June 12, 2000
Might a little hypocrisy actually be good for society?
___By Kelvin Childs
___Religion News Service
___WASHINGTON--As Washington Post op-ed columnist William Raspberry sees it, the demise of hypocrisy has led to the demise of society.
___"Speakers and moralists have conspired to give hypocrisy a bad name," Raspberry asserted at Grace Episcopal Church in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., as part of a weekly lecture series on faith and ethics in daily life.
___Raspberry's column is syndicated in 225 newspapers.
___He also teaches a course, "Family and Community" as the Knight Chair in Communications and Journalism at Duke University. Among his awards is the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary.
___He cited George and Nena O'Neill's book, "Open Marriage: A New Lifestyle for Couples" as "the beginning of the end of the most unappreciated of virtues."
___This introduction to the "let-it-all-hang-out amorality" of the 1970s led to the erosion of ethical standards, because it insists that doing what feels good is all that matters.
___"We're still paying the price for the abandonment of the practice of hypocrisy, in everything from family breakdown to drug-spawned crime to the shortsighted selfishness that threatens to erode our institutions, wreck our economy and topple the pillars of our society," he said.
___"Hypocrisy recognizes that the erosion of standards hurts everybody," Raspberry contended. "It accepts the sanctity of ethical standards, even while violating them. It says, 'What I'm doing is wrong, therefore I must not do it too often; I must pretend I'm not doing it at all; and I must take care not to be found out.'"
___He called standards "an electrified fence that describes the limits of acceptable behavior." People are always tempted to cross the fence, but doing so, he said, "thrills and shocks" us back into line.
___The hypocrisy of pretending to be a better person benefits society as well, Raspberry said. He cited the time he was invited to speak at the University of Mississippi a few years after James Meredith became the first black student to attend the school in 1962, sparking riots on the campus.
___"I knew most of the students didn't remember much about those awful days," Raspberry said. "My surprise was how little their parents remembered."
___In particular, many claimed to support the civil rights movement at the time--something Raspberry, a native Mississippian, finds not possible. But then he noted they want to think of themselves as reasonable people and good citizens; to do so, they had to pretend they never had been racists.
___"I believe those people are less racist today," he said. On the other hand, those caught on camera advocating segregation or protesting the civil rights movement don't have the option of being hypocrites; they are trapped in their racism, he said.
___Offering another example of beneficial hypocrisy, Raspberry told of Mary Daugherty, a Chicago teacher faced with a class full of impossible-to-control sixth-graders. They were so rambunctious, she came to believe some of them had mental defects. So she secretly looked at their IQ scores for confirmation.
___To her surprise, next to each child's name in the principal's files was a number in the 120s and 130s; the worst student in the class had 145.
___After that, Daugherty changed her approach; she gave the kids stimulating assignments and lots of homework and instituted tough punishments for misbehavior. The children rose to the challenge, and by the end of the year, they were the best sixth-grade class in the school.
___When the principal congratulated her, Daugherty admitted to sneaking a look at his files. He then told her what she had seen was locker numbers, not IQ scores.
___In treating the children as potential high achievers, they became just that, Raspberry said. And the Mississippians who forgot about their racist pasts "treated themselves as they should have been, and they became a lot closer to whom they should have been."
___"In both cases, the hypocrisy worked--which is to say it increased the amount of actual good in the world," Raspberry said.
___
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