@Pink_Freud this is precisely fukkers like you need to read, internalize, and accept.
‘Virtue Signaling’ Isn’t the Problem. Not Believing One Another Is.
By JANE COASTON AUG. 8, 2017
Illustration by Derek Brahney. Statue: Viviane Ponti/Getty Images.
We all want to be good. But often, what we want more is for others to know just how good we are. We have long been warned about the dangers of flaunting our own moral superiority this way: In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus instructs his followers not to be like the ‘‘hypocrites’’ who ‘‘love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners that they may be seen by men.’’ Nearly 2,000 years later, the 19th-century Catholic saint John Vianney argued that the instinct to show off our goodness — our fasting, our donations to the poor and the church — would ‘‘make hypocrites of us.’’ ‘‘If we desire a heavenly reward,’’ he wrote, ‘‘then we must hide the good which God works in us as much as possible, for fear that the devil of pride may rob us of the merit of those good works.’’ And yet lately, many people believe that these admonitions have been forgotten — that we are living in a veritable golden age of hypocritical showboats advertising their own righteousness.
The British conservative writer James Bartholomew may be the main popularizer of the term ‘‘virtue signaling,’’ which he first used in
an April 2015 article in The Spectator, arguing that much of the moral outrage we see online is mere posturing: ‘‘Gosh, you must be virtuous to be so cross!’’ His ire was aimed mostly at critics of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a promulgator of rabidly anti-immigrant rhetoric, and The Daily Mail, a newspaper known for its own tabloid nativism and xenophobia. On any given day, it’s easy to find Britons expressing their moral outrage and disapproval of UKIP and The Mail. But in Bartholomew’s view, this isn’t because those people care all that deeply about either. They merely want to suggest that they do — to signal that they’re exactly the kind of very virtuous people who would have enlightened, politically correct feelings about such things.
When people offer their vehement condemnation of some injustice in the news, or change their Facebook profile photos to honor the victims of some new tragedy, or write status updates demanding federal action on
climate change, observers like Bartholomew smell something fishy: Do these people really care deeply about the issue du jour? They probably aren’t, after all, out volunteering to solve the problem. What if they’re motivated, above all else, by simply
looking like people who care?
This sort of ostentatious concern is, according to some diagnoses, endemic to the political left. A writer for the conservative website The Daily Caller
wrote this summerthat virtue signaling ‘‘has been universalized into a sort of cultural tic’’ on the left, ‘‘as compulsive and unavoidable as Tourette’s syndrome.’’ There are plenty on the left who might agree. It’s not difficult to find, in conversations among progressives, widespread eye-rolling over a certain type of person: the one who will take a heroic stance on almost any issue — furious indignation over the casting of a live-action ‘‘Aladdin’’ film, vehement defense of Hillary Clinton’s fashion choices, extravagant emotional investment in the plight of a group to which the speaker does not belong — in what feels like a transparent bid for the praise, likes and aura of righteousness that follows.
The charge of virtue signaling, though, has metastasized well beyond this type of comical figure. Once you’ve decided this ‘‘cultural tic’’ has become universal on the left, almost any public utterance of concern becomes easy to write off as false — as mere performance. It applies when people express dismay that a robotics team made up of Afghan girls may be barred from entering the United States; when someone frets about the American poverty rate; when The Associated Press shares information about a deadly oil-tanker fire in Pakistan. Every one of these things has been described online as the unholy product of ‘‘virtue signaling.’’
There is a clear implication here: Nobody could
really care very much about any of these things, except insofar as it allows them to appear virtuous. No one cares about Afghan girls or distant tanker fires; no one is that concerned about America’s poor. The term carves the world neatly into parts: There are real concerns, and there are contrived, theatrical ones. As one Twitter user wrote to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey: ‘‘Voters care about jobs, security, family, retirement. Not bathrooms, gay marriage, virtue signaling, climate and transgender.’’ Those who purport to care about the latter set of issues — including, apparently, gay or transgender people — must be doing so for attention.
The real problem, of course, isn’t the signaling part: Everyone is signaling all the time, whether it’s about social justice or their commitment to Second Amendment rights or their concerns about immigration law. Those who accuse others of virtue signaling seem angry about the supposed virtues themselves — angry that someone, anyone, appears to care about something they do not. Another Twitter user, defending Donald Trump after the infamous ‘‘Access Hollywood’’ tape, wrote: ‘‘Stop virtue signaling. It doesn’t work. Are you saying you never talked dirty in a [private] conversation?’’ The logic here is not that Trump or his actions were morally correct, but that no one else is, either, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying.
Those who cry ‘‘virtue signaling,’’ though? At least, they claim, they’re honest about it. They are, of course, trying to signal something about their own values: that they are pragmatic, appropriately cynical, in touch with the painful facts of everyday life. Virtue signaling can be a way of staking out a position in an argument — not just the high ground, but the highest ground. (You may be against racism, but I am more against racism than you.) But calling out virtue signaling is a useful position in itself.
Most talk of ‘‘virtue signaling’’ is limited to the realm of arguments: debates, spats, flame wars. It’s just talk, and mostly just talk online. In 140-character arguments on Twitter, the phrase ‘‘virtue signaling’’ creates a virtual foxhole, the spot from which you will attack and defend before logging off for the evening.
But it indicates a problem that goes well beyond our rhetoric. Americans are now more sheltered and siloed in our sources of news and information than ever before. We live in areas and send our children to schools more segregated by class and color than they have been in decades. We are less likely to know different kinds of people, people who might care about different issues than we do. At the same time, we’ve grown dangerously inured to pious doublespeak — whether it’s the politician claiming to stand for the family while engaging in multiple extramarital affairs or the corporation that combines feminist ads with hostile work environments. A result is that we simply don’t believe one another anymore. We do not believe that our Facebook friends really care about terror attacks in foreign countries, or that celebrities really care about climate change, or that Nancy Pelosi actually prays for Donald Trump and his family. Even our most exalted moral leaders aren’t safe. Last year, Pope Francis pointedly opined that ‘‘A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not of building bridges, is not Christian.’’ Someone recently shot back online: ‘‘Oh please Pope. Stuff your self righteous indignation and tear down that wall around the Vatican before you start your virtue signaling.’’
The cynicism we’ve felt about public figures for decades has trickled down to apply to our friends and neighbors as well. We imagine that people who take stands on behalf of those less fortunate than themselves are all a bit like those hypocrites in Matthew, standing on the street corners of the internet, telling us to stop buying conventionally grown potatoes and start using racially sensitive terminology before themselves going home, eating McDonald’s french fries and swearing at the television. Our personal and political isolation has rendered us suspicious and blind to the fears and concerns and cares of others.
But of course many people do care, about all sorts of things that you or I might disagree with. People on low-lying islands in the Pacific care about climate change. Members of the armed forces care about military spending. Transgender people care about their ability to access public facilities, gay people care about whether they can adopt children and evangelical Christians care about their ability to live out their faith in the workplace. These people have families and friends, and next-door neighbors and dog walkers, who most likely care, too. This caring is not a crime; it is an argument, about what people should value in the first place. And accusations of ‘‘virtue signaling’’ are, more than anything, a way of walking out on that argument and dismissing it altogether — a quick and easy solution for those moments when engaging and listening, agreeing or disagreeing, seem too hard, too challenging, too personal, too dangerous.
