Howl/Why Calling Out Virtue Signalling is a Form of Virtue Signalling/Silence = death
An incoherent and problematic article about speaking your mind by someone who doesn’t always do it and doesn’t know what they’re talking about
“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward” Matthew c6
“(If you,) being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:” Rudyard Kipling, If
“When they said, repent, repent, I wondered what they meant” Leonard Cohen, The Future
In a previous article I mentioned a talk by an evolutionary biologist about ethics and specifically altruism. In this article I would like to explore how the policing of so called virtue signalling is a meta-virtue in itself to a different social group, and how social groups overlap Venn diagram style on social media and how that leads to conflict, debate, and on very rare occasions “repentance” which correctly translated literally means a “change of mind”1 I probably won’t do that though. I will neither change your mind about anything or write about what I set out to. The mind is as fickle as it is rigid. Changing your mind. Sounds like such a simple thing, but the brain is wired up to reinforce ideas it already has about things, a classic cognitive error that. Confirmation bias is probably adaptive to protecting the social machine. How should I know? But if your thoughts are making you shitty to fellow human beings, then they surely need questioning.
I had this shitty thought. People were standing up and speaking for what was right. And sometime cynic as I am, I thought “is that what they really believe, or are they just doing it to sound good?”. All the likes and shares. What does it amount to? I guess it’s the start of something. We’re not going to change the world by making a facebook post, or a pseudo intellectual blog on the arse end of the internet read by a couple of people on facebook. But I guess it opens up a dialogue. And that’s what we need. People talking.
The calamitous and shocking events in America were not out of the ordinary, I am talking of course about George Floyd’s recent brutal murder by a cop, which according to Professor Kehinde Andrews in a recent Russell Brand spiritual vlog2 is “not[hing] new” and is something that has been “happening for centuries”. What has changed is racism’s visibility. Both in terms of violent cops and in terms of people kowtowing to the enticing supposedly informed liberarian cruelty of red in tooth and claw Conservatism. We see this on our feeds, if we’re moderate enough not to excommunicate right wingers from our social networks. But people are calling people up on their bigotry now in a new way. “Let he who is free from sin throw the first stone” I know. We’re all racists. We all have prejudices about people based on various generalities. But some of us are trying to learn and improve, and others are getting off on calling out so called “virtue signallers” and feeling smug about their insight. It’s a tacit form of the same disease. We can see the outright brutality of corrupt cops now in HD. Later on in the talk, Professor Kehinde used Martin Luther King’s Analogy of the Southern Wolf and the Northern Fox. The analogy shows the difference between the in your face racism of say the KKK, compared to the tacit, everyday racism that is even more prevalent among the apparently civilised and educated elite. The fundamental ubiquity of racism is such that he argues that we need a complete overhaul of society. Which means revolution. There are no reparations that can be made for societies built on slavery.
I had a postcard where one side was black and the other white. Across the middle in reverse text was the simple phrase, “The paper on this half is the same as the paper on the other half” which is a distillation to essence of Shylock’s speech “if you prick me, do I not bleed…” from the Merchant of Venice, a play not without criticism for it’s racial stereotypes (though pretty forward thinking for the time and fares better than its source material Marlowe’s Jew of Malta). We’re all people. We’ve all got hopes, dreams, fears, wants, and needs. We all supposedly have rights. If someone I know stands up to defend the rights of others and looks good while doing it, good on them. The people eager to criticise human rights protesters for risking infection are sick when it’s life or death for some people in this world. The fact they didn’t object to VE day is evidence their moral compass is stuck and needs a good flick. I went to the Black Lives Matter protest in Malvern and stood (and for 8 minutes knelt, well most of it; I couldn’t manage eight minutes forty three kneeling never mind some doughnut fatted cop kneeling on my neck…) as I was saying I stood in a field where I was probably the third least white person out of the 350 odd assembled protesters, (and I’m half Scottish — it would be easy to sneer at these well meaning white people, but they’re fucking trying their hardest, what are you doing? Quite a lot some of you. Others are just criticising smugly and I understand where it’s coming from but it’s pissing me off, it’s a mixture of privilege, ignorance, and thinly veiled contempt) and they asked if any people of colour wanted to talk and I felt I had nothing to say, or I would have just talked from the half of myself that is Iraqi and Turkish about the psychological civil war of being on the side of victim and perpetrator, and no side. Belonging everywhere and nowhere. Not having a comfortable identity that I can feel snug in with my fellow Iraqi/Turkish/Scots (maybe there’s some kind of club online I dunno. If the people that went to the protest felt good about it, then good. They should. If they shared it on social media, good, they’re spreading awareness. If they get kudos, good they deserve it. They’re probably not doing it for that reason. How crappy an idea of human nature do you have to have to think everyone is just a poseur pseudo freedom fighter doing it for the likes? We judge others by our unconscious standards. They don’t deserve to be shut down like the person in a facebook group who wanted to celebrate black architects and designers and was told this was no place for politics. That’s the beginning of evil, orchestrating people to stand by, to turn a blind eye. Pathologising calls for justice as tokenistic and half-meant hollow gestures. Well if they are, so what. Better a signalled virtue than having no virtues at all as someone else said. These police of the social networks need overthrowing as well as the prison guards in our heads. They are fed by a biased media to oppress those that are superficially different. To say superficially might seem to neglect the rich cultures that exist in various nations, but we have more in common than there is different, even and especially in terms of genetics. What we have in common is the easiest forgotten thing, our humanity. If people exercise their humanity and get a ‘like’ or two (what’s a like really anyway? You can’t eat it) they deserve the little dopamine hit of knowing they’ve done something good. It’s ok to feel good about doing good things. Don’t be like Phoebe in that friends episode that took altruism so far she couldn’t let herself feel good about helping someone. It’s a far cry from say poverty tourism and bringing the video camera with you when you’re giving money to a beggar. Even then, they still get the money. And if you make a virtue out of not telling anyone it’s just as bad only more convoluted. The little signals we give each other of approval are ancient social conditioners shaping what is good for the group. Just the group is now groups plural that overlap in various iterations. And what some groups think is good for them is not good for another group and vice versa. I’m talking about the Left and Right here — poles apart apparently. What common ground do we have when talking with people that vote differently to you. More than you think. And there is our strength, if we can only discover that, we have some hope of shaking ourselves from the confines of a governance that may not always have our best interests at heart, shall we say. The shitty handling of covid is one example.
I used to think it was stupid to say “If you’re not political, that’s just privilege in action?. Thinking about it its probably true. But then it’s easy to be disheartened politically when we seem to be swinging towards an increasingly hollow show of two party politic where both parties are serving the interests of big business almost equally now we’ve lost that the socialist project has been all but abandoned because the press repeated the “fact” that Jeremy Corbyn was unelectable every five minutes for four years and people started believing it. Here’s my mean streak coming through — people don’t want a fair society. People don’t want to support other people especially if it means they have to pay any more tax. They want their English Castle and all the chlorinated chicken they can eat. Complete the sentence usually (wrongly) attributed to Churchill “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25 you have no heart…”actually don’t bother. I did a political compass test, not on facebook but on the website because I was scared of the metadata, and *gasp* scared of being acused of virtue signalling in my anechoic chamber. (Little sound returns from my utterences usually, so be it) that bit of metadata is a drop in the ocean of collected information advertisers can buy to market to you and anyway who cares; I came out left libertarian because I’m not sure the market’s going to sort everything out for us by magic and I’m not into state control. I don’t get a particularly kick from this. I’m not identified with it. I’m pretty sure capitalism is by nature exploitative but think really it’s up to individuals to behave properly and be good to each other and it should be possible to be a capitalist and not an asshole.
To conclude this alphabet soup vomit? Probably for the best. Not sure how. Keep thinking, keep changing, question things, look after each other and the interests of others as your own. Maybe I think now it’s good to talk about politics, or maybe it was better when it was rude and we could all just get along. What was the point of it? Have I changed anyone’s mind? Seems unlikely, but maybe my own. I now think shout from the rooftops what you believe and the time to stand by has gone as if it was ever there. Monsters love the darkness. Let the sun shine in. But don’t burn. If you’re nice you’ll bring me water. Stay home, open your mind, protect the human race. I thought I knew everything when I was 16, now I’m 36 and I realise there’s little I’m certain of. Use sunscreen.
1 Nicholl, Maurice, The Mark, 1953
