You have no doubt heard of Greens Senator Larissa Waters and her No Gender December campaign, which attacks the marketing of toys as “for girls” or “for boys”.
You have also no doubt heard of The Australian’s journalist Christian Kerr’s reaction to Senator Waters’s campaign, which was to point to a Facebook photo of her daughter wearing a pink princess dress as supposed proof of the Senator’s “double standards”.
Opinions on Kerr’s action have been mostly along one of two lines: first, that there are no actual double standards involved; and second, that what Kerr did is incredibly creepy. But there’s another point to be made here which relates to a much broader question of how public debates are played out, and it is this: even if Larissa Waters is guilty of double standards, that has zero bearing on whether her arguments against gendered toys are reasonable.
“It doesn’t matter what side of that debate you’re on: Greens in planes doesn’t disprove climate change any more than Gina Rinehart opening a solar plant would prove it.”
This is important to keep in mind: the good Senator could dress her daughter in pink every day, fill her bedroom from top to bottom with Barbie Dream Houses and stuffed unicorns, and forbid her to look at pictures of trucks until she’s eighteen … and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to the rightness or otherwise of No Gender December.
Calling out hypocrisy is extremely popular, because it’s always satisfying to expose other people as liars and scoundrels, and because it’s easier to identify hypocrisy than to dissect arguments. And there’s nothing wrong with calling someone a hypocrite, per se: hypocrisy is not an attractive trait for a person to possess. But it’s when we enter the area of public discourse, and realise that debate is being polluted by cries of “gotcha” that obscure the substance of the issues at stake, that the hypocrite-hunt becomes damaging.
We have reached a stage where we believe that saying “They aren’t practicing what they preach” is the same as saying “They are wrong”. This belief takes only a moment’s thought to dispel, but it’s tenacious as hell nonetheless. So tenacious that when No Gender December is ridiculed because its spokesperson dresses her daughter in pink, the debate can shift to whether or not this constitutes a double standard, rather than the fact that it’s utterly irrelevant to the campaign’s merits: either gendered toys are a problem, or they are not, and whatever side you’re on, what you do with your own kids won’t alter that.
The tendency to substitute hypocrite identification for argument is a sickness. It’s why climate change deniers think they’ve scored a telling point when they crow that a greenie politician travels by air: “They want us to cut our greenhouse gases, but they’re emitting tons of the stuff in their fancy planes!”
But of course how a person travels has literally no effect on either the science of climate change, or the advisability of various suggested solutions. Al Gore could take a fleet of 747s with him every time he goes shopping, and live in an open-cut coal mine, and it wouldn’t make him wrong about global warming. It’d make him kind of a jerk, but it’s the fact that so many commentators think a debate about the future of the human race is a debate about who is or isn’t a jerk that is the whole problem.
It doesn’t matter what side of that debate you’re on: Greens in planes doesn’t disprove climate change any more than Gina Rinehart opening a solar plant would prove it.
Thomas Jefferson, famously, owned slaves. This fact may render the words of the Declaration of Independence “all men are created equal” somewhat hypocritical on his part. But does it make them wrong? Can one mount a coherent anti-equality argument based on the fact that a man who spoke in favour of equality didn’t practise it?
I’d have thought not. Any more than one can argue that climate change is a hoax because greens pollute, or that a charity has no merit because a millionaire told you to give to it while hoarding his own wealth, or that your defence of public education is invalid because you sent your kids to a private school.
Or that the facts about gendered toys are dependent on whether Larissa Waters’s daughter dresses as a princess.
We’ve got to break ourselves of this habit. There are hypocrites galore in this world, and we can while our lives away pointing them out. But if an issue matters enough to argue about, it should matter enough to disregard the characters of the arguers, and concentrate on the argument.
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