Sam Smith’s new big song “Unholy” has been playing several times a day every single day lately and I finally opened my ears to the lyrics last time I heard it. As it turns out, it is about hypocrisy.
You think he’s a good husband and father? Think again. He’s getting hot in the bodyshop doing something unholy!
I’ve been guilty in the past of mocking the hypocrisy of my political opponents. If climate change is such a big problem, why do all the preachers fly private jets everywhere? Why oppose nuclear power? Why build mansions on the coast? Hypocrisy!
It’s useful to have your own arguments thrown back at you now and then to give you the opportunity to reexamine them.
As it turns out, there are two kinds of hypocrisy, yearning and subversive, and the difference is worth understanding.
Yearning hypocrites are honest. They strive to follow the morals they truly believe in, but fall short, as do we all. Subversive hypocrites lie. They preach ideals they don’t believe in for power and prestige. And everybody believes that their hypocrites are yearning and the other side’s hypocrites are subverting.
So maybe it’s not fair to impugn our opponent’s motives. The more important argument is: which morals are worth pursuing and which are not? And that argument must be made moral by moral, on the evidence of the real world.
If you want me to believe that ethical non-monogamy works, you’re going to have to show me that the majority of people who try it don’t hurt the people who care most for them, that they don’t surround themselves with self-centered narcissists that leave them more emotionally drained than physically.
If I want you to believe that nuclear power is the best solution to carbon emissions, I have to show you that it causes fewer deaths per kilowatt hour generated than any other form of energy including wind, that nuclear waste is safer to dispose of than the chemicals in batteries.
And the hypocrisy of people preaching sexual and environmental morality is simply irrelevant.
