Not Even Hypocritical
On the futility of a #discourse trope
One of the pieces I had opened in a tab for possible inclusion in the Links Dump portion of yesterday’s recap post was Jeff Maurer’s “We're All Noticing the Hypocrisy, Right?”, which offers a long catalogue of flip-flops on both sides associated with the recent campus unrest. There are probably some new entries since that was posted— the pivot from “the offensive stuff you heard wasn’t from students, but from outsiders piggybacking on the perfectly peaceful campus protest” to “it’s outrageous to claim that outside agitators were present, that’s a complete fabrication to justify bringing in the cops” over the last week or so probably belongs in there.
When I was first reading that, though, I found myself nit-picking one of his examples—it doesn’t matter which— thinking “That’s not really a hypocritical flip-flop, because conditions X, Y, and Z have changed between the two cases.” At which point, I realized that I was doing the exact thing that I have pointed out when railing against too-frequent attempts to treat accusations of hypocrisy as some sort of rhetorical trump card.
This is one of my more quixotic arguments about political rhetoric (right up there with my deep loathing for “If [Our Side] did [Thing], the media would be full of pundits from [Other Side] screaming about how it’s the Worst Thing Ever…”1). Basically, my feeling is that accusations of hypocrisy are almost completely ineffective as a political tactic, at least from the standpoint of persuading anybody who doesn’t already agree with your position.
The reason for this is that anyone smart and engaged enough to follow along with the reasoning as to why some combination of past statements or actions and current statements or actions is hypocritical is also smart enough to find a retcon for the change. The apocryphal Keynes quote “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” is almost infinitely elastic— there’s always some set of conditions X, Y, and Z that are different between the past and the present that can be used to justify a shift in position. It’s not hypocrisy to be advocating the correct policy through changing circumstances, after all…
This is of a piece with my long-standing argument that “critical thinking” isn’t the thing that many people want it to be (see the first post here, and a more recent example). It’s somewhere between a desire and a delusion in academia that all right-thinking people will agree with whatever your preferred position is, and that failure to agree reflects a deficiency in thinking. It’s why the characteristic failure mode of intra-faculty arguments is “Clearly, you haven’t properly understood my position, so I will explain it again in a more condescending manner.”
In reality, though, “critical thinking” is just a set of tools that can be used to construct defenses of almost any position. And those tools make it really hard to make an argument about hypocrisy work. In a lot of cases, even the attempt can backfire, as the other side buys into the retcon strongly enough to find the original accusation offensive. Which makes it particularly maddening when you’ve got something like the current situation where smart people on either side are furiously accusing smart people on the other side of hypocritical changes in position.
The fundamental problem here, beyond the general academicization of everything, is that “persuasion” has been almost entirely abandoned as a tactic. The very idea that you might try to get someone on the other side to switch their positions is now regularly derided as foolish. Everything is negative partisanship— those people are on the Other Side because they’re Bad People, and we don’t want Bad People to join Our Side, now, do we?
And whatever their failings as tools of persuasion, accusations of hypocrisy are great as a fire-up-the-base tactic, shoring up the increasingly impenetrable No Man’s Land between partisan factions. They don’t bring anybody around, but that’s okay because they do highlight what idiots the Other Side are with their clearly and obviously hypocritical flip-flops, and their scurrilous accusation that Our Side has ever been anything other than consistently and unfailingly righteous.
Meanwhile, from outside the warring factions, the whole business looks like two groups of absolute lunatics stringing rhetorical barbed wire atop giant berms of piled-up horseshit.
Six months to go until the election. God help me.
So, yeah, that’s a bit of mildly cathartic venting about political strategy. If you enjoyed that for some reason, here’s a button:
And the comments will be open. I would strongly urge you to refrain from using it as a space to claim that one group or another are the real hypocrites, because if it starts to turn into a poo-flinging contest, I will shut things down:
Briefly: The reason the media cover the other side yelling about how this is the Worst Thing Ever isn’t the actual position, it’s the yelling. If you genuinely think that the Thing is terrible, scream and yell about it your damn self, and they’ll most likely cover that. If you think it’s stupid when the other side freaks out about the Thing, then let it pass and freak out about something that actually matters. Complaining about media coverage plays as whining to the refs, and everybody hates people who whine to the refs.
Charges of hypocrisy are I think partly an epiphenomenon of social media, e.g., we are spending our time reading each other and doing a kind of formal textual analysis in a deeply tendentious spirit, sort of like Oxford debate gone amuck. If you're reading charitably, there is usually a way to make sense of what seem like "gotcha" contradictions. You've already pointed out that the "the offensive stuff is from outsiders" and "there are no outside agitators" are potentially quite consistent, but it takes actually having been materially present at one of the protests (or having experience in protesting) to see how that works. Briefly, at the big protests, there are people around the edges who are not really part of it who are just there screaming at anybody with a camera--some of them quite consciously trying to make the protests look bad, some of them just trolls looking for attention, some of them fringe people trying to hijack what's going on. When I went to the big airport protest at the beginning of the Trump Administration, there was a small group of six or seven idiots trying to provoke the cops (and trying to provoke the rest of the protesters) in the middle of a crowd of six or seven thousand people. They were 'outsiders' but not 'outside agitators' in the sense of being the secret leaders or masterminds of what was happening.
But this is the point: on all sides, we do not read charitably because the environment in which we're reading (social media) is full of anonymous strangers whose motives for participating are unknown--some of them may not even be a specific real individual with specific views. Because there are reward structures for drawing attention to oneself and antagonism and provocation are proven strategies for that. And because the *design* of most social media platforms promotes segregating oneself into an echo chamber rather than talking across divides or patiently working out what someone really means rather than just dumping on the words and yelling gotcha!
We also do not necessarily arrive at kumbaya! everybody has a valid point! when we do commit to that patience. Sometimes someone who on the page completely agrees with you is someone you would be profoundly antagonized by if you spent a lot of time with them on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes someone who drives you nuts on a blog would turn out to be very simpatico with you otherwise. But I do think that most of the time, in everyday life, we forgive people their inconsistencies if we understand their meaning, or we can see reasons why they are trying to hold to two different views of something. "Hypocrisy" in real, sustained human relationships is a completely different thing than reading people's writing and judging it to be contradictory. I only come to feel that someone is a hypocrite when there is a dramatic and sustained gap between what they say and what they do, where what they do is malevolent or harmful to me and others. (Notably, it is very rare for someone to talk in a very harmful or alarming way, while being benevolent and kind in what they do--I don't even know that we have a word for that, but it's not hypocrisy.)
The one area where the hypocrisy argument has to be addressed is antisemitism. The Nazi Bar argument is central to modern critiques of conservatism, so we can't be lax with our own side. This is especially true when it comes to antizionism, which inevitably attracts antisemitism. "It was just one guy," and, "She doesn't represent the whole group" isn't acceptable. The moment anyone starts pointing to Jews in general, they need to be shouted down even if their other points are cromulent.