The Sociology of Hypocrisy

An Analysis of Sport and Religion

Stephen G. Wieting

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367271725
• eBook ISBN: 9781317015338
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

With close attention to the spheres of sport and religion as important sites of moral currency, this book draws on media coverage of major cases of hypocrisy, attending to differing meanings and consequences of hypocrisy within the US, France and Iceland. Instances come from scandals within the established churches, as well as cases from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the Tour de France, and the inquest into the Hillsborough Disaster in the UK. It considers the importance of the context within which moral conduct takes place and the relevance of this for the occurrence of hypocritical action, while exploring also the implications of advances in computer and information technology for controlling messages and monitoring deceit. Identifying the negative effects of the detection of hypocrisy at individual and institutional levels, the author engages with the work of Goffman to argue for the importance of trust in institutions, underlining the necessity of minimizing and correcting hypocritical acts by which this is undermined. A detailed study of hypocrisy and the need for trust, this volume will appeal to scholars and students of sociology with interests in social and moral conduct, sport, religion, Goffman and the notion of social life as artifice.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Is Hypocrisy So Ordinary as to Ignore or the Second Worst Vice?

Hypocrisy: The Question¹

On November 16, 1940, Cornell University received a Fifth Down (due to a referee error) in a collegiate football contest in the United States with Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire and scored a touchdown with the extra chance. The immediate result was that the favored Cornell team defeated Dartmouth 7–3. The next day, officials noticed the error. With the knowledge, the Cornell players, their coach, their athletic director, and the president of Cornell sent a telegram to Dartmouth offering to forfeit the game in Dartmouth’s favor, allowing them to win 3–0. Dartmouth accepted.

On October 9, 1990, the favored University of Colorado football team received an extra (Fifth) down due to a referee’s error. They scored on the play in the waning minutes of the contest and were declared the winner, 33–31, against the University of Missouri in Columbia. The head of the University of Missouri, Chancellor Haskell Monroe, Jr., appealed to the Big-Eight football conference (“Eight” referring to the number of institutions within this conference at the time) about the fairness of the result. The conference upheld the conclusion of the game. “Colorado football coach Bill McCartney … did little to sooth the controversy. When, asked whether he would consider forfeiting the game, McCartney declared that he had considered it but decided against it because ‘the field was lousy.’”²

Few fans, journalists, or researchers would deny there are differences here. (The attendance in Missouri was 46,956; the capacity today at Dartmouth Memorial Field is 13,000.) Considerably fewer researchers would consider these differences “make a difference.” The judgment in this project is that the differences do “make a difference.”

Hypocrisy occurs when a person or institution who has moral currency acts in such a way that contradicts the basis of the currency. In the course of one’s life, everybody displays in some way such contradictions. We cannot do otherwise if we aspire to moral elevations on one hand, and realities assure that human frailties (or uncontrollable circumstances) may compromise the heights we have reached or aspired to, on the other hand. Further to demonstrate the generality of the phenomenon, like the occurrence of lying, which is often used effectively to efface another (Bok, 1999), frequently the assignation of “hypocrite” is used as a favored rhetorical ploy to best an enemy or competitor.

Despite the real prospects of common individual occurrences of hypocrisy and the popularity of the designation in rhetorical contests, there is a lack of systematic attention to the origins, patterns, and implications of hypocrisy within sociology. Literatures from many fields are used here; this book carries the explicit burden—from the title—of honoring existing materials from sociology but also noting lacunae in this field.

The project is programmatic. As programs portend, there is a motivation for the effort: sociology should do this. There is also in programs warrant for the claim of responsibility: sociology can do this. Some of the reasons as will become apparent come from the inclusion of the work on hypocrisy within politics and political science, literary criticism, and philosophy. By default, the intimation is that those traditions have supplanted or pre-empted what sociology might do.

The title of the book is literal, and the motivation for the coverage and organization come from the sense of responsibility and competence. Programs have minimal elements; but programs are always essential to complete or proceed toward a valued objective. Programs, big and small, must contain the should and can elements. Opening the first entry in Jess Walter’s short-story collection, We Live in Water (Walter, 2013: 1), the elements of programs for survival whether at the lowest or highest levels appear:

BIT [short, and reductive of Wayne Bittenger, a central spokesperson] HATES going to cardboard. But he got tossed from the Jesus beds for drunk and sacrilege, and he’s got no other way to get money. So he’s up behind Frankie Doodle’s, flipping through broken-down produce boxes like an art buyer over a rack of paintings, and when he finds a piece without stains or writing he rips it down until it’s square. Then he walks to the Quik Stop, where the fat checker likes him. He flirts her out of a Magic Marker and a beefstick (Walter, 2013:1).

Jess Walter, like effective writers of fiction, can encapsulate practical human problems and doable solutions in an economical manner. Mr. Bittenger is out of money, and he needs to advertise for contributions. By experience and creativity he knows how to do this. He has a program.³

Hypocrisy and One Instance of the Sociological Program

So, here is what the program of the sociology (of hypocrisy) should do and can do. This is the coverage and sequence of the material on the sociology of hypocrisy.

1. Sociology looks at the context of actions as one productive means for interpretation.

2. Sociology, with the notions of ideal types and strategic cases, defers from talking about everything, and alternatively looks methodologically to cases with reduced variance, representative of the salient theoretical questions in view, and which are strategically placed in social systems.

3. Sociology by definition acknowledges the role of social organizational factors in the determination of interactional patterns of social actors.

4. Sociology does not always do this, but I am going to attend to the sometimes mentioned mandate, to look for the implications and consequences of patterns of hypocrisy within society.

5. Sociology in principle intends theoretical yield from guided and systematic research.

Contexts and Writing about Hypocrisy

First, I note some productive intellectual traditions for the study of hypocrisy. Sociology has given irregular attention to hypocrisy. There is variable attention and disparate definitions of the term. Fields such as politics, political science, the history of manners, literary criticism, and ethical studies within philosophy have given more attention to the topic of hypocrisy than has sociology. One consistent yield of these traditions (illustrative work exists in Runciman [2006, 2008], Shklar [1984], and Davidson [2004]) is the importance of cultural contexts in adding variation to the meanings of hypocrisy. While sociology generally has circuited attention to hypocrisy, the field offers as a strength an awareness of cultural contexts. Hence, sociology provides resources for showing recognition of such contextual influences. Chapters 2 and 3 attend to variations of context in the meaning, attention, and anticipated consequences of hypocrisy. The salience of hypocrisy or, as Judith N. Shklar (1984) describes the condition of exigency surrounding the deceits, adds variation to the influence of culture on hypocrisy and is a central theme of this first portion of the program of coverage.

1. Contexts that have high valuation for performance, particularly evaluated in relative terms, create exigencies for hypocrisy in institutions, such as in sport and religion.

2. Some individuals have a distinct willingness to assure accomplishment, and proceed to seek it without reservation of effort or expense.

3. The individuals on the path to accomplishment have the cognitive capability and are structurally situated in institutions where they can compartmentalize promised or claimed achievement and documented, objective achievement.

4. Individuals and the surrounding institutions have the resources to control how publically available information is framed and accessed by publics.

5. Individuals and the surrounding institutions have the resources to persist in the maintenance of the putative valorized performance even as evidence and outside knowledge about its falsity grows.

Strategic Cases in the Study of Hypocrisy: Sport and Religion

Secondly, I examine some cases where hypocrisy is evident at the public level. Sports and religion are two institutions given primary attention here. While hypocrisy may occur in many institutions, these two appear to be productive research sites that illuminate the contradictions that hypocrisy embodies. In each, leaders are institutionally charged with displaying and maintaining high moral conduct. So, when compromises occur in individual acts or institutional manifestations, the contradiction between promised high morality and acts that are at variance with the standards stands in clear relief.

I have excluded hypocrisy in politics from the book. The large volume of material could be a reason for doing so. But there is a qualitative issue that provides a stronger warrant for the exclusion. It is true as David Runciman has nicely documented (2006, 2008) that hypocrisy as a topic for intellectual discourse was closely associated from the seventeenth century on with politics. This was the period of developing ideas about republics. Leaders should be valued by the worth of their credentials. And these credentials should be transparent to what was viewed as the emerging popular electorate. In The New York Times, from which a systematic set of cases has been drawn, there are at least as many instances of hypocrisy mentioned within political stories as with religion and sport. In Runciman and related analyses the seriousness of hypocrisy by politicians and in institutions continues. But at the same time, the spread and indeed the ubiquity of hypocrisy in politics suggests its commonality is now becoming coincidental with modern politics (at least in the United States). As such the value of looking at hypocrisy in politics is commensurately reduced as an important desideratum of social order.

For slightly different reasons, hypocrisy in business should be omitted as well. When we consider the legal conception of the corporation, the idea that deceptive practices by business corporations would be an unusual occurrence is a non-sequitur. Corporations exist to make money for their shareholders; they do not exist to represent the moral standards of a culture. Perhaps the tobacco industry would be the clearest example of formally hypocritical acts as to be so numerous and expected that to focus on identifying them, let alone correcting them, is folly. Robert N. Proctor’s book, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (2011) persistently documents the deceits of the industry through the nineteenth, twentieth, and current centuries. The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (http://legacy.library.ncsf.edu), which has developed an archive of documents mandated by successive court cases against tobacco manufacturers, lists 6,784 documents with the invocation of “hypocrisy” in a key word search.⁴

The reason I have elected to focus on hypocrisy in religion and sport is that these two institutions represent in their proclaimed purposes and generally attributed social obligations levels of honesty and opposition to deceit that make them unique. If hypocrisy has consequences in institutions—as will be described in the project—then a defensible first step is to consider these institutions as “limiting cases.” If hypocrisy exists in these two institutions where such hiding of information and manufacture of information is essentially considered anathema, then this gives us a starting point to assessing degrees of hypocrisy and consequences of hypocrisy where such formal denunciation of hypocrisy does not exist.

The general principles of case selection in play here lie within sociology. Source material must be available. The cases should represent relatively unmitigated forms of the institutional characteristics in view. Max Weber’s ideal type is instructive. Sources of meaning infusing human conduct play into his analyses and interpretations of society, giving his distinctive term of “social action.” One prototypical example—his ideal type—of such a source of meaning of human conduct came from Reformed Protestantism. As defined here, sport and religion in their ideal typical composition represent institutional instances that should eschew hypocrisy.

Particular attention focuses on religion and sport cases that are visible. The choice of these cases of pedophilia, Penn State, the Tour de France, and Hillsborough meet the necessary requirements of case selection. Records exist both for the individual actors and for the surrounding organizations. Each accommodates to the requirements of the ideal type, in that the public remonstrances of members and the official postures of the organizations claim honesty. The idea of the book being programmatic—providing an outline of work—obviously includes an invitation for continued collaborative efforts within sociology. Therefore the existence of cases that not only are prototypical and have a history of available records but are also ongoing contributes to this invitation for continued collaborative work within the discipline.

The Importance of Organizational Settings

The social context of hypocrisy includes, as well as culture, the institutional setting of acts of deceit. Institutions may be faulted for lies; common use of the term “hypocrite” much more frequently attempts to make an individual culpable. But when an individual is labeled with the term, it is of great importance to be sensitive to the institutional arrangements within which such lies occur. The surrounding institution may, alternatively, hide, nurture, constrain, or punish the individual lies. Considering the attention to the contexts of hypocrisy and looking at the strategic cases of sport and religion as the initial foci of the project, the third facet of the book program will be to consider the role of organizations in the patterns of appearance of hypocrisy and the contribution to the persistence of hypocrisy. This material appears principally in Chapter 4 but also in Chapter 5.

Some Consequences of Hypocrisy

Fourthly, hypocrisy like lying (or fraud or theft) is consequential. It is consequential for the individual who must either find ways to rationalize or cover up his or her contradictions or face them and experience the harsh blow of a diminished self. It is consequential for the institution because its effectiveness as a moral guardian becomes liable to loss of public trust, or, as with individuals, the institution must scurry to establish further mechanisms to neutralize its contradictions....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Is Hypocrisy So Ordinary as to Ignore or the Second Worst Vice?
• 2 Sport and Religion in the United States
• 3 Some Aspects of Sport and Religion in Iceland and France
• 4 Hypocrisy and Information: Technologies Used in Detection and in Concealment
• 5 Hypocrisy and Related Deceits: When Lying becomes Normal
• 6 Hypocrisy and Levels of Trust within Cultures
• 7 Ethical and Theoretical Implications of Patterns of Hypocrisy: Artifice as a Species Constant or a Variable
• Bibliography
• Index