Let's Have a Daniel Davies Day! ("Liberal College Students Are Not Boddhisatvas" Department)
Hypocrisy is a very small vice:
D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else: In my post below, I suggested that the difference between the progressivity of the tax systems students suggested for income versus for their own grades "might serve as a useful index of the hypocrisy of leftist students". When I use the word "hypocrisy" here, what do we actually mean? Well, the combination of the following two qualities:
- A moral belief that (some loosely defined concept of) equality is (an actual or instrumental) good.
- A personal desire to accumulate more, even at the expense of others.
The first is simply a baseline definition of what it means to have left wing politics. The second ... well put it this way, Buddhist monks spend twenty years living ascetically and meditating for hours at a time before they presume to believe that they have conquered all selfish desires. If you're talking about "leftist hypocrisy"... you're just talking about "leftists who happen to be humans"....
[T]he test of someone's politics is simple; if their political aim is to advance all of humanity, they're on our side, while if they have an overriding constraint that the current owners of property must always be satisfied first, they're playing for the opposition. Hypocrisy doesn't really enter into the equation with rightwing politics; you don't (or shouldn't) get any extra points for being sincere about being selfish.
So where does that leave our students? Well, they're young. They're most likely insecure. They don't actually have a lot, and it's hardly surprising that they're a bit precious about what they have (a close runner for the most sensible thing said in political philosophy in the twentieth century was Michael Oakeshott's remark that "a conservative is a man with something to lose", and the genius of this remark is its ambiguity). One shouldn't blame them for not being Boddhisattvas....
So anyway, hypocrisy in people is not a vice, particularly when the alternative is to be sincerely horrible. In political parties, it's much worse; people who presume to take control of the state's monopoly on the use of ppowerhave to be held to a much higher standard of honesty, because they are explicitly asking for us to trust them on matters important to our lives. A double standard? Perhaps. But I just told you that I don't care about hypocrisy...
