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Bill Bennett's Bad BetThe bookmaker of virtues.

By Michael KinsleyPosted Sunday, May 4, 2003, at 8:34 PM ET

Slipping into the vice slotSinners have long cherished the fantasy that William Bennett, the virtue magnate, might be among our number. The news over the weekend—that Bennett's $50,000 sermons and best-selling moral instruction manuals have financed a multimillion dollar gambling habit—has lit a lamp of happiness in even the darkest hearts. As the joyous word spread, crack flowed like water through inner-city streets, family court judges began handing out free divorces, children lit bonfires of The Book of Virtues, More Virtuous Virtues, Who Cheesed My Virtue?, Moral Tails: Virtue for Dogs, etc. And cynics everywhere thought, for just a moment: Maybe there is a God after all.

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If there were a Pulitzer Prize for schadenfreude (joy in the suffering of others), Newsweek's Jonathan Alter and Joshua Green of the Washington Monthly would surely deserve it for bringing us this story. They are shoo-ins for the public service category in any event. Schadenfreude is an unvirtuous emotion of which we should be ashamed. Bill Bennett himself was always full of sorrow when forced to point out the moral failings of other public figures. But the flaws of his critics don't absolve Bennett of his own.

Let's also be honest that gambling would not be our first-choice vice if we were designing this fantasy-come-true from scratch. But gambling will do. It will definitely do. Bill Bennett has been exposed as a humbug artist who ought to be pelted off the public stage if he lacks the decency to slink quietly away, as he is constantly calling on others to do. Although it may be impossible for anyone famous to become permanently discredited in American culture (a Bennett-like point I agree with), Bennett clearly deserves that distinction. There are those who will try to deny it to him. They will say:

1) He never specifically criticized gambling. This, if true, doesn't show that Bennett is not a hypocrite. It just shows that he's not a complete idiot. Working his way down the list of other people's pleasures, weaknesses, and uses of American freedom, he just happened to skip over his own. How convenient. Is there some reason why his general intolerance of the standard vices does not apply to this one? None that he's ever mentioned.

Open, say, Bennett's The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family, and read about how Americans overvalue "unrestricted personal liberty." How we must relearn to "enter judgments on a whole range of behaviors and attitudes." About how "wealth and luxury ... often make it harder to deny the quest for instant gratification" because "the more we attain, the more we want." How would you have guessed, last week, that Bennett would regard a man who routinely "cycle[s] several hundred thousand dollars in an evening" (his own description) sitting in an airless Las Vegas casino pumping coins into a slot machine or video game? Well, you would have guessed wrong! He thinks it's perfectly OK as long as you don't spend the family milk money.

2) His gambling never hurt anyone else. This is, of course, the classic libertarian standard of permissible behavior, and I think it's a good one. If a hypocrite is a person who says one thing and does another, the problem with Bennett is what he says—not (as far as we know) what he does. Bennett can't plead liberty now because opposing libertarianism is what his sundry crusades are all about. He wants to put marijuana smokers in jail. He wants to make it harder to get divorced. He wants more "moral criticism of homosexuality" and "declining to accept that what they do is right."

In all these cases, Bennett wants laws against or heightened social disapproval of activities that have no direct harmful effects on anyone except the participants. He argues that the activities in question are encouraging other, more harmful activities or are eroding general social norms in some vague way. Empower America, one of Bennett's several shirt-pocket mass movements, officially opposes the spread of legalized gambling, and the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, one of Bennett's cleverer PR conceits, includes "problem" gambling as a negative indicator of cultural health. So, Bennett doesn't believe that gambling is harmless. He just believes that his own gambling is harmless. But by the standards he applies to everything else, it is not harmless.

Bennett has been especially critical of libertarian sentiments coming from intellectuals and the media elite. Smoking a bit of pot may not ruin their middle-class lives, but by smoking pot, they create an atmosphere of toleration that can be disastrous for others who are not so well-grounded. The Bill Bennett who can ooze disdain over this is the same Bill Bennett who apparently thinks he has no connection to all those "problem" gamblers because he makes millions preaching virtue and they don't.

3) He's doing no harm to himself. From the information in Alter's and Green's articles, Bennett seems to be in deep denial about this. If it's true that he's lost $8 million in gambling casinos over 10 years, that surely is addictive or compulsive behavior no matter how good virtue has been to him financially. He claims to have won more than he has lost, which is virtually (that word again!) impossible playing the machines as Bennett apparently does. If he's not in denial, then he's simply lying, which is a definite non-virtue. And he's spraying smarm like the worst kind of cornered politician—telling the Washington Post, for example, that his gambling habit started with "church bingo."

Even as an innocent hobby, playing the slots is about as far as you can get from the image Bennett paints of his notion of the Good Life. Surely even a high-roller can't "cycle through" $8 million so quickly that family, church, and community don't suffer. There are preachers who can preach an ideal they don't themselves meet and even use their own weaknesses as part of the lesson. Bill Bennett has not been such a preacher. He is smug, disdainful, intolerant. He gambled on bluster, and lost.

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Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time and the founding editor of Slate.

Photograph of Bill Bennett by Paul J. Richards/Agence France Presse.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

…Moral activists often hold individuals and groups responsible for the moral content of media that they support (through advertising, production, etc.) but do not directly create. (This is the same assumption built into many anti-drug commercials.) Likewise, Bennett arguably should be held responsible for the immoralities his gambling habit funds and promotes. Admittedly, the gambling itself is probably no more than Aquinas' "wood, hay and stubble," but I doubt that it's wise for the right hand to chastise the wayward flock while the left is drawing for an inside straight. The facile argument made by Kinsley and others on the left is that Bennett criticizes moral failings; Bennett gambles, which is a moral failing; therefore, Bennett is a hypocrite for criticizing the failings of others without criticizing his own. There's some truth in that, but their own unwillingness to take a moral stand (beyond "hypocrisy is bad," which is dubious as a moral proposition) tends to reduce the force of their objection to a simple taunt. Furthermore, it suggests that it is impossible to critique a culture from within, which, if true, would virtually negate the potential for self-improvement. The Confessions of Augustine and Tolstoy alike show that it is not necessary for one to be morally blameless to take a moral stand -- there's a kind of compelling literary archetype to the sinner who strives for personal and social improvement, which may be the founding insight of Christianity itself. But Bennett has instead chosen to think not too deeply on the consequences of his behavior, which is the very sin that he sanctimoniously berates other for. Thus, he personifies a more vulgar literary figure: the Elmer Gantry, the Grand Inquisitor, the pious hypocrite.

--WatchfulBabbler

(To reply, click here)

Billy Bennett isn't much of a philosopher, but he plays one on tv, so undoubtedly he is familiar with Aquinas' conception of the unity of the virtues. The idea is that they come together as a package -- anyone who really has one virtue will have all the others. The problem for Bennett is that it follows that anyone who doesn't have one, doesn't have any. Because Aquinas is the Catholic virtue ethicist nonpareil, this is a real problem for Bennett defenders who try to excuse his gambling as an exception to an otherwise virtuous rule. Poor Billy Bennett: hoist on his own blowhard petard by virtue, so to speak, of his own Swaggartian moment.

The_Fool

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I'm sorry, but Kinsley's joyous attack on Bill Bennett for gambling lacks any merit whatsoever. Even if you could attack all of Bennett's arguments in the past if he allegedly has not lived up to his own standards (a pure ad hominem), there's no basis for claiming that Bennett's private actions contradict his public positions. All of this is based on an unstated premise that there is some equivalency between gambling and the things Bennett has preached against (say, adultery). Now, there are those who believe that gambling and adultery are the same and both wrong. There are those (like Kinsley, I suppose) who believe that gambling and adultery are the same and both ok. But, none of these shrill attacks, including Kinsley's, has made any effort to demonstrate any real equivalence between the two. The fact is that there is no contradiction whatsoever in being for gambling and against adultery. Gambling victimizes no one. There's no deceit in gambling. The Bible says nothing about gambling. The mere fact that many of those who oppose or support gambling have the same opinion about adultery does not mean that those who have different opinions about those two things are hypocrites. Rather, if anything is demonstrated by this, it is that Bennett thinks out his own positions, and does not blindly follow any expected slate of beliefs (which is the common criticism those like Kinsley try to level against those they classify as "religious right"). Bennett's positions are his own, and therefore are not necessarily going to be the same positions as those of James Dobson. This doesn't mean that the arguments Bennett does make lack any persuasive force.

--samuelv

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"If a hypocrite is a person who says one thing and does another, the problem with Bennett is what he says—not (as far as we know) what he does."

I don't think this is hypocrisy...it is merely inconsistency or an instance of "the flesh is weak." Hypocrisy requires Bennett to state something that he doesn't believe in. For instance, as I smoker I can say you shouldn't smoke and not be a hypocrite -- I truly believe smoking is bad for you, but I can't quit myself. Now if Bennett were caught saying "I can't believe these bozos believe all that virtue crap I peddle in those paperback sleeping pills.." that would be hypocrisy (and astute literary judgment).

--spidermelon

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It is relief from the unrelenting bony finger of hypocrites and moralists masquerading as spiritual figures promising redemption, while stealing joy and pleasure from our lives. It is joy of one less shrill voice from the din of criticism. Nothing more, nothing less.

--thearousing

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I'm reminded of the Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns opens a casino. The townspeople turn to Reverend Lovejoy, wondering if it's okay to gamble. He responds something like, "If the government says it's okay, it's not a sin anymore!" It makes me think of the recent anti-drug spots where kids are busted smoking pot in a public bathroom: drugs are bad for you because they're illegal, and they're illegal because they're bad for you. How are they bad for you? Why, because they're illegal... It also makes me think of Margaret Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale," where we're treated to the sight of the Christian conservatives who've taken over the country having a grand old time in a secret brothel. I think the Bennettian moral lesson to be drawn from this episode is: if your vice has the money and power to make and keep itself legal, why, it's not a vice anymore. What's legal is moral, what's moral is legal, and that's the only litmus test.

--ooutland

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