Defending Hypocrisy

By Kleinheider Posted on July 17, 2008 at 1:33 pm

“If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without…let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine–for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish.”

~ Irving Kristol, neoconservative theorist

Kevin Drum takes issue with a new conservative agenda outlined by the book, Grand New Party:

Their agenda is fundamentally natalist: they want to protect the traditional family and they want that traditional family to have plenty of kids. To accomplish that, they propose a variety of initiatives to reduce out-of-wedlock births, make divorce harder, use the tax code to subsidize childbearing, and so forth. The problem here— and it’s one they seem to understand—is that there’s something fundamentally hypocritical about this: it involves an extensive program of social engineering being put in place by conservative elites who don’t really need (or want to be bound by) any of its rules themselves.

They’re only doing it because— well, because the lower classes need it. It’s for their own good. In one sense, this arguably isn’t as bad as it sounds. Hypocrisy is vastly overrated as a sin, after all. But even with plenty of lipstick on this pig, it’s still not very pretty.

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