Here you have the purest example of the standing problem. Its first and most distinguishing characteristic, of course, is that the people who best illustrate it never realize that there is a problem. They are blithe and they are oblivious usually, not hypocritical so much as merely utterly dense and insensitive to their own vulnerability on precisely the matter they are complaining about in others. In our tame political setting, we may not be talking about murder, but the principle is the same as the one underlying the KGB colonel’s unselfconscious little sermon. We love to catch out our politicians on such things, especially when they are advocating what turn out to be “do as I say, not as I do” policies. People never tire-and why should they?-of pointing out that, say, gung-ho, pro-busing liberals have their own kids stashed away in private schools, or that crusading, family-values conservatives unceremoniously dumped the devoted wife of 30 years for a chick their daughter’s age. . .that sort of thing.
It is an oddity and a misfortune of our time that public figures who get caught out in this sort of contradiction generally end up doing their cause, but not themselves, a lot of damage. They discredit what may be a perfectly reasonable and sometimes even noble purpose. However, given the amazing, morally regenerative public-relations therapies now available to the fallen, the exposed one himself may soon be back in the public’s good graces, leaving only the cause he espoused a little worse for wear, if not in tatters. You can be found to have committed very nearly any kind of impropriety or duplicity in our contemporary politics, after all, and, with the proper, pro forma apology and 60-day alleged “treatment” somewhere, be back on the air as an unembarrassed ethics guru for the fall season. The people who breach what ought to be rules of standing, who ignore the fact that their own lives flagrantly contradict the moral positions they are so strenuously arguing, don’t pay. But their side does. Talk about injustice.
The worst of it is that combatants in public disputes have learned to turn all this to polemic advantage. You use an opponent’s vulnerability to discredit or sometimes merely neutralize what may be a sound and honorable position. During the most argumentative days of the cold war in this country this subject came up under the heading of moral equivalence. No matter what unspeakable travesty the Soviets might perpetrate against their own population or those of their neighboring states, it would be pointed out that our side was no angel either, that we who funded and supported a variety of tyrants around the world and had a lot of corruption at home, etc., were a fine one to be leveling charges. There was no room here for arguing a difference of degree or observing that none of these things made, say, the invasion of Czechoslovakia any prettier. Look who’s talking, was the position, and the recommended outcome was, in effect, a draw: we are both guilty so we should both shut up. It was as if the sacred admonition about casting the first stone had been taken to mean that there was nothing much in this world to get exercised about in any case.
You hear strains of this same sentiment now in the conversation about human-rights depredations in China and about the coming handover of Hong Kong. Hong Kong wasn’t a democracy for most of its time under British rule, the argument goes, so why are we getting so uptight about what will happen to it under the Chinese? Even more do you hear this sentiment expressed in relation to the fund-raising and other scandals associated with the Clinton White House. It goes beyond simple, everybody-does-it immobilism. The defensive view seems to be that since the Republicans have engaged in some pretty tawdry practices themselves, the whole issue is somehow moot. They have no standing to complain. Ergo: the complaint has no standing either.
What we manage to achieve in these inconclusive disputes is to vaporize what are and should remain important public issues. The fact that an old KGB spy takes a position does not mean that the position is wrong. It more likely means that he is exploiting it, or is too thick to understand how ludicrous his moral pretension is. Likewise, the fact that some of those snapping and barking around the White House are themselves of dubious purity does not alter the seriousness of the charges being leveled. George Orwell, who detested the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, once importuned his own side to accept the truth and the gravity of atrocities being committed by other governments abroad by saying that the important thing was that the atrocities had happened. “They happened,” Orwell said, “even though Lord Halifax said they happened.” Similarly, of the Clinton White House scandals you could say that they have happened even though Newt Gingrich said they happened. And the thing can be reversed: the Gingrich scandals happened even though David Bonior said they happened.
The moral ought to be that egregious lack of ethical, political or other standing to make a complaint redounds to the discredit of the complainer, being an evidence of shamelessness or at least complacency. It doesn’t, however, redound to the discredit of the complaint. The reason standing is such a great problem is that if we’re not careful it will just lead us into paralysis.
