Faking it
Faking it (by William Ian Miller)
The feeling of faking it forces upon us a recognition of a split between something that we flatter ourselves is our "true" self and the role we are playing. Sometimes, it is merely a vague sense of dislocation that takes the form of worrying where we are amidst all the roles we must play: I worry about who I am, therefore, I guess, I am.
In contrast, hypocrisy, though often infecting certain roles, is less about role than the propriety of motives you bring to the role.
We can be hypocrites and know that we are. In "naive hypocrite", a person hides acts and beliefs he knows to be wrong, and may even suffer a guilty conscience. The "new hypocrite" thinks himself a paragon of virtue, does not feel himself to be faking anything, he may be delighted with the role he has assumed, experiencing himself sincerely but be culpably deluded as to the sincerity of his sincerity. He simply adjusts his conscience by ascribing noble, disinterested, and altruistic intentions to all his behavior. The naive hypocrite is a conscious deceiver; the new hypocrite a seamless self-deceiver.
Matthew 6:1-5, "to be seen by men when praying and giving", Jesus views that it is not about the hypocrite's deed but his less than virtuous intention that is faulted.
Matthew 15:7-9 and Mark 7:6-7, "in vain do they worship me".God doesn't credit these hypocritical prayers.
Jesus is well aware that it is no easy to keep your mind free of reputational and other advantages gained by doing good deeds. Thus, He counsels self-deception: keep the left hand ignorant of what the right is doing. Giving in secret, as Jesus urges, keep you from feeling the pride of eschewing public recognition.
Later, Jesus prefers small pious deceptions of others. Do not, he says, fast like the hypocrites who disfigure their faces and put on a good show. Fast in secret and in public look as if you are not fasting, be clean and neat, anointed and washed (Matthew 6: 16-18).
Jesus" second kind of hypocrisy involves blaming others when you yourself are blameworthy. Matthew 7:4-5, how can you say to your brother "Let me take the speck out of your eye" when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
In the first type of hypocrisy, Jesus counseled self-deception: compartmentalize your knowledge so that half of you does not know that the other half is doing. In the second case, he is arguing against self-deception. We deceive ourselves incessantly, flattering ourselves as to our virtues and blinding ourselves to our faults, while at the same time fancying ourselves to be ever so astute about the faults of others. Jesus is not addressing here the hypocrisy of blaming others for sins we know we ourselves are guilty of but will not confess to; this is not the case of casting stones at the adulteress when we too are adulteress. The second case focuses more narrowly on how our partiality to ourselves fouls up our judgments about the moral merit of others. The hypocrisy here is unconscious and does not give rise to anxieties about faking it; your motives may not be bad, it is just that cognitive bias prevents you from getting a disinterested view of the truth. You fall victim to a false but sincere belief that you are seeing the world objectively and seeing it whole.
La Rochefoucauld pinpoints the phenomenon with the observation that somewhere not quite in the middle lies the truth: "our enemies get closer to the truth in their judgments of us than we get ourselves."
True, our self-love and self-interest lead us to exaggerate them, but we are considerably more trust worthy in our negative judgmenets of tohers than we are in our positive judgments of ourselves.
In contrast, the hypocrisy of casting stones at the adulteress when yourself are an undiscovered adulterer is conscious hypocrisy. (Jesus does not call this person a hypocrite, but we do). You are engaging in a knowingly false pretense regarding your true legal and moral condition, and you are especially culpable because one suspects that your concern to conceal your own sin may be driving you to be not very particular as to the guilt or innocence of the person you are stoning. But be careful not to be too zealous a stoner, for the type who would seek to deflect suspicion from his own guilt by aggressively hunting down similar sinners is himself suspicious. Be somewhat reserved when you stone adulteresses.
Take the ever-present anxiety regarding racism and accusations of it. Is the person who fears that deep down she might be a racist, and aggressively blames others for their racism, worse than the person who does not know he is one and blames others for theirs? The first one is faking nothing.
Perhaps our own bad desires should incline us to be charitable to the person who gives way to his bad desires.
Jesus also uses hypocrite as a hostile epithet to hurl at adherents of certain formalistic practices, who are not as willing as he is to adopt of his more expansive reading of the Law.
Luke 13: 14-17 Jesus heal crippled woman on Sabbath day. The woman had been crippled for eighteen years; she could have waited until Sunday. There is some suspicion as to Jesus' motives: he want sto make a point not about healing, but about healing on the Sabbath. The woman's suffering are not his chief interest. Sabbath work prohibitions were never understood to include not eating or not feeding who could not feed themselves. YOu can't make the animals work on the Sabbath, but you can feed them within the rules of Sabbath observance no less than you set food out for humans.
The problem is one of having to draw the line somewhere when you make a rule, and the rule that distinguishes between feeding animals and healing non-life threatening diorders is hardly irrational.
The terrain of religious observance is the ground upon which hypocrisy first grows. Hypocrites were those who preferred letter to spirit, but could equally be those who feigned spirit to avoid the harsh compliance with the letter of ritual forms. A charismatic Protestant could be as much a hypocrite as a Catholic, though in Jesus' view hypocrites were morel likely to be sticklers for form. \
Ritual is especially problematic, because in much ritual the form is the substance, as in eating fish on Friday or, among Jews, of obeying Sabbath and purity rules. It is about obedience and conformance. Just for the sake of doing it. Does Jesus mean to suggest that automatic observance of such ritual acts and prohibitions is hypocrisy, merely because they have become habit and custom? Or that because not doing them would bring blame? or that the doing of them would bring approbation?
One might argue that the function, if not the purpose, of successful ritual is to finesse the issue of motives. The point of ritual is to have as an acceptable motive nothing more elaborate than "that's what we do." And that is satisfying in itself.
Antihypocrisy: Looking bad in order to be good: fasting, wearing hairshirt
Hypocrisy is a parasite, operating by mimicking the attractiveness of virtue, appropriating its rewards. Once people suspect hypocrisy, many start to mistrust all appearances of virtue as so much glory seeking and shamming.
The hypocrisy of false good appearances
It is a new hypocrisy: a culpable sense of self-satisfaction.
Jesus dislikes the aggressive posturing: too noisy, too much trumpeting and chst thumping. Jesus prefers the look of modesty, the decorousness of private almsgiving rather than public spectacle.
In Calvin's view of predestined salvation, you had already been paid off befor you did your good deed, long before you were born, in fact, but that did not prevent you from worrying about the moral status of your motives for doing good. We are conflicted, but not always. Sometimes we just do good and don't worry that it may be good business to do so. Yet at other times, we doubt our motives.
Virtues naturally immune to hypocrisy.
Courage is not susceptible to Jesus' first ind of hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of the trumpeting almsgiver and the ostentatiously pious. You fear that everyone can see your cowardly soul written on your face. You want to get a nice safe wound and get carried to the rear.
The virtue in Aristotle's sense: being courageous because you are disposed to do courageous deeds by cultivating a disposition that seeks to do virtue for its own sake. Courage is also a virtue that is properly motivated by the desire to have a reputation for it. Courage is courage even if the doer of brave deeds trumpet them about; courage is not like almsgiving and praying. Though courage is not immune to being faked, it is often the case that faking legitimately qualifies as the real thing.
Politeness is immune to many form of hypocrisy because a certain benign form of hypocrisy is precisely its virtue. Politeness saves people from unnecessary pain in social encounters. It means having the tact to cover for the faux pas of others or to state your own claims in ways that will not make for discomfort. It means responding to the cues people give you to reaffirm their self-esteem as regards variously their appearance, taste, general competence,a dn importance, despite your diverging opinion. It means making a show of attention, veiling boredom, making the interaction safe for others, with the expectation that they will return the favor.
The more seriously grounded virtue is graciousness. Graciousness derives from a truly generous spirit, not from a merely polite one, from a spirit gifted in making gone feel welcome and at ease. Politeness always has something of a ritualized predictability about it, that is why it works and not very difficult to manage. Politeness can be mere politeness, it can be cold. Whereas graciousness cannot be cold. We count on politeness as by right, whereas graciousness is by grace, its more than we have a right to. Not that graciousness can't be faked, but that faking it is such a demanding chore that only the truly gracious would have the wherewithal to pass off a fake as the thing. You can be polite without great expenditures of spirit. We are inclined to feel as if we are faking politeness. In fact we want, subtly, to let the other person suspect we are faking it. Perhaps even more painful are the unwelcome appearances of the feeling of faking it when we would much prefer to be lost in the role of making polite conversation.
Self command: sense, sensibility and shallowness
Politeness must often employ the virtue of self-command or, self-control. Self-command is understood about not revealing or acting on feelings and motives rather than overtly misrepresenting them. Unlike politeness, self-command seems to mobilize itself more on one's own behalf than on behalf of others.
Emotionalism is not about having and then expressing deep feelings, but about bad manners, simply overdramatizing these passing feelings. Emotions come and go in a moment.
The virtue of those small hypocrisies that make us civil.
The naked truth: hey, wanna f***?
Direct vulgarity is a strategy more available to men than to women. Charm needs time.
There are other, more self-interested reasons we keep the truth to ourselves. We don't trust what it would mean for the entire conversational and moral order if we were to speak truth except euphemisticall. We fear the chaos, and the revenge. There is also a connection between the primitive taboo against saying the name of God and the still thriving taboo against saying the naked truth.
Say it like you mean it: mandatory faking and apology.
Pretending vs faking it.
Pretending allows you to play any role you want: you write the play, set it where you will, play the part you want to play. Faking it means playing a role that the larger culture has already scripted and that your inner being somehow feels is not quite your own. Faking it is forced upon us and gives rise to unpleasant accesses of self-consciousness. Faking it places us ever so much in the world, pretending gets us out of it for a brief vacation like a day dream.
The feeling of faking it forces upon us a recognition of a split between something that we flatter ourselves is our "true" self and the role we are playing. Sometimes, it is merely a vague sense of dislocation that takes the form of worrying where we are amidst all the roles we must play: I worry about who I am, therefore, I guess, I am.
In contrast, hypocrisy, though often infecting certain roles, is less about role than the propriety of motives you bring to the role.
We can be hypocrites and know that we are. In "naive hypocrite", a person hides acts and beliefs he knows to be wrong, and may even suffer a guilty conscience. The "new hypocrite" thinks himself a paragon of virtue, does not feel himself to be faking anything, he may be delighted with the role he has assumed, experiencing himself sincerely but be culpably deluded as to the sincerity of his sincerity. He simply adjusts his conscience by ascribing noble, disinterested, and altruistic intentions to all his behavior. The naive hypocrite is a conscious deceiver; the new hypocrite a seamless self-deceiver.
Matthew 6:1-5, "to be seen by men when praying and giving", Jesus views that it is not about the hypocrite's deed but his less than virtuous intention that is faulted.
Matthew 15:7-9 and Mark 7:6-7, "in vain do they worship me".God doesn't credit these hypocritical prayers.
Jesus is well aware that it is no easy to keep your mind free of reputational and other advantages gained by doing good deeds. Thus, He counsels self-deception: keep the left hand ignorant of what the right is doing. Giving in secret, as Jesus urges, keep you from feeling the pride of eschewing public recognition.
Later, Jesus prefers small pious deceptions of others. Do not, he says, fast like the hypocrites who disfigure their faces and put on a good show. Fast in secret and in public look as if you are not fasting, be clean and neat, anointed and washed (Matthew 6: 16-18).
Jesus" second kind of hypocrisy involves blaming others when you yourself are blameworthy. Matthew 7:4-5, how can you say to your brother "Let me take the speck out of your eye" when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
In the first type of hypocrisy, Jesus counseled self-deception: compartmentalize your knowledge so that half of you does not know that the other half is doing. In the second case, he is arguing against self-deception. We deceive ourselves incessantly, flattering ourselves as to our virtues and blinding ourselves to our faults, while at the same time fancying ourselves to be ever so astute about the faults of others. Jesus is not addressing here the hypocrisy of blaming others for sins we know we ourselves are guilty of but will not confess to; this is not the case of casting stones at the adulteress when we too are adulteress. The second case focuses more narrowly on how our partiality to ourselves fouls up our judgments about the moral merit of others. The hypocrisy here is unconscious and does not give rise to anxieties about faking it; your motives may not be bad, it is just that cognitive bias prevents you from getting a disinterested view of the truth. You fall victim to a false but sincere belief that you are seeing the world objectively and seeing it whole.
La Rochefoucauld pinpoints the phenomenon with the observation that somewhere not quite in the middle lies the truth: "our enemies get closer to the truth in their judgments of us than we get ourselves."
True, our self-love and self-interest lead us to exaggerate them, but we are considerably more trust worthy in our negative judgmenets of tohers than we are in our positive judgments of ourselves.
In contrast, the hypocrisy of casting stones at the adulteress when yourself are an undiscovered adulterer is conscious hypocrisy. (Jesus does not call this person a hypocrite, but we do). You are engaging in a knowingly false pretense regarding your true legal and moral condition, and you are especially culpable because one suspects that your concern to conceal your own sin may be driving you to be not very particular as to the guilt or innocence of the person you are stoning. But be careful not to be too zealous a stoner, for the type who would seek to deflect suspicion from his own guilt by aggressively hunting down similar sinners is himself suspicious. Be somewhat reserved when you stone adulteresses.
Take the ever-present anxiety regarding racism and accusations of it. Is the person who fears that deep down she might be a racist, and aggressively blames others for their racism, worse than the person who does not know he is one and blames others for theirs? The first one is faking nothing.
Perhaps our own bad desires should incline us to be charitable to the person who gives way to his bad desires.
Jesus also uses hypocrite as a hostile epithet to hurl at adherents of certain formalistic practices, who are not as willing as he is to adopt of his more expansive reading of the Law.
Luke 13: 14-17 Jesus heal crippled woman on Sabbath day. The woman had been crippled for eighteen years; she could have waited until Sunday. There is some suspicion as to Jesus' motives: he want sto make a point not about healing, but about healing on the Sabbath. The woman's suffering are not his chief interest. Sabbath work prohibitions were never understood to include not eating or not feeding who could not feed themselves. YOu can't make the animals work on the Sabbath, but you can feed them within the rules of Sabbath observance no less than you set food out for humans.
The problem is one of having to draw the line somewhere when you make a rule, and the rule that distinguishes between feeding animals and healing non-life threatening diorders is hardly irrational.
The terrain of religious observance is the ground upon which hypocrisy first grows. Hypocrites were those who preferred letter to spirit, but could equally be those who feigned spirit to avoid the harsh compliance with the letter of ritual forms. A charismatic Protestant could be as much a hypocrite as a Catholic, though in Jesus' view hypocrites were morel likely to be sticklers for form. \
Ritual is especially problematic, because in much ritual the form is the substance, as in eating fish on Friday or, among Jews, of obeying Sabbath and purity rules. It is about obedience and conformance. Just for the sake of doing it. Does Jesus mean to suggest that automatic observance of such ritual acts and prohibitions is hypocrisy, merely because they have become habit and custom? Or that because not doing them would bring blame? or that the doing of them would bring approbation?
One might argue that the function, if not the purpose, of successful ritual is to finesse the issue of motives. The point of ritual is to have as an acceptable motive nothing more elaborate than "that's what we do." And that is satisfying in itself.
Antihypocrisy: Looking bad in order to be good: fasting, wearing hairshirt
Hypocrisy is a parasite, operating by mimicking the attractiveness of virtue, appropriating its rewards. Once people suspect hypocrisy, many start to mistrust all appearances of virtue as so much glory seeking and shamming.
The hypocrisy of false good appearances
It is a new hypocrisy: a culpable sense of self-satisfaction.
Jesus dislikes the aggressive posturing: too noisy, too much trumpeting and chst thumping. Jesus prefers the look of modesty, the decorousness of private almsgiving rather than public spectacle.
In Calvin's view of predestined salvation, you had already been paid off befor you did your good deed, long before you were born, in fact, but that did not prevent you from worrying about the moral status of your motives for doing good. We are conflicted, but not always. Sometimes we just do good and don't worry that it may be good business to do so. Yet at other times, we doubt our motives.
Virtues naturally immune to hypocrisy.
Courage is not susceptible to Jesus' first ind of hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of the trumpeting almsgiver and the ostentatiously pious. You fear that everyone can see your cowardly soul written on your face. You want to get a nice safe wound and get carried to the rear.
The virtue in Aristotle's sense: being courageous because you are disposed to do courageous deeds by cultivating a disposition that seeks to do virtue for its own sake. Courage is also a virtue that is properly motivated by the desire to have a reputation for it. Courage is courage even if the doer of brave deeds trumpet them about; courage is not like almsgiving and praying. Though courage is not immune to being faked, it is often the case that faking legitimately qualifies as the real thing.
Politeness is immune to many form of hypocrisy because a certain benign form of hypocrisy is precisely its virtue. Politeness saves people from unnecessary pain in social encounters. It means having the tact to cover for the faux pas of others or to state your own claims in ways that will not make for discomfort. It means responding to the cues people give you to reaffirm their self-esteem as regards variously their appearance, taste, general competence,a dn importance, despite your diverging opinion. It means making a show of attention, veiling boredom, making the interaction safe for others, with the expectation that they will return the favor.
The more seriously grounded virtue is graciousness. Graciousness derives from a truly generous spirit, not from a merely polite one, from a spirit gifted in making gone feel welcome and at ease. Politeness always has something of a ritualized predictability about it, that is why it works and not very difficult to manage. Politeness can be mere politeness, it can be cold. Whereas graciousness cannot be cold. We count on politeness as by right, whereas graciousness is by grace, its more than we have a right to. Not that graciousness can't be faked, but that faking it is such a demanding chore that only the truly gracious would have the wherewithal to pass off a fake as the thing. You can be polite without great expenditures of spirit. We are inclined to feel as if we are faking politeness. In fact we want, subtly, to let the other person suspect we are faking it. Perhaps even more painful are the unwelcome appearances of the feeling of faking it when we would much prefer to be lost in the role of making polite conversation.
Self command: sense, sensibility and shallowness
Politeness must often employ the virtue of self-command or, self-control. Self-command is understood about not revealing or acting on feelings and motives rather than overtly misrepresenting them. Unlike politeness, self-command seems to mobilize itself more on one's own behalf than on behalf of others.
Emotionalism is not about having and then expressing deep feelings, but about bad manners, simply overdramatizing these passing feelings. Emotions come and go in a moment.
The virtue of those small hypocrisies that make us civil.
The naked truth: hey, wanna f***?
Direct vulgarity is a strategy more available to men than to women. Charm needs time.
There are other, more self-interested reasons we keep the truth to ourselves. We don't trust what it would mean for the entire conversational and moral order if we were to speak truth except euphemisticall. We fear the chaos, and the revenge. There is also a connection between the primitive taboo against saying the name of God and the still thriving taboo against saying the naked truth.
Say it like you mean it: mandatory faking and apology.
Pretending vs faking it.
Pretending allows you to play any role you want: you write the play, set it where you will, play the part you want to play. Faking it means playing a role that the larger culture has already scripted and that your inner being somehow feels is not quite your own. Faking it is forced upon us and gives rise to unpleasant accesses of self-consciousness. Faking it places us ever so much in the world, pretending gets us out of it for a brief vacation like a day dream.
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