The recent "scandal" involving Eliot Spitzer, the (now former) Governor of New York, calls for a bit of reflection. For readers who live outside the U.S. media bubble, Spitzer rose to prominence and power on his reputation as a crusader who fought to eradicate corruption, wherever it was found. He did this primarily in his previous elected position as New York's Attorney General.According to the press, Spitzer did three things that are noteworthy: I. More than any other single individual, he helped advance the causes of shareholder control, and proper governance and oversight of corporations. II. He used public, vicious, personal attacks on specific individuals at these corporations as one tool for achieving these ends. III. He spent tens of thousands of dollars on prostitutes.
It has been noted in several articles that the individuals targeted by Spitzer were openly and vindictively gleeful at the revelation that Spitzer had spent huge sums of his personal money on high-priced hookers, and his subsequent resignation in shame. The American press, especially in New York, was quick to reflect not only this euphoric reaction, but also the commonly held belief on Wall Street that Spitzer's harsh tactics and degradation of women was demonstrable proof that his efforts to check corporate misconduct were invalid.
Say what? To understand this reasoning (that the governor's inclination to pay women for sex negates his anti-corruption work), you must comprehend the American view of integrity and hypocrisy.
America is a culture that craves consistency, and mistakenly equates this consistency to something like "integrity". We demand consistency in our leaders, in our foreign policy, and from our fellow citizens. We want consistency so badly that we presume it exists, even when it is plainly absent. We are not believers in Oscar Wilde's observation that "we are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent". Quite to the contrary. For Americans, the opposite of consistency and integrity is hypocrisy. In fact, as Kenneth Johnson pointed out, in a culture where there are no shared values, the only sin is hypocrisy.
Consider this: cultural agreement on a foundational moral code (as in the "natural law" or "divine command" construction) provides individuals with a form of security. Life is more predictable when we can make certain presumptions about how each of us "should" behave, and "ought to" live, as indicated by our shared moral code. Conversely, in a society where this shared understanding does not exist - such as in multicultural, secular, western, liberal democracies - we feel a collective sense of instability because we do not have a framework to predict the behavior of the man standing next to us. The only way stability can be reclaimed is if we demand consistency relative to itself and live our lives equating consistency to morality and personal integrity.
It is for these reasons that in America, a person who says one thing and does another is seen as the incarnation of evil. We tolerate a great deal in this country, from prostitutes to white-collar thieves, but we will not tolerate a man who is inconsistent. We see the inconsistent man as the embodiment of randomness and volatility in our world. We see him as the threat that must be put down. Without a shared moral code, we are not a culture that can say, "Spitzer is a man who did wrong when he used a woman by treating her purely as an object. He did wrong when he attacked individuals harshly and personally. He did good by fighting corruption." No, in our effort to establish certainty and regularity where there never is any (inside one person), what we say is, "If we voted this man into office, that is because he was a predictable force for good. If he did something bad, he must therefore be a predictable force for evil. Therefore, everything he ever did was wrong."
To complicate matters is our rather blunt use of the word "hypocrite", a term that has become our shorthand for "inconsistent" or even "unclean". To be technical about it, "hypocrisy" is not "saying one thing and doing another", but believing one way and directing another. Put a different way: if Spitzer believed in his heart that engaging in prostitution was wrong, but did it anyway, his behavior is merely a demonstration of remarkable personal weakness, but not hypocrisy. However, if he believed in his heart that prostitution was acceptable, but spoke out publicly against it, then this could be actual hypocrisy.
The obvious problem - the missing variable - in all cases is that we do not know what any other man really believes in his heart. In order to get away with our use of the word "hypocrite", we presume that Spitzer's actions were in line with his beliefs, while at the same time knowing that every day we each do things that go against the convictions we hold most dear. As Betsy Holmes likes to remind me, when other people violate the moral order, it's because they are bad people. When I do it, I've got pretty good reasons.
Let's be more careful casting stones, shall we?
