Charges Of Hypocrisy Research Articles

The Transparency President? The Obama Administration and Open Government

President Obama has trumpeted as a major part of his reform agenda, promising an unprecedented degree of governmental openness and overseeing a variety of open government reforms, from changes in Freedom of Information Act policies to the creation of new websites like Recovery.Gov. Although is politically popular, and the Obama Administration benefits in the short run by contrasting itself with the Bush Administration's reputation for secrecy, in the long run President Obama's rhetoric on openness in government may backfire politically. Too much emphasis on making government a fishbowl will only raise expectations about an unattainable or undesirable level of openness. Transparency has clear benefits but it also has its costs, as when, for example, the prospect of disclosure dampens internal deliberation and self-criticism by government officials. The real choice for government, then, is how much transparency, and what type, to offer over different processes. The Obama Administration has already found itself needing to make tradeoffs and place limits on transparency, and it is likely to continue to do so in the years to come. Yet members of the public, and certainly open-government activists, are unlikely to appreciate the need for making such tradeoffs, generating disappointment among the administration's supporters and charges of hypocrisy by its opponents. It remains unclear whether Barack Obama will ultimately earn the mantle of the transparency president - or whether the unrealistic hopes for openness in government he has raised will, when unfulfilled, only serve to reinforce public cynicism about government.Posted paper, uploaded January 2010, is the published version of the working paper originally posted July 2009.

The Truth about Hypocrisy

Charges of hypocrisy can be surprisingly irrelevant and often distract us from more important concerns

Re‐Regulating Offshore Finance?

AbstractThis article explores global efforts to regulate offshore finance in the wake of international concern about the effects of so‐called harmful tax competition, as well as money laundering and terrorist financing (the latter a relatively new category since September 11, 2001). In the mid‐1990s, a number of multilateral organizations, from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to the Financial Action Task Force, as well as non‐governmental organizations like Oxfam, attempted to curtail offshore finance and tax haven abuses by ‘naming and shaming’ small jurisdictions into compliance with an emerging set of international financial norms. These efforts left themselves open to charges of hypocrisy, however, because many OECD countries themselves failed – and indeed, still fail – to adhere to the standards required of offshore havens. Tax havens responded by calling for a ‘level playing field’. Nevertheless, this effort at global regulation of offshore finance has had tangible effects. This essay explores those effects and argues that the attention to offshore finance missed an opportunity by going after the jurisdictions that provided services rather than addressing the market for such services. Understanding that missed opportunity requires analytical attention to payments, as opposed to exchanges, in international finance and in the social study of finance.

White Faces, Black Faces: Is British Sociology a White Discipline?

In promoting its public profile, sociology must be mindful of the face it presents. Whilst ethnicity is a key sociological concept, little is understood about the ethnicity of sociologists or sociology students. Recent attention on a purported black `brain drain' to the USA charged UK sociology with hypocrisy for identifying ethnic differences elsewhere but failing to put its own house in order, implicitly alleging that the public face of sociology is white. Ethnic differences in sociology are investigated using extensive datasets about UK graduates and postgraduate students for 2001/2 to 2004/5.The findings indicate ethnic-group differences between first-degree graduates and postgraduates in sociology. `Rational' choice and Bourdieusian interpretations of these differences are discussed in the context of sociology's status as a subject in the academy and the labour market. Charges of hypocrisy are not proven, but neither is the discipline exonerated of myopia concerning its own ethnic composition.

Are Countries that Ban Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Hypocritical?

In this paper I analyze whether countries that ban human embryonic stem cell research, but are likely to allow their citizens to be treated with stem cell-derived products are guilty of hypocrisy. I conclude that the charge of hypocrisy is much more difficult to sustain than many believe.

True exchanges or thought crime?

Abstract Academic boycotts are obnoxious weapons that imperil the principle of freedom of expression and intellectual exchange and people who advocate an academic boycott of Israel open themselves to charges of hypocrisy and mendacity.

The Ecstasy of Speed

The Ecstasy of Speed Srdjan Smajic Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events. Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Those who are familiar with Paul Virilio’s work on dromology, or the logic and effects of speed, may have noticed by now a paradox in the manner in which he addresses this subject. While he maintains that speed is the essential modus vivendi of the latest devices of destruction, deterrence, and misinformation, Virilio himself writes and publishes at an impressive pace. The reviewer, who has just gotten his hands on A Landscape of Events (2000 [1996]), has not yet seen The Information Bomb (2000 [1998]), and probably will not get to it before the translation of Stratégie de la déception (1999) comes out to announce that, yet again, the technologies and texts of yesterday are already outdated. On the one hand, this arrangement is perfectly logical, and the rationale behind it is self-explanatory: one cannot take forever to comment on events that are occurring at the speed of light—and only for the duration of their televised presentation. The Persian Gulf War, which according to Virilio was in 1992 already “receding into the vacuum of consciousness” at meteorite-speed, demonstrates how televised events operate (“now you see it, now you don’t”), and perfectly, if tragically, illustrates “the compression of history and finally the disappearance of the event!” (24).1 If human memory has by now so thoroughly adapted itself to televisual programming that objects, events, and even persons can be said to exist only insofar as they are being televised in “real time,” then the speed at which Virilio makes his observations public appears to be not so much a matter of choice but of sheer necessity. Who wants to read about last year’s war when terrorist attacks are being televised by CNN as we speak or write? In fact, it is no longer the Gulf War but the Kosovo War that provides the best example of what Virilio is talking about. “The automation of warfare,” he says in a recent conversation with John Armitage, “has... come a long way since the Persian Gulf War of 1991.” Speaking in technological, military, and strategic terms, the Kosovo War is so far ahead of the Gulf War that the latter may just as well have happened thirty or forty years ago. Some may already have forgotten the name Norman Schwarzkopf. History, Virilio states in the same text, “is now rushing headlong into the wall of time,” by which he means that we are in fact witnessing its end, the final and apocalyptic realization of the Hegelian prophecy. Under such extreme conditions one cannot afford to lose sight of speed, its doings and undoings, and to fall behind on what is latest, hippest, hottest, and most up-to-date. Virilio cautions us to keep in mind that “the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!” (“Kosovo War”). Timing is indeed everything. On the other hand, such a perfectly logical strategy (speed vs. speed, a speedy response to light-speed events) makes itself vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. Is Virilio not riding on the crest of the technological wave and enjoying the benefits? Do not his texts and interviews frequently appear on internet sites where, instantly accessible from any terminal on the globe and only a click away from your own homepage, the words and sentences faintly flicker in some ontologically ambiguous cyberspace that is the exact opposite of the geographic space and historical time in which Virilio would advise us to live? Are not the words I have just quoted—these very words I am writing now—already part of the landscape of events in which everything exists in the eternal, real-time now, and therefore never really and actually? Cyberspace and information superhighways, Virilio remarks in another cyberspace text, bring about a “fundamental loss of orientation.” If to exist, really and fully, “is to exist in situ, here and now, hic et nunc,” then this sort of existence and reality “is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and...

On not being clear: a response to Burnard

It seems that I have gone too far. That, at least, is the ‘humble opinion’ of Professor Burnard (1999). In my paper ‘Writing Ourselves’ (Rolfe 1997), I attempted to discuss a function of writing other than the descriptive and the analytic. This third function was the synthetic, the act of constructing knowledge through the very act of writing, such that ‘not until we had written this down did we quite know what we knew’ (Van Manen 1990). In order to distinguish this third function, which I saw as qualitatively different from the other two, I referred to it in italics as writing, and dared to suggest that it might be seen as a form of research. I also explored the post-structuralist notion of the objectification of the text, the idea that texts are open to multiple readings and that when we later return to our own texts, we do so with a fresh pair of eyes as a reader rather than as the writer. As Virginia Woolf (1978) observed, the self who writes is different from the self who later reads what is written. Closs & Draper (1998) made several objections to the stance I had taken, and I felt that a response was required. Having asserted my belief that texts are open to multiple readings, however, I felt that all I could offer was another reading, both of my original paper and of Closs & Draper’s response (Rolfe 1999). Burnard has condemned this approach as ‘an affectation and a dishonest one at that’. I should, he claims, ‘cut the pretension of writing about [my] own work in the third person’, and yet, had I attempted (as Burnard urges me to) to ‘put them right’ on the ‘true’ meaning of my paper, I would be open to the charge of hypocrisy. Having sided with the post-structuralist claim that authors have no privileged authority in interpreting their own

Mulieres Religiosae, Strictly Speaking: Some Fourteenth-Century Canonical Opinions

The Catholic Historical Review VOL. LXXXVJANUARY, 1999No. 1 MULIERES RELIGIOSAE, STRICTLY SPEAKING: SOME FOURTEENTH-CENTURY CANONICAL OPINIONS BY Elizabeth Makowski* At the start of the fourteenth century, a religious woman was defined by canon law as one who had not only taken the three vows ofpoverty, chastity, and obedience, but who had also made solemn profession in an already existing religious order.1 Additionally, solemn vows committed the mulier religiosa to strict claustration.2 Community life absent *Dr. Makowski is an associate professor of history in Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos. 'The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) forbade the founding of new religious orders and stated that henceforth anyone who wished to become a religious would have to enter one of the already approved orders: Joannes Dominicus Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova etamplissima collectio (Florence, 1759-1798;rtp.Graz, 196l),XX, 1002;an English facing-text of the council's decree can be found in Norman Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Washington, D.C., 1990), p. 242. The canons of the Second Council of Lyon (1274) repeated the Lateran ban, adding that any new order which had arisen since 1215,without express papal confirmation,was to be suppressed:Tanner,Decrees,p. 326. This decree was incorporated into the collection of canon law known as the Liber Sextus {VI 3.17.1), published in 1 298, and medieval canonists would cite it from this collection . Pope Boniface VIII subsequently removed any ambiguity about the way in which an approved community could admit new members. The candidate for religious life would not only pronounce the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but also make formal profession. The public act of profession, signified by the assumption of a distinctive habit, was considered the action by which the vows of religion were made solemn: VI 3. 1 5- 1 ; the Latin text can be found in the standard modern edition of the body of medieval canon law: Emil Friedberg (ed.), Corpus iuris canonici (Leipzig, 1879; rpt. Graz, 1959), II, 1053. The 1298 Bonifacian constitution Periculoso {VI 3.16.1; Friedberg, Corpus, II, 10531054 ) stipulated that all professed nuns observe cloister regulations. Claustration rules strictly limit the occasions on which outsiders, even members of the clergy, could enter a 2 MUUERES REUGIOSAE, STRICTLY SPEAKING: SOME FOURTEENTH-CENTURY OPINIONS one or more of these characteristics was regarded as semi- or quasireligious , and while this juridical status did not automatically involve ecclesiastical censure (both Franciscan and Dominican tertiaries flourished with papal approval), it could. This was especially true for semi-religious women who, in the absence of formal religious profession , lived in uncloistered communities—the well-known condemnation of the Béguines at the Council ofVienne being a case in point.3 Despite the threat of inquisitorial investigation, however, quasireligious women's groups continued to thrive. In the Southern Low Countries, the Béguines found local patrons and new, unenclosed, female religious orders emerged; Italianpinzochere and uncloistered penitential groups abounded, and in Germany canonesses maintained their venerable, if irregular, community life.4 And while there are many reasons for quasi-religious resilience, one stands out in sharp relief: Alongwomen 's monastery, and they forbade unauthorized exits, save for emergencies. For a detailed study of this decree see: Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and its Commentators 1298-1545 (Washington D.C., 1997). Although I disagree with Katherine Gill's statement that"Periculoso did not represent either a dramatic turning point or a culmination in the history of women's religious institutions"—general acceptance of a papal ruling being only one measure of its significance—her observation that the decree might actually have encouraged the spread of semi-religious communities is noteworthy. See Katherine Gill, "Scandala: Controversies Concerning Clausura and Women's Religious Communities in Late Medieval Italy," in Christendom and Its Discontents , edd. Scott Waugh and Peter Diehl (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 177-203.»With the publication of the decree Cum de quibusdam by Pope John XXII in 1317, Béguines, whose semi-religious status defied traditional categorization, found themselves forced for nearly a century to defend against charges of hypocrisy, heresy, or both.The decree was published in the last official decretal collection...

Democracy, Bureaucracy, and Hypocrisy Redux: A Search for Sympathy and Compassion

I Dwight Waldo's 1977 Royer lecture advances a cogent and concise statement concerning the fundamental essences of democracy and bureaucracy and, by so doing, demonstrates the intrinsic tensions that exist at the interface of these two concepts. As viewed by Waldo, the counterpolar forces that are generated by the juxtaposition of these two concepts give rise to a third, hypocrisy. Hypocrisy enters because the `dialectic' between democracy and bureaucracy offers extraordinary opportunities for confusion and self-delusion and invites self-serving opinions. After all, both democracy and bureaucracy are multifaceted and controversial. When both are studied together, the opportunities for confusion and delusion are multiplied, given the human capacity for irrationality and ego-serving views of the world (16). One reason for confusion and delusion is that the engines of democracy and bureaucracy run on different tracks, leaving from different stations and heading for different destinations. Sometimes they run parallel to each other, seemingly moving as one; more frequently, their tracks either diverge or converge, depending on the forces that are exerted on them at any given moment. When they do converge, the inevitable result is, as Waldo politely suggests, a dialectical happening, by which I assume he means a hell of a train wreck. Elsewhere in his writings, Waldo (1980, 45) reflects on these inevitable happenings and asks: Why would an instrument [bureaucracy] designed to be impersonal and calculating be expected to be effective in delivering sympathy and compassion? One cynical answer that immediately suggests itself is that such expectations are the nurturing catalysts of hypocrisy and that the methods of allocating political power in our systems of governance thrive on the exploitation of hypocrisy. But such an explanation is too glib, too superficial. More fundamentally, the answer may be found in the manner in which we have twisted democracy to fit the cardinal canons of management, which are embedded deeply in the bureaucratic systems. The result may be hypocrisy in an extreme form. Continuing in his Royer lecture, Waldo provides a brief survey of classical liberal economists, public choice economists, and contemporary liberals as examples of those who are in the vanguard of fostering hypocrisy in the most erudite manner. Waldo did not exempt from the charge of hypocrisy, indeed not. Again and again he caught himself in entertaining, according to circumstance, two opinions that cannot be reconciled, or defending a position that, objectively considered, is clearly in his own self-interest. Over time, certainly, he accepted then rejected various positions or solutions (Waldo 1977, 18). My purpose here is not to hold our profession's most distinguished sage accountable for thoughts and words recorded nearly 20 years ago. He may have changed his position on hypocrisy being the bad seed of the union between democracy and bureaucracy. I would hope not, though, because it seems to me that the predominant operational characteristic of the fusion of democracy and bureaucracy -- that which, in turn, defines our deeply ingrained paradigm of policy and administration in a democratic society -- is hypocrisy. II One logical way to begin is to consider the historical roots of the term hypocrisy. Based on its Greek origins, hypocrite connotes an actor, one who plays a part; who pretends by adopting an attitude that is at variance with his or her own convictions; who articulates one thing but, in fact, means something quite different. Just how well we fit into these parameters of hypocrisy can be judged by the manner in which we still embrace the democratic rhetoric of Jefferson while continuing to act in a pragmatic manner befitting Madison. Moreover, we, as a society, continue to sanctify the virtue of union -- unity through diversity -- but, by the same token, we are loath to forego rugged individualism as the categorical imperative of freedom. …

Pharisaic Dominance Before 70 CE and the Gospels' Hypocrisy Charge (Matt 23:2–3)

The following study treats two distinct but related questions. First, were the Pharisees the dominant party in Palestinian Judaism before the destruction of the temple? And second, did Jesus of Nazareth engage in controversy with them? Many scholars today would answer one or both of these questions negatively. My thesis, however, is that both should be answered affirmatively and, further, that it was precisely the status of the Pharisees as the dominant party that makes intelligible Jesus' charge of hypocrisy.

The Crisis of Overcriminalization

Excessive reliance upon the criminal law to per form tasks for which it is ill-suited has created acute problems for the administration of criminal justice. The use of criminal law to enforce morals, to provide social services, and to avoid legal restraints on law enforcement, to take just three examples, has tended both to be inefficient and to produce grave handicaps for enforcement of the criminal law against genuinely threatening conduct. In the case of morals of fenses, it has served to reduce the criminal law's essential claim to legitimacy by inducing offensive and degrading police con duct, particularly against the poor and the subcultural, and by generating cynicism and indifference to the criminal law. It has also fostered organized criminality and has produced, possibly, more crime than it has suppressed. Used as an alternative to social services, it has diverted enormous law- enforcement resources from protecting the public against seri ous crime. Finally, its use to circumvent restrictions on police conduct has undermined the principle of legality and exposed the law to plausible charges of hypocrisy. Pressures to crimi nalize persistently block practical assessments of what the criminal law is good for and what it is not. Studies of the sociology of overcriminalization offer a means of understand ing, and perhaps, to some degree, of controlling, this unfortu nate phenomenon.

French North Africa: an American Problem

FOR SEVERAL YEARS, the French protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco have been asking the United States for help in their attempts to win independence. Although our refusal to give help subjected us to charges of hypocrisy, and although the Arab countries made our support of colonialism an excuse for neutrality in the cold war,1 Tunisian and Moroccan nationalism never was a paramount problem to American foreign policy makers. In recent months, however, this situation has changed. The British promise to evacuate Suez has left French North Africa as the only part of the nationalism-conscious Arab world still under European control. Although the Arab League had espoused the cause of North African freedom as early as 1946, the issue of removing France from the Mediterranean scene was always secondary to the Suez problem. Now that this is settled, animosity previously directed at London has been diverted towards Paris. French presence in Algeria, which is administratively part of metropolitan France, is not yet considered intolerable, but its continuance in the protectorates is. With Tunisian and Moroccan independence as a cardinal aim of its foreign policy, Egypt, the pacesetter of the Arab League, has shown no restraint in attempting to arouse francophobia, accusing France not only of wantonly exploiting North Africa, but even of plotting with Israel against the entire Arab world.2 Fortified by this support, the nationalist movements of Tunisia and Morocco have become forces to be reckoned with on the international scene. The large concessions wrested from a weakened France in recent months have encouraged the nationalists to intensify their efforts to obtain outside support. Their chief objective is the United States the one

Widening the Church's Invitation

Most Christian churches today are fairly hospitable, and accept for membership anybody of respectable character, with few questions asked. Nevertheless it remains true that in joining, a man is universally supposed to give tacit assent to certain theological and historical beliefs. In many churches the Apostles' Creed, so called, is recited weekly. Most have printed statements of belief which are published as representing the convictions of the members. A frank statement of doubt or disbelief in-say-the resurrection of Christ, or the inspiration of the Bible, or the incarnation, or the atonement, is regarded as treason and as warranting the charge of hypocrisy if the member remains within the church. The church stands in the eyes of the world for such doctrines; and those who do not believe them stay for the most part outside, however much they acknowledge the value of her work, and however wistfully they may realize the inspiration her fellowship and counsel might give. The contention of this paper is that the churches should frankly cease to be groups of believers in certain creeds; that they should widen their invitation, not winking at the heresies of their more liberal members, but making it plain that there is no such thing as heresy for them, that a member is free to believe or disbelieve according as his own reason and experience lead him. The church, that is, should put as her one requirement the wish and earnest endeavor to live the Christian life. Are you willing, she should ask, to enrol yourself publicly as a follower of Christ, to live the sort of life he taught, at whatever needful personal sacrifice ? If so, you have a perfect right to the name Christian and to the fellowship of the church, whatever your doctrinal views may be. In this way the church might come to include all those who hate evil and