One post I recently read talked about hypocrisy and Christianity. A few lines from it...
"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may pertain to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."The quoted author claimed "liars at least care for the truth, if only to hide it. But when a culture gets saturated with BS then concern for the truth gets lost on a grand scale. What worries [the author] is that people are getting lazy and careless about the truth. And as we grow mentally lazy and careless the truth gets lost. All that remains in civic dialogue is BS, advertising, and spin." With the consequences of postmodernism still affecting culture today, this has never before been as relevant.
...Lying is a distortion or hiding of truth. By contrast, BS is an indifference to truth. This distinction might make BS appear to be more mild than lies, but Frankfurt would disagree...indifference to truth is much worse than hiding it:
"[The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."
...BS is an indifference to truth. This indifference to truth is often caused by a kind of laziness, of failing to do the work to "get things right." This is what I see happening among Christians. I don't see a lot of willful hypocrisy, but I do see a lot of talk about righteousness and holiness and compassion with little energy devoted to examining how all that talking is cashing out in the real world. In short, Christians talk a great deal with little effort expended in moving from words to deeds. Outsiders hear all that Christian moral chatter and they also observe the lifestyle gap. The only word they have for what they are observing is hypocrisy, but I think a better word is BS.
I've often wondered how people could see the genuine, caring, friendly, and well-meaning people I knew in church could ever be construed as hypocritical. For a long while, I just assumed their criticizers were all bitter, angry people (I believe the correct linguistic term for them is "haters") or people that just misunderstood my friends and judged too quickly. I don't think this is the case anymore; I don't doubt my friends intentions, but neither do I believe that the accusation of hypocrisy is completely unfounded either. At this point, it might not even be the moral BS and carelessness that are at the root of criticisms, but simply a matter of priorities.
For example, Mark Noll wrote in "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" that even great intentions could encourage bad behavior. For example, part of Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus, that "the things of earth will grow strangely dim", might be taken to incorrectly justify gnostic tendencies and irresponsibility towards the physical (taking care of the earth, mercy and urban ministries). If something is considered more important than everything else (i.e. God, Jesus, missions, etc), then logically, we should prioritize our time and effort towards those things as opposed to others. Beck makes the suggestion in another post that this tendency may be why Jesus refuses to divorce love for God from love for people. And loving people...well, that opens up a plethora of applications (including environmental concerns, I'd argue) and places a whole world of callings and responsibilities on the Christian's shoulders.
This is becoming a bit of a tangent, so I'll end with a last paragraph from the post.
The root cause of Christian BS is the disjoint between orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the Christian tradition. Specifically, for a variety of reasons, Christianity came to emphasize "right belief" over "right action." Being a Christian meant one believed certain things (e.g., that Jesus was the Son of God). Assenting to these propositions and mastering the God talk that surrounded them grew to define what it meant to be a Christian. But once orthodoxy became separated from orthopraxy the specter of moral BS entered...The disjoint didn't (and doesn't) emerge because of willful deception (hypocrisy). Rather, the disjoint was (and is) due to a kind of carelessness, a thoughtlessness that entered the Christian faith.
As if the sins I'm conscious of weren't enough, the Holy Spirit is needed to intercede for me on the behalf of these sins of my ignorance as well.
3 comments:
Oh man, this is going to be all over the place.
I wonder for the undecided, whether it is better that they talk to a liar or a BSer.
Old post. Note first question, two different answers.
Hypocrisy is an interesting thing, and I'm never quite sure when I'm justified in thinking someone hypocritical because it's such a sliding scale. Pretty much everyone is hypocritical to some extent, though there are some people who particularly offend my hypocrisy detector, but where is the line drawn, and do I really have the right to draw it? I don't mean anything by that, those are just questions I ask myself sometimes. Obviously I don't have answers to them.
Part of this post kind of reminds me of one of your earlier posts with the comic comparing 1984 and Brave New World. It also reminds me of an article a friend brought to my attention that takes (politically) red states to task for not practicing what they preach, and also has some surprising statistics regarding the supposedly immoral blue states. Luckily for the sake of others (and hopefully for ourselves), I think we don't personally see quite this level of hypocrisy in our daily lives.
Prioritizing is also mentioned in sleight in that article. As you mention it, I posted long ago about how I once observed in the paper version of the Houston Chronicle, an article about how women's shelters around the state were being forced to turn away domestic violence victims because of a shortage of beds and space, and right next to that article, was a short blurb accompanying a picture of a woman picketing in front of Neiman Marcus with a sign reading "Fur is worn by beautiful animals and ugly people." Now how does one weigh the lives of battered women and children on a scale with a bunch of minks? Not that I'm advocating cruelty to animals, and people certainly have the right to support their pet (no pun intended) causes. In fact, it's great that there are people so wholly dedicated to important issues like animal treatment (though PETA won't get a pass from me). So what's a person to do? Is the prescription just to try to avoid tunnel vision?
P.S. You dropped off the face of twitter! I'm still waiting for fail story #3 :P
Hmm...interesting. On your question - I'd agree with Henry in practice, and Mon in theory (it depends on what you call good). An interesting idea is that good is never really achievable (like "healthy" is not a goal we can arrive at). The way to measure "good" for a Christian, then, is to measure the rate at which he/she moves towards or away from the goal of trying to be good.
You're right about the sliding scale of hypocrisy, but I'd argue the point of the article is to turn our attention to the fact that problems of hypocrisy are more often related to problems of BS (which is, at its root, a problem of disregard for the truth). Again, as with being "good", having complete regard for the truth may be impossible, but it's still a goal we can orient ourselves towards. I think the claim Beck makes is that we're missing the point of accusations of hypocrisy by thinking all these accusations are referring to us being purposefully hypocritical.
That was a fairly interesting article, btw, esp that aspect about middle class morality...
I think on prioritization, it is good to avoid tunnel vision, but not so far that we have absolutely no specialization. Remember that Brave New World/1984 cartoon? Huxley feared we would be inundated with so much information that we'd stop caring, or that important things would be drowned out in a "sea of irrelevance". It seems like there has to be a balance b/w tunnel and panoramic vision.
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