Until I started depending on Uber and Ola, I travelled everywhere by my car but that never failed to drive me crazy. This was because despite my sane waiting or crawling, impatient drivers would inevitably cut in right and left or at the very last moment, making those who exercised common decency or who followed the rules, appear as immature idiots. That included me and whenever this happened, I’d descend into a rage about the inconsiderate, selfish drivers but also tinged with something else: a kind of self-congratulatory smugness that I would never do such a thing. But when I reflected, I recalled that I do too at times - the genuine hypocrite!
In today’s divided, ostrich like situations, there is scarcely a more common epithet hurled in public life than “hypocrite.” The world is in a penumbra of impotence, even as we face wall-to-wall crises: the heating planet; wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan; the migrant crisis, the famine crisis, etc. In place of action and solutions, which seem totally out of reach, we substitute judgment. And what is more satisfying to adjudicate than the charge of hypocrisy?
After all, we are a collection of aspirations and failings, from which we try to be who we think we should be but constantly fall short. But I understand the appeal of calling out what looks like hypocrisy when we see it, since at no time in human history has it been possible so easily to detect, denounce and pitch the words of so many people against their deeds - the root portrayal of hypocrisy. Although hypocrisy presents in many forms, some are indisputable and relatively low, oozing with bad odour like when I ask my kids to state that I am out when I am snuggled lazily at home.
Others have unbearably high stakes, like in the case of all politicians where the hypocrisy is starkly visible as they bathe and stay immersed in their sin of enduring deception. For the politicians, it is a kind of alluring power: pretending to be someone they are innately not - humble when they are not and intelligent when they are imbecile. This comes easy to them since they are always playing a pretending role when they profess heartless sympathy or when they are at their best, turning to political cynicism and when they are at their worst, veering towards hypocrisy.
Catching this deception of politicians turn out to be deeply satisfying for the media, the layman and even even fellow politicians to bring low the person who previously had a claim to the moral high ground. And, the entire media will willingly sell their souls to obtain this perfume of luxury bashing without measuring the truth. The internet and social media have created a permanent record of publicly recorded stances, offering an all-you-can-eat buffet of human inconstancy, ready-made for our eager appetites.
Steering away from politicians, hypocrisy is visible in other doamins too like the esteemed portals of learning and in the power of the pen, too. There was a time when being a college student meant that you willingly submitted to the rules, expectations and judgments of a professor or a department. You did not get to grade your teachers at the end of the term, as what mattered to the university was their opinion of you, not yours of them. The relationship was unabashedly hierarchical. As a student, you were presumed ignorant, but teachable. You paid the university for the opportunity to decrease your ignorance. Sadly, much of this has been overturned in recent years. Students today, whose parents often pay fortunes for their education, are treated like valuable customers, not sponge like apprentices. University curriculums have moved away from core requirements — the idea that there are things all educated people ought to have read, understood and discussed together — to a kind of mix-and-match set of offerings. Engineering teaching have endured frequent budgetary cuts for not being seen to provide practical benefits — viz. skills that are beyond practical value in the job market. The result has been the hollowing out of higher education.
Professors cater to students and institutions with higher grades and diminished expectations. Where do the kids in today’s academic institutions get conviction to shift focus away from their studies to Palestine and Ukraine? Part of it is youthful idealism, and part of it stems from ideological currents in elite academia and the media. But an equal part is the substitution of critical thinking with the ceaseless affirmation of emotional choice. Can we reverse the trend? There is a wisdom rooted in knowledge, expertise and experience that collectively goes by the name of authority. Isn’t it time to restore it.
As for news media, here too there was a time when Arnab Goswami used to be synonymous with “the nation wants to know…”, and be largely believed. His authority derived from the accuracy and quality of his reports. But slowly his audience understood that the news he was dishing was not simply facts, as they wanted but shaped and tainted with opinions.
This is happening as the current approach is not to seek or create news media that provides straighter news or a better balance of opinion. It has been to turn the tables. Conservatives, including me, note that “mainstream media” often present a slant on the news. Why do media indulge in such hypocrisy? Is the bygone era of honest journalism dead? Because it has proved immensely profitable, especially on cable TV, radio airwaves and now podcasts. It has given previously disaffected consumers a much wider range of options for where they obtain their news, or at least the version of it that does the least to contradict their beliefs.
But what it has produced is not better-informed citizens. It is a land of cacophony, confusion and conspiracy theories. To give hypocrisy a pass, one might argue, is to slide down a slope toward having no principles at all. In these merciless political times, it would be better for our minds to focus on the true betrayals that really matter. Perhaps if we embrace the inevitable inconsistencies within ourselves, we can have a more generous, less purity-focused people of practical good aimed at real change.
Think contra! What if higher education did some introspection away from hypocrisy and responded to plummeting public confidence by demanding a whole lot more of their students, especially through extensive core requirements? What if professors gave grades that reflected actual performance? What if administrators responded to rules-breaking through summary expulsions? What if the news media, also facing declining levels of trust, stopped catering to their least literate readers, stopped caring about their angriest ones, stopped publishing dumbed-down versions of news, and stopped acting as if journalism is just another form of entertainment?
Maybe moves like these may spell the death of academia & the news media but may also help save them recover from the pits of their hypocrisy and as for me, it will help my turnaround from the small tit bits of hypocrisy that I have indulged in and realize now. The words today’s youth almost never want to hear — “You are wrong” — are sometimes the ones that, unknowingly, they must get used to.
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