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All Voting is Virtue Signaling
“Virtue Signaling” seems to be the newest insult fad. Everyone is looking to dismiss those they disagree with as simply virtue signaling while their tribe is the epitome of pragmatic sensibility.
#NeverTrumpers are signalling their virtue that Trump and Hillary are so beyond the pale that neither of them deserve their vote. Meanwhile, #ReluctantTrumpers are signalling their virtue that they can swallow their pride and do what they believe is best for the country. #Trumpers are signalling their virtue that everyone else can take a hike: They aren’t going to feel guilty for what they believe.
By any sane metric, voting is a colossal waste of time. You’re more likely to win the lottery than change the outcome of a presidential election. You can say that, if everyone thought like that, that you’d then stand a much stronger likelihood of affecting the election, but — when it comes down to you personally standing in the booth — your act will almost certainly make no difference to the final outcome.
Most of life is signaling. Even graduating from college is mostly signaling your intelligence as well as your ability to commit and follow through, all things employers value more than your grade in English Lit. If no one signaled, we couldn’t communicate real information and society would come to a halt. If no one signaled their perceived virtue, actual virtue could never propagate.
I’m sure you could even argue that I am virtue signaling in this post, but that’s okay! That something contains virtue signaling neither makes it wrong, nor makes it unworthy of being said.
Published in Politics
Actually, no. In virtue signaling, a person simply announces adherence to a view that is already regarded as exhibiting virtue for the purpose of enhancing one’s reputation. Take the example from Wikipedia: “… expressing a hatred of the conservative newspaper Daily Mail might be an example of virtue signalling among the British left.” The British left all hate the Daily Mail already so it’s not “I’m a better Briton than you because I hate the Daily Mail and you don’t. Virtue signaling is more platitudinous than it is argumentative. The same goes for slacktivism, which is a subset of virtue signaling.
I repeat the definition with emphasis:
I’ll pretend you’re comparing me to Scott Alexander. :)
Um, guys, voting is anonymous. It can’t be virtue signalling.
Virtue signaling is making yourself the subject, no matter what you’re actually talking about. To a degree we all do it – it can even be fun – it isn’t a hanging offence.
I don’t see how what I wrote contradicts the definition offered, even with emphasis. Is it possible you are adding conditions to your interpretation that don’t appear in the definition you cited?
For example, the definition does not mention that it must a platitudinous, “slacktivist”-esque promotion of “a view that is already regarded as exhibiting virtue” by everyone. There is nothing in that definition itself limiting the expression or promotion to the platitudinous or saying the view especially valued within a social group must be universally shared by the larger social group a smaller social group might be embedded in.
Now, it may be that the definition offered is simply inadequate, more a summary that fails to fully define the meaning rather than a definition, strictly speaking, and therefore the examples you’ve given should be given more weight than the definition itself. If so, bear with me for not having understood. Lawyers and mathematicians can be a bit literal-minded about their expectations that definitions define things :-)
In any case, I’m with the Man with the Axe – what I see more than anything is the perception that the other guy is virtue-signaling:
Perhaps this is why I’m more likely to make complaints of virtue-signalling the butt of a joke than I am to take them seriously. Maybe a Mod shouldn’t even admit this, but then, they do say admissions against interest are even more likely to be true…
VS is just this week’s slang for fascist. Which is last week’s slang.
I call attention to this key element: that the audience is people who agree with the speaker: “viewpoints that are especially valued within a social group”
The example you cite is directed at opponents, i.e. people who do not value the viewpoint expressed. The explanations I added are not additional conditions; they are explanatory and consistent with the definition. I also call your attention to the example cited. Again, the audience is like-minded people (British leftists), not Tories: “virtue signalling among the British left.” It’s an in-group thing.
The example, “I’m a better Ricochetian that you because I’m voting-for/not-voting-for X” is directed at opponents: those who are on the opposite side of voting for X. The distinction could not be more sharp.
Physicists can be quite literal-minded also.
Is it, though?
If I were to read Ricochet through the lens of virtue-signaling, I’d see plenty of stuff that appears to be more within-faction moral support than anything else, arguments less intended to persuade the opposition than to shore up the resolve of one’s own side. So, virtue-signaling.
Heck, I don’t think you even need to live under the perpetual cloud of suspecting virtue-signalers under every bed to note that some argumentation whose purpose is to shore up resolve on one’s own side rather than convince one’s opponents does go on here, and that a certain amount of that is to be expected, perhaps even a normal, healthy sign.
For example, an argument like “I’m a better Ricochetian that you because I’m voting-for/not-voting-for X”, signals to those who agree with it, “We who agree are better than they who don’t”. Such a claim is arguably a more powerful within-group signal than it is cross-group – easier to believe your ally telling you you’re both better than your opponents than to believe an opponent’s claim that he is better than you, no?
But in any case, as I said, it’s hard for me to take accusations of virtue-signaling terribly seriously. When factions form around a shared belief or value, it is to be hoped that those in the faction believe there’s something about it that promotes being a better person. For the reverse to happen is kind of perverted – we’re proud to be part of a faction that promotes the worsening of people! Well, maybe we’re proud of it if we’re @jasonrudert ;-P
I understand your point better now. Speaking of being literal, I took your example literally: “I’m a better Ricochetian that you“, in which a person is literally speaking to an opponent. It’s true that people on the same side hear it too. Nevertheless, the term means, as I understand it and as the example I gave previously makes clear, the signaling is made in the presence of like-minded individuals and is explicitly directed at them.
Yours is a more expansive definition that includes signaling to everyone. That’s fine but just to be clear, note that I gave the definition I was relying upon at the very beginning. Given that it is one I found at a site with lots of traffic, I’ll claim that it has broad currency. I’m open to being otherwise. You are welcome to yours. However, though definitions of words in the language may be arbitrary, the ones that enjoy wider usage are more relevant.
This isn’t quite it. Besides the smugness that accompanies much virtue signaling, I find the vacuous nature annoying. It is not a virtue that is being promoted; it is the moral superiority of the speaker. And it ends there. There is no action, just a pronouncement that the speaker is in favor of good things. Hence its close connection with slacktivism.
P.J. O’Rourke has a good handle on it:
Myself, I think virtue signaling is deplorable, and I would never do it. I also wouldn’t write a post about it — that is deplorable.
I’m with the good Dr. here, and I’m not as ready as Mike is to jettison the opprobrium that accompanies virtue signaling. Matt Upton was spot on earlier this thread, too, with his observation that there is a difference between being something and wanting to be seen as being something, and we rightly attend to the difference when judging character.
If Raymond Aron was right about socialism, then it strikes me that virtue signaling is just the secularization of a phenomenon we’d all recognize in the religious context: the person who makes a great show of their piety. We all know the difference between a person who genuinely, humbly, and dutifully attends to the practices and beliefs of their religion, and the person who goes out of their way to be ostentatious about just how good a believer they are, and where others fall relative to them.
Merely holding an opinion, or acting on an opinion genuinely held, isn’t virtue signaling.
Such comments aren’t exclusively aimed at the out-group.
Often times — I know, because I’ve done it myself in moments of weakness — there’s often an implicit “Amiright?” at the end of such comments, aimed at one’s in-group. Unsurprisingly, the comments can get a lot of likes.
“Virtue signalling” presupposes that someone cares what you think. For myself, it has long been apparent that no one cares what I think. Therefore, I feel free to express my opinions without worrying about accusations of virtue signalling. For the same reason, I don’t have a twitter account.
Clearly the writer of this post has never lived in a place like Chicago. Voting in a place like that has nothing to do with virtue and everything to do with the acquisition of power. Something the Democratic party understands all too well.
The best example I keep in mind to help me define “virtue signaling” is the widespread photo of a sad-faced Michelle Obama holding a cardboard sign with #BringBackOurGirls. Obviously all decent people are opposed to kidnapping little girls and turning them into sex slaves, but Michelle had to advertise her opposition when neither she nor her husband (who was in a position to) had the slightest intention of doing a damn thing about it.
That’s virtue signaling. I don’t see a lot of it going on here on Ricochet. It’s generally a left wing impulse, because leftism really is about feeling good (about oneself), rather than doing good (despite the personal cost).
As usual, Remy skewers this nonsense.
[Also, yes, before someone else writes it, I’m aware of the irony of posting a video which mocks virtue signaling to an audience predisposed to enjoy it, thereby being somewhat guilty of a mild kind of virtue signaling, all on a thread in which I criticize virtue signaling in response to an OP charging that conservatives, too, virtue signal]
Nice. And just to show that this has been going on forever, Tom Lehrer made the point about 50 years ago, accompanied by an 88-string guitar. Ready, aim, sing!
Ditto for the video I posted. Plus ça change….
#GravitasSignaling
I think the problem is that the line between what is virtue signalling and what is something else can be blurry. Is a lawn sign for a favored candidate virtue signalling? Sometimes, but enough of them in a neighborhood may also be an attempt to create a bandwagon effect.
But usually we are talking a situation where the signalling is useless compared with the virtue signaled. When there is a perfect match between usefulness and the virtue in question, we think of it as setting an example.
#irony
(An aside from the Grammar Nazi: I hate any word — like “signal”, as used — that suggests we are unthinking machines. For example, “respond”: an electrical system responds; a person replies.)
Nonetheless, virtue signaling is on the upper end of a sliding scale of concern we have for what other people think of us. It is deliberate and an affectation. Further down the scale, depending on who you are and the occasion, are how we dress and walk. On the low end of the scale: I would walk naked through Times Square and not bat an eye or care one whit what people thought of me, for an important enough cause. The cause could easily have absolutely nothing to do with “sending a message” to someone. Not everything we do is some form of affectation, putting on airs, or posturing, which is what the phrase “virtue signaling” means.
I don’t vote to “send a signal” to anyone. In your penultimate paragraph, you state that most of life is signaling. By the time you’ve written this, you’ve changed the meaning of “signaling” you started out your piece with so that it means next to nothing at all. A significant amount of what we do is done for purposes other than making a point with someone. That they see us do it is simply a side-effect of them having eyes that can see the light reflected from us as we do it.
I have seen it used several times in relation to NeverTrumpers and their- our- damned principles. I don’t go around trumpeting that I’m a NeverTrumper (though I say so if asked), except when discussing politics on Ricochet, as I think it important to have my biases up front.
In the case of the OP, it is the term “principles” that I see most often used, again with the idea of standing by one’s principles being spun as a negative in order to convince people to VoteTrump. I think you can substitute “principles” for VS in the OP, and it might be more on point.
Well, yes, but consider how it looks from the outside. If I neither understand nor agree with a virtue being promoted by Group X, or believe X’s tactics to be particularly feckless (or perhaps even destructive), X’s promotion of that virtue appears pretty vacuous to me:
X looks to me like X is congratulating itself on its moral superiority when I find real content behind that claim of moral superiority entirely absent.
I fail to take accusations of virtue-signaling terribly seriously not because I believe virtue-signaling itself fails to exist, just as you and PJ describe it, or isn’t annoying. It’s because so much of what I see complained of as “virtue-signaling” isn’t, really.