On Being a Hypocrite

I care about the environment. I use electricity like it’s going out of fashion. I’m concerned about the plight of the poor. I give nothing to charity. I think trade unions are important. I didn’t join one. I believe it’s difficult to morally justify the slaughter of animals for food when alternatives are available. I eat meat. I am a hypocrite.

To my mind there’s always been something fundamentally honest about the way some conservatives don’t seem to care about other people. Why pretend you’re doing otherwise when really it all comes down to looking after Number 1? I can’t do that. When I’m not ignoring the plight of others I’m feeling bad about it. While members of the NRA sleep easily at night (possibly with a gun under their pillow) I lay awake, wracked by guilt.

Not too wracked, of course. This absorbs my attention for all of about three minutes before sleep comes and claims me. What guilt there is isn’t enough to motivate me to, you know, do something. I’m not being actively nasty, I suppose. I don’t spit on the poor. Or vegans. And I feel for them in that way that doesn’t actually require me to do anything concrete. But is that really feeling? And why don’t I do something? Why am I content to just lie awake in bed for a few minutes at night before eventually nodding off?

I can remember the question first intruding upon my consciousness during high school. Back then it was easier to explain why I wasn’t doing more. I was a kid after all; no one expects kids to do much about this type of thing. That’s why when they do they get featured on the news. I dimly recall resolving that it wasn’t always going to be like that. At some point I was going to start helping. It wasn’t clear to me exactly when this change was going to occur but I felt sure it was. The thing is I’m 25. I’ll be 26 by the end of the year. When am I going to start?

Being a hypocrite is a strange thing. It’s not like being a fire fighter or a policeman or a doctor. You tend to point that out to people. ‘Oh, hello. I’m Rui’s husband. I’m a lawyer.’ Sometimes you even make up business cards lest people forget exactly what it was you were. But being a hypocrite is sort of like the reverse. Other people point it out to you. ‘You’re a hypocrite, Michael.’ It stings, too. And nobody puts it on their business cards.

So why don’t I do more? I keep coming around to this question on what now seems to be a semi-regular basis. Every so often I stumble across something promising in the Economist or Nature (I’m lying, I never read Nature) that presents an argument for why the answer isn’t greed. For a while this contents me until eventually, inevitably, the words begin to ring hollow–or I stumble across a Peter Singer article–and then I’m back to square one.

So why don’t I do more? Is it because I don’t like the poor/environmentalists/animals? They’re annoying at times to be sure, and I don’t really like their smell, but no, I don’t think that’s the answer. I certainly feel bad when I stop and think about their position. I wouldn’t feel bad about someone or something I didn’t like, right? And I suppose insofar as I align myself with groups or political parties, I do so with those that try to defend these sorts of people. That’s got to count for something. Right?

Maybe I don’t think they should be helped. People eat animals. That’s the way of the world. It’s naive and foolish to try to change the way things are; much better instead to simply go with the flow. And yet as I noted above I feel sympathetic to these causes and will do little things like voting for a party that says it wants to change the status quo. Why do this if I don’t think they should be helped? And if I did feel like this why would I feel guilty about not doing anything? Surely, I’d be like the conservatives I disparaged above and be content in my own self-righteousness.

Perhaps I’m greedy. I don’t want to forego something in order to help someone else. This theory sounds good and, in spite of my reluctance to want to accept it, it seems pretty plausible. The problem is it isn’t always true. I do go out of my way to help people. Not systematically, that’s true, and not on a grand scale, but I’m certainly not beyond putting myself out. And it’s not as if some of the things I’m neglecting to do are grand. I’m talking about having shorter showers or making sure the TV is powered off when I go to bed. Some of the sacrifices I could be making are ludicrously small. And I’m still not doing them.

Which brings me to the final possibility: I don’t think it will make a difference so I don’t see the point. So what if I start sending some of my wage to World Vision? Millions (billions?) will still starve. So what if I cut the length of my showers in half? There are over 120 million people in Japan alone. We’re literally talking about drops in the ocean. Without the collective efforts of huge numbers of people changes in my behaviour will do nothing to ameliorate the larger problem.

If this sounds like a variation on ‘Everyone else was doing it’ it’s because it is. Since when has the moral imperative been dependent on a larger successful outcome? We do the right thing because it’s the right thing, not because it will resolve some bigger problem. Otherwise we wouldn’t say ‘kind’ when we could just say ‘efficient’. If we accept that helping those in need is right, it makes no difference to the normative question of what we should do if our efforts are likely to bear fruit or not.

All of which has got me thinking. Is it too easy to be a hypocrite? As scandal after scandal enveloped the likes of Mark Foley and Ted Haggard in 2006 I wondered if hypocrisy was the final great sin in modern society. I’m not so sure any more. Now I wonder if, at the end of the day, while we put up a veneer of outrage when someone is hypocritical we don’t want to throw the stone too hard. At least not while we’re still in the glass house.

So perhaps we need to be tougher. Perhaps we should feel uncomfortable about the way things are. Perhaps we need to make others feel uncomfortable about the way things are. Perhaps simply waiting for people to decide to do the right thing takes too long or never really works anyway. Perhaps we need to exhort ourselves and others to do better and not to put it in the too hard basket. Perhaps we need to be that guy at the party that makes others feel uncomfortable. Perhaps we need to do this not because we seek to aggrandise ourselves but because we really think this stuff is important.

Even as I’m suggesting this I’m wondering if I really do want to be that guy at the party. Nobody likes him and does he really achieve anything anyway? Perhaps there’s a middle ground? No, stop. Isn’t accepting mediocre responses the thing that got us into this in the first place? I thought we were going to be tougher about this. I don’t know what I feel any more. Dizzy, mostly.

Where has this inquiry led me? Closer to understanding my own motivations? Further away? Around in circle? The honest truth is that I still don’t have an answer. I see-saw between the various explanations wishing someone else would come along and tell me the answer. But I know no one’s coming. That’s not how these things work.

Alone, I stay awake at night. For about three minutes.