living in the interests of saving - a heresy that has a strong resonance at a time when the world is teetering on the brink of serious recession. For Mandeville this was not just an economic theory but a notable example of his doctrine of private vices, public benefits. Runciman's concluding chapter contains passages that can be quoted by partisans of all political persuasions and of none. On the candidates for the US Democratic party's presidential nomination he is cautiously sympathetic to Barack Obama, but makes the best case I have seen for Hillary Clinton, even if it is ultimately unconvincing. What struck a chord with me was his gentle demolition of the idea that a politician's profession of his own sincerity, or passionate belief, proves anything at all, which was the real undoing of Tony Blair.
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