Our Unhealthy Fascination With Hypocrisy

For the last week, I have read through every political post or link I have come across on social media. That admittedly masochistic project was motivated by a desire to get into other peoples' heads by looking at the arguments they make or endorse, in particular the form of the argument. The ways in which we make claims or argue with one another says a great deal about what we think of one another, and I wanted to get a sense of that directly from regular people saying what they think, instead of reading about attitudes in a news story or a poll.

I was struck, from beginning to end, by how determined we all are to show that our opponents are hypocrites. This form of argumentation has been elevated to an art form by the president, who responds to every revelation of his own inadequacy by hurling the accusation back at the revelator, but he did not invent it. It has always been a cheap ploy in all kinds of argumentation and it knows no ideological boundary. What was surprising to me was exactly how pervasive it has become.

What's wrong with that kind of argument is that it doesn't address the issue. If someone disagrees with me on some public policy issue, and I respond by pointing out some time in the past when they supported a similar policy to mine, or some vaguely analogous issue in which they followed a different principle, or point out some ideological inconsistency of theirs, what I am certainly not proving is that they are wrong on the issue. What I am doing instead is ignoring their argument by claiming that I needn't acknowledge them as an advocate for their position.

In effect, when I call my opponent hypocritical, I am saying that they are either too foolish to have thought the issue through or too cynical to care about the underlying principle. In either case, I'm saying that they are wrong because of their characteristics as an individual, and not because of flaws in their argument on the issue at hand. It is a textbook ad hominem fallacy.

While those negative imputations may be true of many in public office and relevant to discussions of their desirability as representatives, they do not have a place in a reasonable discussion of serious social problems between adults.

It's too easy to simply say that someone who thinks differently than I do is shortsighted, shameless, and impervious to reason. Certainly there are a number of individuals who are any or all of those things, but when we start using the existence of disagreement as a suitable criterion for applying those labels, then we have crippled our ability to communicate with one another. The result is what we currently have - a feedback loop in which increasing polarization leads to increasingly harsh and uncompromising propaganda, which leads back to increasing polarization and on it goes.

I am deeply troubled by the way in which we reduce individuals entirely to their politics. What's more, the longer that goes on the more likely it is to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we treat people as enemies they are likely to become enemies. It does very real damage that is not easily reversed.

On my way to closing, I would like to point out that these observations are not an exercise in tone policing. Some truths are harsh, and many harsh truths are relevant to discussions of public policy, not least as they relate to race, foreign policy, and the federal budget. That being said, how we engage with other people matters and how we think about other people matters. If we start to erode those boundaries, our political divides will continue to widen.