Free falling now

Hypocrisy, among all the vices, is regarded with particular disdain and horror by egalitarians. A hypocrite publicly upholds noble values and standards of behaviour … because he recognises that those values are worthy of support and commendation even if he cannot always embody them.

La Rochefoucauld’s observation that “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue” will doubtless be trotted out early and often in the case of Eliot Spitzer and the girls. The epigram has generally been presented as meaning — in the words of one journalist — that “the loudest moralizers may be most suspect.” But I believe that La Rochefoucauld meant to suggest that hypocrisy was an implicit acknowledgment of the claims of virtue. Otherwise, why bother with dissimulation?

There are, as I say, many reasons to dislike Eliot Spitzer.The music critic Tim Page, referring to an unpleasant and pretentious college president, observed that he was the sort of chap that gave “pseudo-intellectuality a bad name.” I feel similarly about Eliot Spitzer and hypocrisy. His behaviour gives that ambiguous vice a bad name. What’s wrong with Eliot Spitzer is not so much that he praised good things and did bad ones. Most of the items he championed in his various moral campaigns were, when you looked behind the rhetoric, of dubious value. Really, he was a power-hungry, regulation-crazed functionary whose chief sin was to harness the power of the state to destroy his enemies and aggrandise himself. Had he been a little more hypocritical he might have been less dangerous.

Excerpted from Roger Kimball’s ‘Schadenfreude and Spitzer’s fraud’ in the Guardian, March 11