Masks of shame cover Scott Morrison's motives

If we were wholly frank with everyone?"

(From Molière's hypocrisy-themed verse play The Misanthrope)

....

Australia is abuzz with Barnaby Joyce's well-informed and so surely fact-based diagnosis that Prime Minister Scott Morrison is "a liar and a hypocrite".

Everyone knows what a lie is but what is hypocrisy? It seems a more nuanced wickedness than lying. And while all of us know a lie when we see it (especially when it is bare faced) we may need the help of our inner-Poirot to fully and infallibly detect hypocrisy.

As if eerily anticipating our Barnaby Joyce "bombshell" (the excitable media's word for it) and our need to make sense of the face-ashening h-word, the estimable Los Angeles Review of Books has just thoughtfully posted a thoughtful piece about hypocrisy.

University of Houston professor Robert Zaretsky diagnoses that "We [Americans] are in the throes of a pandemic. Not the pandemic that requires masks to cover our mouths, mind you, but the pandemic [of hypocrisy] that requires masks to cover our motives."

Then he goes on to look at media headlines employing the word "hypocrisy" above stories of the present horrors of Republicans and Democrats being two-faced on several toxic fronts. From there the professor has a little think about hypocrisy and about what the playwright Molière (1622-1673) may tell us about it given that his greatest comedies, especially Tartuffe and The Misanthrope, are hypocrisy-themed.

Professor Zaretsky describes how in Molière's most successful comedy Tartuffe, or The Impostor, the eponymous villain, Tartuffe, "is the most scurrilous of scammers". Although barely Christian he pretends to be ultra-pious so as to make himself indispensable to some wealthy and pious Parisians. Tartuffe is so skilled a wearer of [figurative] masks that, deceiving everyone's socks off, he carries off his major schemes of financial and marital self-aggrandisement.

Honest characters in the play are left aghast by this, "but so are we" the aghast Professor Zaretsky observes. "Why? How is it that la tartufferie - a term now used interchangeably with hypocrisy - makes us bristle so?"

"It happens," the professor continues, "that the word 'hypocrisy' issues from the Greek hupokrinesthai, which can mean 'to speak in dialogue' and, by extension, to play a role. If all the world [as Shakespeare says and shows us] is a stage, most of us spend our lives as actors.

"Whenever a divide opens between my private beliefs and my public behaviour ... I stumble over the fault line of hypocrisy," Professor Zaretsky diagnoses.

He thinks that "such stumbles" can be "an ordinary and benign vice" since little lies like the ones we even tell to those we love "are part of the daily commerce of life".

But then (and he gives an illustration from Molière) he insists there are hypocrisies that properly shock us because they are "malignant".

So, if Scott Morrison is a hypocrite, are his tartufferies ordinary-benign or are they malignant?

Perhaps he does both kinds. There are his just-tolerable everyday hypocrisies, teensy lies and compromises of conscience without which the fabric of everyday party politics in a democracy would come undone.

But then for all of Morrison's lesser and perhaps essential-to-the-social-and-political-fabric hypocrisies is a giant, truly malignant one.

Not unique to him but shared by millions of "believers" is this business of being so publicly, ostentatiously Christian without there being anything one does in one's laughably "Christian" life that bears any resemblance to anything Jesus ever thought, believed, did or said.

To live a life uncontaminated by compassion (Morrison's cold pragmatic callousness is the hallmark of his political career, demonstrated in his callousness towards refugees, his indifference to the plight of Julian Assange, and his unchristian 'let it rip' attitude to a pandemic that does its worst ripping among the most weak and vulnerable) while simultaneously calling oneself a follower of true compassion's greatest exemplar, is to wear a mask of shame.

Perhaps it is my moralising, more-humane-than-thou atheism showing through, but somehow Christian hypocrisy (pious American slaveholders used to find proofs of God's enthusiastic endorsement of slavery in the Bible at Genesis IX, 18-27: read it for yourself, readers, and see how you go) seems in a malignant class all of its own.