Virtue-Shaming, Vice-Signaling, and the Case That Kindness Isn't Cynical
If you have a teen or pre-teen, you might be familiar with the term "try-hard." If you're not familiar with it, the expression means exactly what it sounds like—someone who tries hard. The fact that the term is used in middle and high schools as a gentle slur, a way to chide a person who goes the extra mile, says something about the wry sensibilities of our postmodern America. Everyone wants to accomplish great things, but openly trying hard to achieve those dreams is almost as bad as cheating—it's the 21st century version of being a suck-up.
There's a similar term that's slithered its way into the vernacular of the American political landscape: "virtue signaling." Wikipedia defines it this way: "Virtue signaling is the conspicuous expression of moral values."
If you haven't heard "of virtue-signaling" before, it may not be immediately obvious that the term is used to disparage the alleged virtue-signaler. They key word in the definition is "conspicuous." The problem, in other words, is being virtuous in a way that is noticeable. Here's an example from Twitter, in which CNN's Jake Tapper gets hit with the label for having the audacity to quote a Bible verse.
If you spend some time looking at the usage of "virtue signaling" on Twitter, you'll find that the phrase is applied quite liberally. People who lament gun violence, worry about refugees at the border, or advocate for better access to healthcare are prone to be hit with the label.
Let's get something out of the way: It's unequivocally good to care about the less fortunate. It's indisputably right to care about victims of crime, and refugees, and people who can't access the healthcare they need. Some of you might already be preparing a retort along the lines of: well what about people who want guns for self-defense, or people who have been the victims of crimes perpetrated by immigrants, or people who work three jobs because they really like their private health insurance? The answer, of course, is that we should care about those people, too. Caring isn't an either/or proposition.
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In the halls of the middle school where I teach, it's rarely the high-achieving students who are tossing out the word "try-hard" (unless they're doing it in self-deprecation). Instead, it's the struggling students who tend to throw around the phrase. They hurl it at their higher-achieving peers as a way of reckoning with feelings of inferiority. Sure, you have better grades than I do, but that's only because you're a try-hard. The unspoken rationale is that trying hard is somehow cheating; it's cutting corners. And if it's a faux pas to put forth significant effort, then the student with the bad grades can more easily excuse the inferiority of his own academic record.
I think the same thing happens in politics. Everyone knows that we should care for the less fortunate, but different people have different political philosophies and different priorities. When a person with a different political point of view seems more empathetic to those less fortunate, we feel shame. In such a situation, we can save a little bit of face by implying that the empathetic one is really just a moral show-off, just a grownup suck-up.
There's something else going on, though, too. Many people also use the term "virtue signaling" when they feel a politician or TV personality is being hypocritical. In the age of Whataboutism, some would have you believe that no one should be allowed to question the acts of anyone else unless the questioner himself is completely blameless. You can't criticize a politician for cheating on his wife, because members of the other political party have done the same. You can't call out a blatant lie, because everyone lies. In fact, politicians should no longer even be made to feel shame for lying. The current iteration of Whataboutism has gone well beyond the mere questioning of individuals' moral authority; it's transformed into a denial that moral authority exists at all.
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In such a vacuum of virtue, it's perhaps no surprise that we've now entered an even more cynical phase. While virtue signaling—openly expressing moral values—has become a no-no, it's been replaced by something far worse. I'm going to call it vice-signaling. Vice-signaling is when the speaker attempts to show that he is not afraid to be mean, or rude, or politically incorrect, or to hurt feelings. This is almost always justified by an insistence that it's okay to be a jerk because the speaker is right. A prominent example occurred recently when Louisiana senator John Kennedy lashed out at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by quipping "it must suck to be that dumb." If I had said that as a child, I would have been punished twice, first for calling someone dumb, and a second time for using the word "suck." Kennedy, conversely, has stridently defended his remark. It was fine for him to say something mean, he insists, because "what I said is accurate." (It's not, of course.)
Here's the thing, though. Even if it were true, it wouldn't be a nice thing to say. It wouldn't be an appropriate thing to say. It really wouldn't.
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Earlier this autumn, my Northwest Iowa community was consumed by a local election in which the incumbent mayor was challenged by an outspoken local physician. The race was nasty; with one side deploying the cynical rhetoric of cable news and talk radio. Despite it being a local election, the main issues weren't business development or street maintenance. Rather, the issues the mayoral candidates discussed were constitutional and theological in nature. A month after the election, I'm still too traumatized by the whole thing to go into it in much detail here. I do, however, want to make one point. The people hurling political invective were self-aware enough to realize that the things they were saying were mean. Whenever the issue of meanness came up, however (either due to accusations of meanness or through proactive defensiveness) they responded with the same retort: it's not "mean," it's the "truth."
I worry that such rationale has started to make sense to a lot of people. It shouldn't make sense, though. Whether or not someone is right or wrong has nothing to do with whether they are being kind or cruel. A person can speak the truth cruelly just as a person can speak a lie kindly. Believing oneself to be correct does not entitle a person to be a jerk. It just doesn't.
What's worse, though, is that this kind of attitude implies that the great ethical code of living in community is nothing more than a mandate to believe oneself to be correct. As long as you think you're right, you can do whatever you want to your neighbors. You can say anything you'd like in any tone you like. You can hurt feelings, destroy public property, threaten local businesses, and it's OK as long as you believe you are right.
We live in a cynical age. I'm cynical! But it feels like we've crossed a kind of threshold. It feels like an essay with the simple premise that it's okay to try to be virtuous, to try to do the right thing, might somehow be controversial. It shouldn't be that way.
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My brother last week turned me on to the podcast Dolly Parton's America. It's a strange mix of biography and cultural anthropology, all built around the music and outlook of Dolly Parton. In the fifth episode, host Jad Abumrad tries to reckon with Parton's steadfast refusal to engage in politics. Though many of her songs can easily be interpreted to be political in nature, the artist herself avoids any kind of political commentary. She has fans on both sides of the aisle and doesn't want to offend either side. Besides, the best thing she can do is pray for those in power, she says.
I don't know what I think about Parton's stance. Part of me recoils at the idea that people in positions of influence should sit silent, but the other part of me knows that she has a point. No one would doubt that Parton is a well-meaning, virtuous person. She enjoys wide-ranging popularity; she's considered a great person by people on both sides of the political aisle. Perhaps, though, she's considered virtuous not in spite of her avoidance of politics, but because of her avoidance of politics. Perhaps she realizes that she'll lose her moral authority the moment she wades into politics. And so she chooses to be a beacon of wholesomeness, a beacon of blunt country virtue, rather than a political megaphone.
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I don't want to give up on the idea that virtue and public policy—virtue and politics—can coexist. I think people intrinsically want to be virtuous, and they want leaders who are virtuous. In fact, I think virtue-shaming—which is what the whole "virtue-signaling" critique is really all about—is just a thinly veiled defense mechanism of people who know deep down that they are on the wrong side of things. The answer, I think, isn't to shame people who use terms like "virtue-signaling;" we're not going to solve things by calling out people who vice-signal. Rather, the solution has to be kindness. We need to be conspicuously kind to people, including those who scoff at the idea of being nice. I'm not sure it will solve everything. I'm not sure it will win elections. But it will make our communities and our country better places to live. When it comes to kindness, we should all be try-hards. There's no shame in that.
