History/Academia/Religion/Culture/Politics/Jazz
Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

At various points during the last week, I have felt my sympathies pulled towards every party involved in the Terri Schiavo case, which makes this story a tragedy in the Shakespearean sense: who do you feel most sorry for in Hamlet? Ophelia? Polonious? Gertrude? Hamlet? You can even feel sorry for the bad guy, Claudius, after his "words without thoughts" prayer. Even false piety has pathos, as anyone who has tried to be pious knows.

At various points during the week, I've also felt myself alternately delighted and disillusioned by the blogosphere. One of the entries in my Moleskine was Jeffrey Stout's observation that "the democratic practice of giving and asking for ethical reasons ... is where the life of democracy principally resides." While reading many blog posts on this issue -- too many to catalog exhaustively now -- I have been heartened by this exchange of reasons. Some of the most thoughtful posts I've seen, in no particular order and from a variety of angles, are at Positive Liberty, In Medias Res, Frogs and Ravens, Freespace, Easily Distracted, Gower Street, Michael Bérubé, Cliopatria, and The Weblog. The case has also sparked an interesting debate about "personhood" between Brandon at Siris and Chris at Mixing Memory. I would point to these posts (and others) as examples of the best thing the blogosphere can offer us: a democratic space in which to give and ask for ethical reasons.

But if the life of democracy consists in giving and asking for reasons, the Terri Schiavo case has also highlighted the ways in which this life is jeopardized. There are two principal threats to the life of democratic conversation. The first occurs when interlocutors refuse to give reasons, either by accepting no questions or by begging the questions being asked. The second occurs when interlocutors do not ask for reasons, but instead assume they already know the reasons that their opponents would offer. Whenever either of these wrenches is thrown into the gears of democracy, the ramifications quickly spread and become systemic.

Observe. Person A asks Person B if someone in a persistent vegetative state is alive. Person B responds that life is sacred. Person A is frustrated because this answer does not deal with the original question, but she decides to ask for Person B's reasons for believing that life is sacred. Person B is incensed that Person A would even ask such a question and accuses her of wanting to kill people in persistent vegetative states. Person A has heard it all before and concludes that Person B is a religious wingnut. Meanwhile, the life of democracy ebbs away, as the exchange of questions and answers bleeds into the exchange of epithets and accusations.

Of all the interventions that can fatally interrupt a democratic conversation, one of the most serious is the charge of hypocrisy. I have been thinking about this for the past week, because my first instinct about a week ago was to write a post denouncing the hypocrisy of those who claim to champion the "culture of life." I was outraged by the fact that some people could speak with a straight face about the sanctity of life, while simultaneously supporting preemptive war and capital punishment, or while simultaneously failing to support more progressive health insurance policies and efforts to fight the AIDS epidemic. Fired by righteous indignation, I was prepared to compare the "culture of life" to the proverbial sepulchre: whitewashed on the outside, but inwardly full of bones.

I still feel some of that indignation, but I've also started to realize that such a response, as far as it goes, inhibits the giving and asking of reasons. Instead of opening space for conversation, it declares conversations already closed: positions are ossified and assigned epitaphs. When this happens, the fault can be distributed liberally among various parties. As I mentioned above, if some people ossify their opponents' position by failing to ask them about it, others ossify their own position by refusing to entertain requests for such descriptions. But ultimately, what I have to figure out is how to be a better democratic conversationalist myself, and that means starting with me and assessing blame there. And since my knee-jerk reaction to this conversation was to deliver a pox on the houses of hypocrites, I've been spending some time judging how democratic that reflex was.

Not very, I've concluded. And that concerns me, because I am not alone in resorting almost reflexively to the charge of hypocrisy when I find myself in difficult conversations. I won't provide you with links to prove this, because I'm dealing primarily with my conversational faults. But you probably don't need the links -- probably, you've run across the sweeping suspicions of grandstanding, the unmasking of manufactured sympathy or outrage, the charges and counter-charges of partisan spin. Of course, there may be times when such accusations are part of a democratic conversation: at some point, they may be the reason we have to give when we are asked to defend our belief. So I don't want to suggest that accusations of hypocrisy must be ruled out of democratic discourse; arguably, nothing should be ruled out. But I do want to suggest that charges of hypocrisy must be handled with care, deliberately rather than reflexively. When they are thrown without care into democratic deliberations, they often cause the types of system failure I've outlined above.

Diagnosing a hypocrite depends on knowing motives. Literally, a hypocrite plays a part, feigns an attitude that he does not feel, wears a mask. As William Ian Miller argues in the introduction to his entertaining book on Faking It, we usually recognize hypocrisy in ourselves when we feel split in two. In these moments, there is one "me" that is performing and posing, while another "me" seems to look on in bemusement at how fake the other "me" is being. But as Miller also notes, it is sometimes difficult, even on self-examination, to tell whether "I" am different from what I appear to be, or whether what I appear to be is all "I" am. Diagnosing hypocrisy is difficult even when it comes to my self, whose motives are relatively transparent to me (or at least the "me" that observes the "me" that performs). How much more difficult is it to say with confidence that others are faking it, putting on an act, disfiguring their faces in shows of mock piety! At the very least, we ought to recognize that this is always hard to judge.

Even more importantly, if diagnosing hypocrisy requires knowing motives, the diagnosis cannot be made as a blunt generalization. For example, it certainly may be true that many members of Congress have been putting on a performance with regard to the Schiavo case. But it hardly follows from this that every supporter of Schiavo's parents is hypocritical or insincere. The reverse is also true: if some pro-life protester outside Schiavo's hospice can be proven hypocritical, or even if some Congressional leader dissimulates, neither fact counts as evidence that every member of Congress interested in the case was interested for base reasons.

Sometimes ripping masks off of hypocrites is called for, but sometimes I feel like our national conversations run like bad episodes of Scooby Doo. The episode starts with the unmasking of some villain. A few minutes later, our heroes run into someone with a similar looking mask and cheerily begin trying to rip it off too -- only to discover that this is not a mask, but an actual face. Like Shaggy and Scooby, we react by running away screaming. In some ways, there is nothing more frightening than an antagonist who is both hostile to our position and perfectly sincere. But as usually happens in Scooby Doo episodes, we learn that the proper reaction to this fearsome character was not to run away, as Shaggy and Scooby did, but instead to sit down with the maskless man and find out his story, as Velma, Freddy, and Daphne usually did.

I don't want to be mistaken here: I'm not saying that it harms democratic conversation to point out the inconsistencies in a position. But not all inconsistency is hypocritical; people can be unaware of inconsistencies in their positions, while hypocrites are aware of inconsistency but indifferent to it. We are all at various points unaware of inconsistency in our beliefs, and one goal of democratic conversation should be to lead our interlocutors to greater consistency. But when we blanket a position with the charge of hypocrisy, we simply stop at pointing out the inconsistency and attributing it to false motives. Charges of hypocrisy do not move us towards resolving that inconsistency. For example, suppose someone supports preemptive war but also opposes abortion. It could be that this person is a hypocrite, but it could also be that she does not see any inconsistency in her position. In that case, it behooves us to ask her how she makes those positions cohere. If we sense that those positions do not cohere, we ought to offer our reasons for thinking so. But this conversation will be much more difficult if we simply assume -- before the exchange of reasons -- that our interlocutor is wearing a mask, or deliberately hiding bones in a whitewashed tomb.

What I'm calling for (elliptically) is nothing new. Basically, it's the Socratic method. Socrates could really zing his interlocutors by pointing out inconsistencies in their positions. But the reason his dialogues sound so persuasive is because he took those positions seriously; he asked his interlocutors for reasons and then patiently went about showing that those reasons did not add up. To practice this kind of patient criticism, of course, Socrates sometimes had to suppress the suspicion that his interlocutors were being disingenuous.

I remember when I read Plato's Republic for an undergraduate course, the entire class was enthralled by the way that Socrates thrashed Thrasymachus in Book I. Thrasymachus dared to argue that justice was a weakness and a vice, whereas injustice was a strength and a virtue. It takes some time for Socrates to realize that Thrasymachus really holds this position, and is not just pulling Socrates' chain. Socrates finally says "I certainly ought not to shrink from going through with the argument so long as I have reason to think that you, Thrasymachus, are speaking your real mind; for I do believe that you are now in earnest and are not amusing yourself at our expense." Thrasymachus responds: "I may be in earnest or not, but what is that to you? --to refute the argument is your business." Socrates agrees, and gets right back to asking questions.

Socrates' exchange with Thrasymachus demonstrates, ironically, that hypocrisy itself is not as damaging to democratic conversation as charges of hypocrisy. Even if Thrasymachus is not in earnest, even if he is not speaking his "real mind," the conversation can continue, so long as Thrasymachus is willing to answer Socrates' questions and Socrates is willing to ask them. But if Socrates had thrown up his hands in indignation and refused to "refute the argument" simply because it was not offered in earnest, the conversation would have stopped prematurely. (There are all sorts of similar exchanges about honesty and earnestness in Book I; in every case, the conversation continues despite mutual suspicions on both sides that the other side is dissembling.) Perhaps one reason Socrates keeps the dialogue going is because it is ultimately hard to tell whether Thrasymachus is in earnest or not. In such cases, it is best for the health of democratic conversation and argument to assume that he is.

This post may be annoying or off-putting in the same way that meta-blogging sometimes is. After all, I've been defending the exchange of reasons, yet I have not myself given reasons for my beliefs about the Schiavo case. If you want to know why I have devoted the post to metadiscourse, I would give three answers: First, my argument doesn't depend on the actual positions being taken up by interlocutors; whatever those positions are, blanket accusations of hypocrisy from either side are usually conversation stoppers, unless handled with extreme care and precision. Second, I've spent the whole post pointing out the weakness of my instinctive response to this tragic case, which indicates that I need to think some more before I can have a more thoughtful response. In comments at various other blogs, I've had different conversations about various aspects of this issue, some of which I think have been reasonably Socratic, and others in which I've phoned it in instead of keeping the conversation going. But in general, I'm still mulling my reasons for belief -- the two "me's" are still dialoguing with themselves before either sallies forth to dialogue with you. Finally, most of the thoughts I've had in relation to the specific aspects of this case have been mentioned elsewhere in other conversations. By contrast, there is a pressing need in polarized conversations to step back and think about conversation itself: what is at stake in making sure it survives, and how can we maintain its health.

Perhaps it seems like a cop out to say that I don't have everything figured out in this case, but that is the least hypocritical answer I can think to give you right now. What I can do is link some more. I can point you to two sources that have been useful for me in trying to sort out the various ethical and legal issues involved in the Schiavo case.

First, an ethics program at the University of Miami has an extensive timeline, complete with scanned images of important legal documents. After scouring these documents, it is impossible not to conclude that the court system did its job very well. If you haven't read the 2003 report of Jay Wolfson, a guardian ad litem, I think it offers an exceptional model of judicial reasoning mixed with humane reflectiveness.

I have also thought a lot about an article I read in the February issue of Harper's before the case began receiving round-the-clock media attention. I cannot recommend highly enough Garret Keizer's "Life Everlasting: The Religious Right and the Right to Die." I recommend this article not because I agree with every conclusion it reaches, but because it still has me pondering whether I do. You can judge for yourself which parts of the article are strongest, and which parts slip unnecessarily into charges of hypocrisy.