Among the most frequent argumentative tactics in our politics is the accusation of hypocrisy. Those on the left accuse right-wingers of hypocrisy, for example, when they claim to be “pro-life” while still supporting the death penalty and a private health insurance system. Those on the right accuse the left of hypocrisy just as frequently, as when the latter profess to support free speech rights and then “cancel” public figures with controversial viewpoints. The right decry sex crimes against children, and then support a President implicated in the Epstein files; the left cast themselves as champions of the working-class even though most of their rank and file are highly educated and affluent. And not only politicians can be hypocrites. Who is more hypocritical, we wonder, than the tech titans who banned Donald Trump from their platforms and donated to liberal causes only to kiss the ring when it was squeezed back onto the pudgy presidential finger?
The charge of hypocrisy is, at root, a negative judgment about inconsistency. “Flip-flopping” politicians are often more intensely despised than those whose views are hateful but predictable. This is in part, perhaps, because of the moral vacuum that rank hypocrisy seems to expose; those who are willing publicly to contradict themselves appear to be without a moral compass, out only for their own gain. When Vance referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler,” only later to become his smarmiest promoter, this seemed to many to expose something deeply corrupt about the Vice President as a human being. Of course, to him, this was not inconsistency, much less hypocrisy — it was simply a change of mind.
While “hypocrisy” has never been a term with a positive connotation, its milder twin brother, inconsistency, has sometimes seemed more appealing. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote. His admirer Walt Whitman, in a turn of phrase that has since become a cliché, went even further, omitting Emerson’s qualification: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” If the playfulness inherent in such an attitude went out of style for a time, the counterculture of the 1960s and the free-market disinhibitions of the 1980s and ‘90s brought it back. In 1994, Leon Wieseltier wrote that his was “an age in which inconsistency is an occasion for pleasure. (The name of that pleasure is post-modernism.)” He quipped, “I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?”
As the pendulum of culture swings, Wieseltier’s Emersonianism has come once again to ring hollow. The exigencies of renascent authoritarianism, nativism, and techno-oligarchy all have made the picture of self-as-experiment come to seem somewhat frivolous. Dire times demand clear and consistent commitment. A lack of such clarity, or such consistency, will now seem at best irresponsible, at worst a sort of capitulation to (or even support of) fascism. This is not quite the same as the trite remark that in times of crisis, one is forced to “pick a side.” Most of us are, indeed, already “on a side.” But what has become newly important, it seems to me, is ironing out the ambivalences within oneself, making sure that one has achieved—and can demonstrate—the crystalline clarity of consistency.
All of which brings us to the new essay collection by the firebrand critic Andrea Long Chu, entitled Authority. Chu is a staff writer at New York magazine and an erstwhile comparative literature graduate student, who broke into the rarefied realm of the literati with her debut essay in n+1, “On Liking Women,” in 2018. The following year, Chu expanded that essay into a book called Females, and from then on, her vinegary style of criticism has evoked both delight and disgust in the many readers of her essays, now collected in an elegant gilded black-jacketed hardcover.
Authority has already provoked much debate, and anyone who wishes to write about it must confront two challenges. First, the essays in the book vary drastically in both tone and substance. There is, for instance, consecutively, an essay weaving together reflections on the “pink pussy hats” of the 2020 Women’s March with an account of Chu’s vaginoplasty; another personal essay about her experience receiving transcranial magnetic stimulation, interlaced with a critique of John Searle’s famous Chinese Room thought experiment; and then a scathing assault on the novelist Bret Easton Ellis and his penchant for anti-woke screeds. Making matters yet more difficult is that it is not only Chu’s choices of topic that are eclectic; her style and tone shift violently across the volume’s selections, ranging from the passionately subjective and even exhibitionist to the more detached mode of the literary historian. Anyone who proposes to write about Chu, then, is necessarily doing so selectively. She is, as Archilocus’s adage would have it, a fox rather than a hedgehog.
The second challenge is precisely the prolixity of the discourse around Chu’s work. Critical reviews have been mixed. The Washington Post’s Becca Rothfeld wrote that Chu “often gets away with baggy asso- ciative gesturing because her prose has a patina of brilliance, even when it is wanting or worse in terms of substance.” Jed Perl, writing in The New York Review of Books, seemed to second this assessment, implicating Authority in his lament over critics who forsake the controlling and unifying pull of a core IDEA in favor of surrender to the immediacy of various aesthetic objects. And in The New Yorker, S.C. Cornell has argued that despite Chu’s bellicose posturing against “liberalism,” she herself is a liberal par excellence, valorizing unrestricted free choice above all else.
I agree with all of these criticisms, but am most intrigued by the last. Despite the lack of a unifying theme or hedgehog-like IDEA, the reader of Authority would be hard-pressed not to notice that Chu really does not like liberals. Indeed, the villains in Chu’s critical imagination are not fascists or philistines, but rather anyone who might be considered a “liberal,” a “centrist,” or a “humanist” (the difference between these terms, as Chu uses them, is unclear). Like many online leftists, Chu seems more irked by the namby-pambyism of high-profile liberals than she does by the authoritarianism or bigotry of the right. What bothers her, at root, is liberalism’s hypocrisy.
Most of Chu’s targets in Authority—and, indeed, most of her subjects are targets—are small fish. Take, for example, “Psycho Analysis,” a hatchet-job directed against Bret Easton Ellis’s non-fiction debut, White. The purpose of the book, as Chu puts it, is “to offend young, progressive readers while giving everyone else the delight of watching.” In the book, Ellis lambastes the #MeToo movement, praises alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and makes a whole host of generally politically incorrect statements that render the book noxious. Further, he brands millennials “Generation Wuss,” admonishing them to “Deal with it, stop whining, take your medicine, and grow the fuck up.”
Chu’s problem with all this is that it “amounts to a lecture on kettles from one of our leading pots.” Ellis’s vice is that he is “disingenuous.” Chu points out that “It is, of course, Ellis who won’t stop whining; Ellis who can’t handle being trolled; Ellis who calls criticism ‘oppression’; Ellis who manically describes the tendency of people online to react disproportionately to things as a ‘vast epidemic of alarmist and catastrophic drama.’” Ellis, in other words, is a hypocrite—he is an overly sensitive, chronically online crybaby who accuses young people of his own worst traits.
There is some substantive moral criticism in this essay. Chu writes that the source of Ellis’s annoyance with his leftwing friends is probably “not because they hold left-wing political views but because, like him, they are rich, and rich people are universally horrible.” But there is no real argument that Ellis’s wealth is the source of his ethical rot; rather, the emotional force of the piece is in its exposure of Ellis as a particularly virulent hypocrite.
Consider next the marquee piece in Authority, the eponymous “Authority,” which offers an interpretive history of literary criticism as an exercise in shoring up the authority of the critic during times of perceived cultural and political crisis. “Authority” is a skillful essay, which surveys a broad sweep of literary history with an easy command of the sources. But the core contention of the piece is not that any particular critic, or school of criticism, has failed to overcome the “crisis of criticism.” Rather, it is that criticism, in its transactions with political authority, has a hypocrisy problem.
At least since Samuel Johnson, literary critics have seen their role—according to Chu—as inculcating an educated populace capable of self-government. In the United States, criticism applied itself to this task by attempting to teach citizens how to read texts closely and weigh their form and content outside of the grip of political ideologies. But for Chu, this is a fine bit of deception: “At least until the 1970s,” she argues, “criticism in the United States was… an amoral institution with an openly political mission… Criticism was charged with defending art against all political interests except the one it happened to serve—as if putting its finger in the dike not to avert a flood but to gain a monopoly over the water supply.” In other words, liberal criticism’s aim is to indoctrinate readers into an acceptance of the liberal status quo through a (false) stance of apolitical moral and aesthetic sensitivity.
And this is precisely the crime that Chu indicts specific liberal writers of committing. In “Likely People,” Chu takes aim at the novelist Zadie Smith, less on the basis of a reading of her novels and more in response to the perceived ideology underlying those novels. Chu alleges that for Smith, the novel is “a little liberal machine for making more little liberals.” Smith places herself in an English tradition that sees the novel as increasing a reader’s “moral sympathies” for people unlike themselves. This requires a suspension of prejudice and judgment, a Keatsian “negative capability” that Smith praises.
For Chu, this is so much chaff in the wind. “Negative capability” is not, as it was for Keats, a marker of profound ability to cope with the mysteriousness and unintelligibility of life in the world, but rather, a convenient cover for political “both-sides-ism.” The urge to sympathize with “plausible others” in fiction betrays a political centrism that substitutes humanist psychologizing for political ideology.
Chu cites Smith praising her young students who have become more political, while nevertheless trying to keep identity politics out of novels. “This,” says Chu, “is literary NIMBYism: Yes, politics, but over there.” Like Ellis, Smith is “disingenuous.” Smith herself wrote that “ideological inconsistency is, for me, practically an article of faith.” But this possessing “no firm opinions or set beliefs” is precisely the sort of seeming liberal virtue that Chu wishes us to understand as the rankest hypocrisy.
That argument is most clearly outlined in the the not-so-subtly entitled essay, “Cunt!” on Maggie Nelson’s book On Freedom. Nelson, like Smith, wants to free the work of art from ideological purity tests. She decries “a world drunk on scapegoating, virtue signaling, and public humiliation” and wants to preserve space for artists to “give expression to complex, sometimes disturbing dimensions of their psyches” that transgress the boundaries of the politically acceptable. Nelson particularly decries protestors’ use of the word “violence” to describe the effect of politically suspicious art, which she believes is a false use of the term in the service of censorship.
The problem here, for Chu, is not that Nelson is flat-out wrong; not that insensitive art truly is a form of violence toward minority groups. Rather, it’s that Nelson is a hypocrite. On the one hand, she takes critics of art to task for using language of physical harm that suggests an equivalence between bad art and police brutality. On the other, she writes that “Acting as if the world neatly divides… into problematic, ethically turbulent, essentially dangerous people who should stay ‘over there,’ and nonproblematic, ethically good, essentially safe people who should be allowed to stay ‘over here’ is not our only option. After all, what I’ve just described is a prison.” Chu notes that the conflation of moral absolutism with “incarceration” is just the sort of linguistic crime of which Nelson has just finished accusing the new philistines.
Nelson herself is here, Chu writes, exercising “the freedom, inherent in the nature of language, for words not to mean what they say. The freedom to mean things—this is what Nelson will freely extend to works of art while in the same breath denying it to those who would advocate that these same works of art be removed or destroyed.” Nelson, in other words, wants absolute expressive freedom for the artist, but (according to Chu) rigid constraint for critics.
In fact, Chu agrees with Nelson—rhetorical “violence” is not real violence, and art should be a space for wild experimentation that occasionally violates taboos. As she writes, she only wishes to extend Nelson’s paean to freedom to other forms of discourse. At the end of “Cunt!” Chu is unusually self-aware. “I can only say [Nelson] is being disingenuous by risking disingenuousness myself; I place on her arguments a demand for logical consistency that I implore her, at the same time, to spare other people.” Chu admits that she is, herself, a devotee of inconsistency—“I’ll tell you a secret,” she (cloyingly) writes: “I am generally in favor of the artistic freedom to provoke and offend, except when I am not. I am generally opposed to the censorship of troubling or controversial speech, except for when I am not.” Is Chu herself, then, a hypocrite? “Well,” she replies, “I exercise judgment, or at least I try to—which is to say, I gather the indeterminacy of a thing into the inconsistency of having an opinion about it.”
Chu’s reflexivity is perspicacious, insofar as it reveals the ouroboros–like nature of her critical endeavor. In critiquing the liberal writer, Chu’s weapon of choice is the accusation of disingenuousness. But in focusing her attacks on that particular vice, she lays herself open to precisely the same objection. Indeed, the essays in Authority can take positions that are entirely inconsistent with one another. To take only one example, in her essay, “On Liking Women,” Chu makes the evocative claim that transness is not about stable, ontological identity, but rather about desire. “The truth is,” she writes, “I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them.” Contrary to the political slogan that trans women are women, Chu chooses instead to center the insouciant act of desire that makes a male wish to be a female. It’s not that any given individual thinks they would look better with a vagina than a penis; rather, it’s that a trans person wants to be a woman, and women paradigmatically have vaginas, according to Chu.
Now, move on to the next essay in the collection, entitled “Bad TV.” Here, Chu writes about the show Transparent, which was embroiled in controversy when its cisgender star, Jeffrey Tambor, was accused of sexual harassment. Chu writes of her enjoyment of the show while she herself was transitioning. She related, she says, to Tambor’s character’s emotional confessions: “’I don’t wanna be trans!’cried Tambor’s character, in a bitter argument with her estranged sister. ‘I am trans!’ Me neither; me too.” Here, in other words, Chu seems completely to disown the thesis of “On Liking Women.” Where in that essay, transness was an active desire rather than a static state of being, here it is precisely the opposite. Which is it? Can it really, plausibly, be both? Perhaps: but this takes all the bite out of the gleefully provocative earlier piece.
The point is not to add one more turn of the screw, accusing the hypocrite-hunter of hypocrisy. The point is, rather, about this form of moral and political argumentation, that focuses on sincerity, ingenuousness, and consistency above all else. Despite the stringency of Chu’s judgments, she rarely critiques writers like Ellis, Smith, or Nelson on the basis of their values or their beliefs. Their besetting sin is their hypocrisy. It is this aspect of Authority that, I think, helps to illuminate a salient feature of our contemporary political discourse.
Someone is a hypocrite; a critic comes along and accuses them of hypocrisy; then another critic comes along and accuses the first critic of hypocrisy. We might call these people, respectively, Maggie Nelson, Andrea Long Chu, and The New Yorker’s Cornell, who argued that Chu’s strictures against liberalism belied her own deep-seated liberal tendencies. Accusations of hypocrisy are inherently iterative and reduplicating, like a cell that splits into two, which splits into four, and so on and so forth. This was one of the key insights of the political philosopher Judith Shklar in her classic and still relevant essay “Let Us Not Be Hypocritical” of 1979.
The burden of Shklar’s essay was to understand “What is the mentality of those who cannot bear hypocrisy?” The question is as important now as it was then. “Hypocrisy remains the only unforgivable sin even, perhaps especially, among those who can overlook and explain away almost every other vice,” Shklar wrote. Contemporary political life had, she contended, produced a class of “professional antihypocrites” whose calling was to “unmask” every inconsistency they could find.
The problem is that antihypocrisy is not, as one might think, the opposite or negation of hypocrisy; rather, it is its inevitable counterpart and co-conspirator. The contest between hypocrisy and antihypocrisy is a “mutually enhancing, rather than destructive, conflict.” For Shklar, this is because the act of unmasking inevitably entails an elevation of a moral standard. Once the standard has been raised, it is even easier to violate it. “In the unending game of mutual unmasking,” she wrote, “the general level of sham rises. As each side tries to destroy the credibility of its rivals, politics becomes a treadmill of dissimulation and unmasking. To call an opponent evil might boomerang, but he need only be unarmed by charges of hypocrisy.”
Shklar located the source of the antihypocrites’ passion in an urge to dominate. The contest between the hypocrite and the antihypocrite is, for Shklar, a form of “psychic warfare.” In other words, antihypocrisy arises not from a confidence in the rightness of one’s own standards, but rather, perhaps paradoxically, from a deep “moral insecurity.”
But this moral insecurity is not just a negative trait of some unlucky individuals. Rather, it is the product of the particular type of society in which we live – that is to say, a pluralistic liberal society. In such a social order, there is no real consensus about the common good. Incommensurate values abut each other with no real possibility of rational adjudication. As Shklar put it, “Without ancestor worship or divine providence to rely on, modern liberal democracy has little but its moral promise to sustain it. That is why it generates both political exigency and the interplay of hypocrisy and vocal anti hypocrisy.” Indeed, the “moral promise” of liberal democracy is, even apart from its pluralism, one of the core catalysts for what Shklar calls the “discrete system” of hypocrisy-antihypocrisy; most critics of hypocritical liberals are themselves disillusioned liberals. Further, liberal democratic societies, which entail a high degree of role differentiation, often require a certain level of role-playing, especially from public figures; this, too, adds fuel to the fire of antihypocrisy.
Shklar’s portrait of liberal society, then, is one where moral disagreements are not confronted head-on, but rather are subsumed into ever-escalating contests of unmasking. We despise the counterfeit, the “inauthentic” politician, the “liberal” who takes a moral high-ground only to betray it the next day. And yet, Shklar argues, the ordinary hypocrisy of everyday life is “not a serious issue. It becomes so only because our sense of public ends is so wavering and elusive.” Ironically, it is only our shared commitment to unmasking hypocrisy, our vaunted quest for sincerity and consistency, that unites us. “Both sides are alike—engaged in an interminable struggle in which neither possesses anything that can pass for moral knowledge. Indeed, when the normal situation of pluralism is upset, and some degree of moral unity prevails, the cry of hypocrisy is no longer heard, because no one is out to ‘psychically annihilate’ or to unmask the opposition.” She concludes: “When one really knows that someone is evil one has no time for his possible hypocrisy.”
The moral of the story for Shklar was that the “discrete system” of hypocrisy-antihypocrisy is a built-in feature of pluralistic liberal societies. And while one can lament the shallowness of that form of public discourse, there are some benefits to an eagle-eyed awareness of inconsistency. If nothing else, calling someone a hypocrite is better than killing them.
Chu’s essays, her criticisms of “liberalism,” and the responses her book has provoked—including this one – are all so many case studies of the dynamic Shklar presciently outlined in her text. This strikes me as particularly true of infra-left debates, where “centrists” or “liberals” square off against “progressives” or “leftists.” True, the ideological distance, the incommensurability of values, is less severe there than in right-left divides. But precisely because we share underlying moral commitments—to social welfare, political reform, individual liberties, etc.—the only move left to make is that of unmasking. Authority is, indeed, a masterclass in the psychological warfare of unmasking. Chu has little to say that seriously impugns the moral character or political ideals of a Zadie Smith or a Maggie Nelson; and yet, they strike her as supremely disingenuous. That the same can be – and has been – said about Chu merely demonstrates how unprofitable this form of argumentation is.
For Shklar, hypocrisy is not the worst vice in politics; that prize goes to cruelty. This is a particularly neat inverse of Chu’s credo, which, judging by the persistent tendency of her essays, is that cruelty is fine, hypocrisy unforgivable– “Viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days; cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days I aim for cruelty,” she proclaims. I suspect, though, that if we seriously wish to change laws and institutions and manners, then it is cruelty, rather than hypocrisy, that we must confront.
The stated aim of Chu’s book, as she writes in her epilogue, is to help “destroy” our particular form of society. But it is not at all clear how calling liberals hypocrites does that. Indeed, what is more emblematic of our current society than the charge of hypocrisy where any robust notions of the common good or of human flourishing have decayed? I am aware that, in this previous sentence, I am being a hypocrite, accusing the antihypocrite of hypocrisy in my essay about the vapidness of this way of thinking and living together. Perhaps Shklar is right that in a pluralistic society, consistency is the only god we have left.