Hypocrisy Upward

Irony is overrated, hypocrisy is underrated, notes Lars Pynt Andersen as a memorable motto (which evokes, by the way, a line from Al Pacino's Looking for Richard, a woman stating that irony, after all, "is just hypocrisy with style.") It seems that the late Wayne C. Booth shared Lars' concerns, as apparently Booth left an unpublished manuscript, "The Curse of Sincerity", which celebrates hypocrisy, or what Booth calls "hypocrisy upward". Robert Denham has read this manuscript, and I'll quote Denham (who quotes Booth) at some length to introduce this fine concept:

Many of the virtues we most honor are originally gained by practices that our enemies might call faking, our friends perhaps something like aspiring or emulating. We pretend to be scholars long before we can produce a piece of scholarship that is not visibly faked. Just now I played with a bit of Greek etymology, as if I knew Greek, which I do not. And yet I now know, because of the fakery-practice, a bit more Greek than I knew before. We must fake — must practice — the cello (say) long before we can really play it, and each stage of improvement requires new levels of faking. ([Booth, The Company We Keep] 253)

It is this productive form of hypocrisy that Booth calls “hypocrisy upward.” For hypocrisy to move upward it must be motivated by the aspiration to develop the “potentialities of a given virtue” (253). Hypocrisy downward is motivated only by the practice of deceit, the kind of false consciousness that imposters use intentionally to mislead. This is, of course, hypocrisy in its modern pejorative sense.

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Booth’s overriding purpose [in The Curse of Sincerity] is to show us that in practicing hypocrisy upward the selves we create only occasionally debase life; most often they raise it, heightening our ethical perceptiveness and enhancing our awareness of how we should speak and act. Those who repress their masks, projecting instead a mask of total sincerity and absolute honesty at all times, are cursed indeed.Even if our various posings have little effect on our daily lives, the time we spend living with our hypocritical self, says Booth by way of conclusion,“represents a lot better form of life than most of the hours we spend in the too-often shit-bound world.”