Virtue Signaling Is Now A Cheap, Prolific Substitute For Actual Virtue
by Noelle Mering, The Federalist:
The less prone we are to self-examination, the more self-aggrandizing we become in our denunciations. It’s making our society harsher.
For several reasons, all embarrassing testaments to my vice, I was listening to an interview of a beloved former contestant on ABC’s “The Bachelorette.” He was making public amends after having traded his good-guy persona for a series of one-night stands and unfulfilled promises.
I’m sure it’s a temptation of some enormity to be suddenly surrounded by beautiful and willing young women who see you as you want to see yourself. Still, he knew, as all celebrities must know, that how his fans saw him wasn’t real. He began to cope with that disparity by becoming louder in support of various charities. Somehow he thought that by putting his weight behind a good cause he could bridge the chasm between perception and reality, a chasm exacerbated by his womanizing.
His case was less egregious than, but still reminiscent of, Harvey Weinstein’s bizarre public mea culpa about fighting the National Rifle Association in light of the revelations of his predation. Such a jarring non sequitur was deemed unacceptable because he’d violated the last sexual norm: consent. But it was still revealing in how we’ve come to see public support of a popular cause as a great balm for our personal guilt.
It made me wonder how often we all do this. We feel the dissonance between who we ought to be and who we are, and we make up for it by becoming noisier about some issue. If our noise can also implicitly condemn moral beings with whom we disagree, then we might come that much closer to feeling satisfied with ourselves.
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