Hypocrisy

To engage in hypocrisy means to claim to hold a certain position while in fact (deeper down?) you hold a quite different if not contrary position.

Hypocrisy is widely viewed in a very negative light and frequently that view is justified.

However, in certain circumstances there is a significant silver lining associated with hypocrisy.  In fact, I believe that, in certain situations, hypocrisy may be a first step in moral awareness.  

When A engages in hypocrisy he implicitly acknowledges that the position that he claims to hold is, in some sense, morally superior to a common alternative position.  Some observers will see the position A claims and his alleged reasons for holding that position to represent valid arguments and be convinced of the validity of that as the morally superior position.  Later, when they learn of his hypocrisy, those observers may have different responses to A.  But for some, what was a hypocritical position for A, will remain a very real position for them.

Of course I need an example.  I offer a classic.  “We hold these truths to be self evident – that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”  For how many generations has that been offered up as “our belief”.  Perhaps the parents of the boomer generation of Americans were especially convincing.  I do not know to what extent those parents’ claim of a belief in racial equality was real.  But many of their children took their parents stated support of the principle to heart.  The result was a large and necessary white component to the civil rights movement.

Therefore, far from being universally a negative activity I think the following is sometimes a better description.

Hypocrisy is the deference we show to those precepts that we recognize as valid, but are unable to practice. 

American Football

Two things about American football.

Personal perspective declaration:  I never played anything except backyard football and I was very bad at that.  But I am a fair weather fan of the Dallas Cowboys.

1.  There have been a number of stories in the news the last few years about how football head damage usually results, not from one jarring hit, but from the accumulation of little hits and little concussions over the years.  As this becomes more and more well known I would expect a long term decline in the sport among the very young where it is most dangerous.  Whether that will move up the ladder and lead to a long term decline in the sport I, of course, don't know.  I would speculate that it might, if long term means in a century or so.
I think that that would not be inappropriate. Because of an attitude that prevails in the NFL and elsewhere which is well represented by a story I once heard (perhaps apocryphal) of a defensive back (A player who tries to keep the pass receivers from catching the ball and stopping them if they do catch it.) who told a reporter that his objective was to "hit the receivers in the middle of their back so hard that when the next pass came in they would think more about the coming hit that the spiraling football."  That is not a sport, that is Rollerball.

2.  The NCAA imposed an appropriately harsh sentence on Penn State.  However, there is one part of it that I think may be ill advised.
 "The NCAA also erased 14 years of victories..."  


a.    What does that mean?  
Do the teams that lost now get declared to have been the victors?


b.    This would seem much more appropriate if the crimes had been related to "the winning of games" such as recruiting violations.  But they were not.


c.  Also, this rewriting of history sounds more than a little bit Orwellian.