## David Runciman lecture https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shklar-on-hypocrisy/id1508992867?i=1000517869772 We should put cruelty at the top of our list of vices. Do everything we can to avoid that, even at cost of being more permissive of other vices. Within ordinary life there can be pockets of cruelty, and we should be vigilant about that. The four other ordinary vices: - hypocrisy - snobbery - betrayal - misanthropy - can lead to nihilism, giving up, then maybe cruelty Ordinary because we all do them. Obsession with not being cruel can lead to cruelty by the back door. The fanatic for anti-cruelty can share the problem of any fanatic, a kind of deadening of our sensitivity to the ways in which cruelty can creep up on us-not the overt cruelty of the deathcamps, but the cruelty of everyday oppressions. Trouble with Bentham is that he was intolerant of cruelty, he wanted to eradicate it everywhere, and out of that he built a system, and the trouble with systems is that they can end up treating people, as Rawls would say, as means and not ends. As feeding them into the system to protect them, to save them from the worst that can happen, but in a way that has some indifference to them and maybe has some blindspots too. [...] As Rawls said, if you try to turn Benthams utilitarianism into an ultimate positive philosophy you can get absurd results, e.g. there can be an indifference to human beings. And out of that, there is always a risk that cruelty creeps back in. What Nietzsche seems to have hated is hypocrisy about cruelty, particular that of Christian religion. N thinks that we should be open about our propensity to cruelty, that the worst thing is to cover it up, to conceal it, hide it, that the worst thing Is the Christian kind, where cruelty lies behind pious talk about nobility and justice. Nietzsche was not a Monster. N like Bentham was finely attuned to human suffering, but he persuaded himself that the worst thing would be to deny who we really are. Shklar: we should never accept cruelty. We have to find a way to be always against cruelty, without becoming fanatical, puritanical enemies of cruelty. That, she says, is a question of temperament and of character, there isn't a philosophical system that can tell you how to do it. Somehow you have to be as brilliant as Bentham, as open as Nietzsche without becoming Bentham or nietzchche. Don't by htpervihilant to the point of seeing things that are not there. With snobbery and hypocrisy, we are hyper sensitive to them, but when we go after them, as may make them worse. Don't take eye off ball by excessive focus on these. Meritocracy means there is a cruelty to the way that less educated are treated by the educated in democratic society. We hate hypocrisy, when we discover it we try to route it out. And yet it's completely self defeating to do that. The crusade against hypocirisy is the most self defeating of all. For two reasons. First if we demand openness, if we demand that people do live up to their pricniples, that they don't have private places andnsecret clubs where they play by their rules, we won't create and open, honest and transparent society, because everyone needs some of those places, maybe even particularly politicians. The demand for that level of openness, of honesty, of being who you seem all the way through, drives politicians into greater secrecy. Transparency as a crusade does not produce open politics. Transparency as a crusade forces politicians and others to find places even more secretive where they can hide. If you have things that you do not want to be consumed publicly in a culture that demands openness , the result won't be openness, the result will be deeper darker secrets. And the second reason is that the anti hypocrisy crusade is self defeating because it makes us all hypocrites. If we demand of a set of politicians standards that we cannot live up to ourselves, if we say to them you have to be open and honest and transparent all the way through, when we know, in our family lives in our personal lives that we ourselves aren't capable of that, when we know that the first rule of parenting is do as I say, not as I do, in that world demanding something of politicians that we can't do ourselves makes us hypocrites. If we become too intolerant of these things, we become cruel. Trump is cruel, but he is not a hypocrit. That was one of his great appeals. He was as he seemed. He was willing to be as unpleasant in public as he was in private. He was cruel all the way through. ... So he seemed more open than Hilary Clinton. If we get the rank ordering wrong, if we don't put cruelty first and instead become preoccupied with the vice of hypocrisy, we wreck our politics. And I'll leave you to decide whether Trump is a good illustration of that. Shklar's message: we should be more tolerant of the other ordinary vices. Not completely accepting, you tolerate things not because you think they're ok, but because you think they're not ok, but you have to live with them. We should tolerate more hypocrisy. Not accept it. We're still allowed to hate it, to wish there was less of it. But we have to stop trying to root it out. She thinks the focus is better placed on the institutional versions of ordinary vices than on the personal versions. [...] There has always been, in democratic societies, a certain obsession with the personal lives of politicians. [...] There are worse things than personal hypocrisy. There is personal and institutional cruelty, which are worse. And institutions that do not live up to their own values, are a good target of criticism. The original hypocrisy of the USA was slavery, and that hypocrisy is worth rooting out. And that can be a focus because it is not self defeating to try to make institutions live up to their own standards. You'll never get there, no institution can be perfect, but relative to the obsessive personalisation of hypocrisy, institutional hypocrisy makes sense politically as a target. Ultimately these are questions of temperament and character. It's about an approach to life, a way of being, and in the end it's about a willingness to lead a kind of double life. The double life of the modern citizen. One of Shklar's heroes is Montaigne, the 16th century French essayist and also politician, and she takes a lot of her ideas from his ideas about ordinary vices, about the perils of cruelty. Montaigne as she said lived a kind of double life, he was prone to misanthropy, he sometimes despaired of his fellow human beings, he wanted friendship yet saw how hard it was to sustain. He often seemed to say he felt happiest withdrawing from the world, retreating into a tower, writing, thinking, cutting himself.off from other human beings because dealing with other human beings is hard. It's easier to think about them than to live among them. And yet he also lived a political life, because he knew that you couldn't simply withdraw from the human condition and study it. You had to engage with it, and experience it. He hated politics and he did politics, when he was in his tower, he felt the pull of the world and when he was out in the world he felt the pull of the tower. Now we can't all live like that but there is a little bit of that in all of us. And recongising that doubleness is one of the ways we can come to tolerate even if not to accept hypocrisy. The great glory of modernity is that it created a politics that allows the space for people to move between the public and the private, to live out their lives on the stage, then to hide away. ... The point of the double life is that it is unfrozen, that there is a freedom in it, but also there's a capacity to change in it. It is, I think for Shklar, one of the lessons of the history of ideas that no single idea has to grip us and keep us in its grip. That we can become lots of things but we don't have to think that we are things. Snobbery doesn't mean that you are a snob. Hypocrisy doesn't mean that you are a hypocrit. An act of betrayal does not mean that you are a traitor. What these things mean is that you are human. What Shklar wants us to understand is that this kind of toleration of ordinary vices not only protects us from cruelty, but also it can keep us free.