In praise of the Hypocrite (Sympathy for the Devil)

License Creative Commons

Xavier Massó

Sometimes it is necessary and right for a man to die for a people. But a whole people must never die for a single man: remember this, Sepharad.

(Salvador Espriu, La pell de brau XLVI, 1960)[1]

Who reminded us of this is a great poet currently fallen into oblivion, like so many others after the cruel plundering and devastation of the subject of Literature in our school curricula. Thruth may sometimes be unpleasant, but it is still thruth although unpleasant. So are those verses. They do not speak to us about education, nor about anything in particular, but that is precisely what makes them so great. Nevertheless, they don’t seem at all compatible with certain narratives, such as, for example, that of inclusive schooling, at least as it is currently conceived: without any kind of limit.

We’re living in hypocritical times, so hypocritical that they have been socially resolved in a systemic cynicism whose narrative has been imposed on a previously cancelled reality. Especially in educational matters, we are increasingly immersed in a new version of Victorian double standards. But no longer as a staging of conscious farce, but in its rigorous form proper to the higher phase of the grotesque: like a Shakespearean tragedy performed by a carnival parade. Now it is not enough with the more or less concealed Victorian hypocrisy. Not anymore. What we are now required for is to blindly believe the story, absolutely. Pretending it’s no longer worth. “The envy of virtue made Cain a criminal. Glory to Cain! Today vice is what is most envied”[2], shouted another great poet: it is impossible to express it better. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, sang the Rolling Stones…

The hypocritical pretense of the faker is no longer enough because the contradictions between reality and the story are at their very limit and threaten to shatter the discourse that sustains it. As in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Orwell’s brilliant dystopia, it is not enough to respond there are seven fingers in the hand they are showing us, as long as we still know there are only five: we must believe without hesitation that there are seven; absolute conviction required. There has always been hypocrisy and there will ever be hoax. But from the very moment there is no contrast admitted, we are then installed  in a deceitfull narrative whose effects ara analogous to those of legalizing counterfeit currency: it becomes impossible to distinguish truth from falsehood, good from evil. And then we enter the kingdom of the night in wich all cows are black, as Hegel said. The indifferentiation in wich anything goes.

We boast of an inclusive schooling that does not exclude anyone under any circumstances and this is axiomatically decreed as good due to the absence of evil. No nuances. A capital error that abandons us to indistinction in a field flood by doctrinal dogmatics tinged with a shy moralism that ignores reality and the human condition, while taking it for granted by ignoring it, lest it clash with the ideal construct. Let’s see, whether we like it or not, the fact is there are toxic people of any age. To pretend otherwise is either not having understood anything or cynically settling into the grotesque. And to do nothing about is to assume it as good, as well as the harm it may cause to its victims. Trivializing evil and human pain does not seem to be the best way to remedy it.

Hypocrisy corresponds to farce; cynicism to grotesque. The difference is not trivial. The hypocrite does not accept or does not have necessarily to accept the narrative as valid; but he doesn’t refuse it openly since he assume it while taking advantage to his own benefit, more or less veiledly; he is a faker who knows that he is acting out a farce, but he would never think of turning it into a common rule. Because he knows counterfeit currency requires legal tender, just like lies need the thruth to be lies, otherwise it makes no sense. At least, the hypocrite retains a certain trace of morality. But this has no use to the cinic one. He has moved from hypocrisy to cynicism having been convinced, as Chesterton said, that his private longings are a right and the rights of others are an abuse. That is why he’s got much more in need of foundation than the hypocrite. The hypocrite cheats the common rules that he’s nevertheless still taking as a pattern. The cynic, on the other hand, demands to convert his personal aims into common rules that provides the moral alibi he needs to cheat reality by decreeing it different from what it is.

This is the cas of so many people who in the public sphere fervently and stridently declare themselves in favour of applying the inclusive model without any limits in schools… to which they are privately very careful not to send their children, while they denigrate those who publicly denounce inclusive schools as a eugenic social project combined with class aggression. They publicly extol the virtues of a model from wich they privately flee, selling advices they don’t apply themselves.

It may not be the most heroic option, nor the most honnest one, but perhaps it is the most logical one in the face of such a dissociation the public and private narratives. In a public space characterized by a common framework that is explicitly cynical and doctrinal – in line with what Chesterton expressed – the private sphere is the refuge of a hypertrophied hypocrisy as a reaction to the growing pressure of a public space invaded by infinite private spaces, so syncretic and heterogeneous that it cannot anymore be understood as “public”, despite retainning this name. The signifier without meaning. Jus like Bertrand Russell wondering if the proposition “the king of France is bald” is true or false. France has no king.

In the public sphere, the place for staging, it arises then Sympathy for the Devil. Compassion and/or sympathy, empathy for the devil, as a sublimation of the taboo by the procedure of trivializing it, ignoring it or attributing to it a strictly “technical” and contingent, banal character. Which in turn is paradoxically translated into a sickly drive for evil that grips and prevents from understanding it, facing it and trying to remedy it, at least as far as possible.

The recipe for emotional balance of guilty consciences, that so often tend to internal restlessness. Victorian societies used to “sit a beggar at your table” on Christmas Day, in posmodern cinic societies de demand it’s turned to “put a bully in your school”. But nobody, or nobody in their right mind, wants their children to share the same space at the mercy of bullies, potential rapists and psychopaths running riot in public schools. So, yes, but as long as it is not the school of their offspring. Let us not forget, we are in the “common” framework of social cynicism, so, everything is all right, but “noli me tangere”: forget about me (and mine). Help yourself.

A poor sublimated consolation of a declining and socially inhibited middle class sheltered in social cynicism as the last refugee, with the same model that promotes the most syncretic inclusion being the moral alibi that keeps them for now (only) apparently safe from it, although at the price of destroying public education , unaware that the game is so far being played in added time. Like the one who’s in free fall from a fifteenth floor and when he’s about half way someone asks how is he doing and he answers: “so far, so good.”

Perhaps there is after all some kind of poetic justice in such a bizarre construct: the woke left converging with Margaret Thatcher, the real pioneer on implementing inclusive school since 1979. What a surprise.

Some may even appeal to the Bible in defense of inclusiveness and the need to recover the lost sheep above all else: “Which of you men, if you had one hundred sheep, and lost one of them, wouldn’t leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that was lost, until he found it? When he has found it, he carries it on his shoulders, rejoicing. When he comes home, he calls together his friends, his family and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!’ I tell you that even so there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance”. (Luke 15:3-7).

It may be so in the Gospel, where salvation is transcendent and the sheep that the wolf eats go to heaven. But things do not work this way down here. And being aware the wolf is lurking around, it rather seems to us to be reckless, a historical irresponsibility, and absolutely immoral to leave alone the remaining ninety-nine sheep. That is why we are with Espriu, because athough it may certainly be unpleasant, sometimes it is necessary and right…

___

[1] Translated from catalan https://lletra.uoc.edu/especials/folch/espriu_.htm#XLVI

[2] Translated from Spanish. Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares X (Campos de Castilla, 1917)

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons