The Awful Specter of Standards*

To the extent that the problem of hypocrisy can be reduced to a simple cause I would submit that it rests – for conservatives -- on the adherence to standards, writ large. For liberals it is something else entirely.


What kinds of standards? Those traditional in Western culture, particularly – but not exclusively – normative ones: standards of social behavior, decency, honor, objective truth, intellect, principle, language and performance in one’s endeavors. Adherence to standards is, in a word, discipline. Standards that motivate, on the one hand, and constrain on the other.

The petulant, adolescent rebellion of the 60’s was an overt rejection of traditional standards and attendant norms. And it was a wholesale rejection, somewhat reminiscent of the phenomenon that followed the French Revolution. Agin’ what is and for what ain’t. Although he rebellion may have been driven more by demographics than ideology, many of the ‘new’ ideas it internalized had been brewing for half a century

I think that a case can be made that a desire for constraints and a natural sense of good and bad, right and wrong inhere, hard-wired, in human nature, and are probably associated with survival. If they are deliberately ignored or willfully denied one is exposed to nagging phantasms of loss and guilt. A post-Kierkegaardian nihilism. Enter here the specter of standards – not quite destroyed -- to remind the left of the existential angst that eternally besets them.

Conservatives, by definition, embrace tradition, and they are represent a constant scold to the left for their forfeiture of essential structure. Though we often fail to meet them, they are still our standards. This may explain why the left is so hostile to established religion (not in the Constitutional sense) and to the military, where tradition and discipline are foremost.

The left holds the amoral high ground.

Having foresworn intellectual discipline the left trades on emotion – the lowest common denominator. By “lowest” I do not mean least important, but rather least governable, for it operates at the limbic level. It is infantile, requiring no standards beyond the operative and strategic ones of empathy or anger that a situation may demand. It seeks its own ends (power) without any scruple save the primal, self-affirming need to believe they – persons and ends -- are good.

And so we return to hypocrisy. Better, perhaps, “hypocrisies”, since the hypocrisy of the left is qualitatively different from that of the right. For the right hypocrisy lies in articulating standards and failing through weakness to meet them; for the left hypocrisy is simply the pretense of owning standards. Employed as a means to power, It is a weapon taken from the arsenal of the right and used against it. Otherwise it is without meaning. As there can be no shame without honor, so there can be no hypocrisy without standards.

As the experience of the 20th Century illustrates, the political victories of the left may be ultimately hollow, Pyrrhic and haunted, but they are extremely pernicious. As to liberals, better they be true hypocrites.

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Note: this post is a near-verbatim reprint of a comment submitted to PJM, Victor Davis Hanson on 07/02. Here is the link.