Virtue Signaling and Morality as a Competition on the Left
More and more I find myself to be an old fashioned liberal falling behind in a race to be the most outraged and by inference, morally aware. I used to think I was a progressive, but that seems to mean so much more as each year does.
I mean, I still want Elizabeth Warren to run. That has to count for something right?
One of the most unedifying spectacles in the fallout from the terror attacks in Paris has been the one-upmanship of social media virtue signaling. The naked display of people parading their superior morals while dressed in the Emporer’s New Blogs seems as vampiric as anything Ann Coulter or others of her ilk could say to hijack and twist it into their pet cause.
On a platform like Facebook where etiquette requires a large group of acquaintances from high school and past jobs it’s harder to curate an echo chamber than other media. Quite to the contrary, large swathes of people engage in self-censorship given the audience for their comments is more like their boss’s extended family Thanksgiving dinner that they were unlucky enough to be invited to and less their local political action group.
There certainly is a value in having so many people actively identifying their positions in this environment. Seeing so many of your extended acquaintances, especially those who were thrust upon you by by external factors like the school system or workplace support a particular cause even in the most shallow of ways can help people re-evaluate their positions.
How acceptable is homophobia if the Butcher of 9th Grade just colored his Facebook profile in a rainbow hue? How acceptable is turning back refugees if that douche from marketing that used to joke about “towel heads” and “slopes” just shared a sympathetic article? It’s the most shallow form of support, and yet it seems to redefine your mental geography as these various people you have windows of history with signal their positions and alter your perceptions of the landscape of the debate.
They aren’t making a reasoned or impassioned plea but there is a body of knowledge you have about this person’s life experiences that turns it into a little subconscious argument.
This is not to vindicate clicktavism, I won’t champion too much the cold efficiency of an Amazon One-Click Moral Purchase, the kind of obligatory support it can engender and what the boolean logic of not taking part in something so vacuously simple seems to imply…
Additionally, in the wake of something like the French terror attacks the previously mentioned virtue is somewhat nullified as there is kind of universal agreement that killing innocent people is bad and the main value seems to be in giving people a way to mourn and express sympathy or at worst, make themselves part of the story.
This isn’t the value signaling I’m talking about.
Value signaling starts wearing it’s Problem Glasses when it becomes a form of humble bragging and a way to form ingroup-outgroup dichotomies.
In this, donning the French flag was akin to accidentally triggering the first salvo in an unforeseen war. You see, as small as the action is, as vacuous as it as a show of support, it still shows that the people that did it care. They care enough to work out how to do it, they care enough to broadcast a public statement of support. To Professional Carers this is an outrageous provocation. It’s a challenge to their carefully constructed moral authority, and perhaps worst of all, they didn’t think of it first. They looked wistfully at Jean Jullien’s Eiffel Tower peace sign like he’d won the caring lottery with a Division 1 prize of several million attentions and recognitions.
I’m not talking about the Save the Whales type care-havers here either. If it’s that pedestrian, it couldn’t possibly display superiority. I’m talking the type where offense isn’t so much a natural reaction to something unpleasant as it is an opportunity to display the keenness of your offense detection methods. It’s I-Have-Taken-Offence-But-It’s-Probably-Nothing-You’ve-Heard-Of Carers.
Well meaning and well-intentioned school friends and aunties alike telegraphed their natural tendency to empathy and exorcised the demons of their anxiety at lives very much like their own being extinguished. Simply posting flags and peace signs, poignant mostly in their ubiquity and like a form letter to the dead.
Not to be outdone even by this however and with the trills of an overwrought diva the reactionary posts came swiftly to remind us exactly who was the most virtuous among us.
“I see your flag profile picture but WHY DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT BROWN PEOPLE?” They cried, re-raising the moral stake and going all in on a particularly morbid poker hand. Grief and morality as a competition.
One article that crossed my feed was typical of this chiding hair shirt brigade. It chafes just as much from rank hypocrisy as it does from the hamfisted Spotlight of Lesser Morals it tries to shine on people. In the New Matilda article “Paris Attacks Highlight Western Vulnerability, And Our Selective Grief And Outrage” we are reminded that a large number of Lebanese people died just days before and with a leading and rhetorical cloud of wonder, it asks us just what the difference between the Beirut and the Paris massacres were.
The question is actually quite simple but not in the way it’s author, Chris Graham thinks:
“As France enters yet another period of mourning, Lebanon is just emerging from one. Not that you probably heard anything about it.” He begins, sounding like a hipster accusing the reader of not being attentive enough to have heard of some local underground band just as much as a statement with a separate meaning at the institutional level.
“Meanwhile, in a brown part of the world, as the attacks began in Paris, Lebanon was just emerging from a National Day of Mourning”
“But how do we explain our identification with French suffering and our apparent indifference to Lebanese suffering? Or more to the point, how do we explain our indifference to the suffering of people we perceive as different, Lebanese, African, Hazara, Muslim…. Brown people.”
Even with this leading and facile framing, the simple answer really comes down to several closely related things.
It’s a universal trait in all humans to be most concerned about those closest to them. It’s the Monkeysphere or Dunbar’s Number in action. In simple terms, a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. The idea is that a human can only reasonably be expected to maintain serious inter-personal relationships with upwards of about 150 people give or take 50. This is because we spent the vast majority of our evolution in small social groups and our mental software just hasn’t caught up with the last couple of thousand years of human civilization.
Rwanda may have been a genocide, but you only cry when it’s individualized with a photo or after two hours of Don Cheadle
This leads us to taking a variety of mental shortcuts to deal with people outside our immediate social sphere and putting people in different boxes to try and account for the reams of data our monkey brains have to cope with. Chris goes some way to address this by calling on the influence of Lebanese people on Australian society.
Although he makes a show of demonstrating Lebanese influence on Australian life with a listing of several each sports, political and business people, he somehow forgets the strength of cultural export and if Civilization 5 has taught me anything about the French, it’s that they have a lot of it.
It’s as though he’s forgotten French influence is at the very heart of western democracies from the enlightenment to our system of government. It’s not just Champagne, French Fries and Ratatouille. As a commenter on the article noted, so many Australians died fighting for France that whole regions still commemorate their sacrifice in schoolrooms.
But if you asked an average Australian to name a famous Lebanese person without consulting Wikipedia as Chris no doubt did to collate his examples, would they really be able to name more than one or two off the top of their head? Isn’t it kind of a dangerous question, the sort you vet beforehand? Who could be sure they wouldn’t hesitantly come up with Bilal Skaf, the notorious serial gang rapist who made headlines and penetrated the consciousness of Australians in a way NSW governor Marie Bashir simply wouldn’t beyond educated elite circles? Or perhaps they’d name John Ibrahim the “nightclub entrepreneur” who had a whole “true crime” television series dedicated to his alleged activities broadcast to the poor racist proles? Lebanese criminal gangs make the headlines far more often than the ethnic figures behind certain companies are discussed so can an average Australian be overly blamed for not necessarily identifying with his mentioned examples of Lebanese culture?
Fat Pizza, the TV show that spawned Rebel Wilson and featured many Lebanese characters probably did more than most people or events to force Lebanese people into Australian monkeyspheres. It presented an almost “Aussie Larrikin” rogue face to the culture. But even there headlines were made when one of the actors was stabbed and his brother killed by Lebanese gang members over a rude hand gesture.
It’s all so unfortunate.
Lebanese influence, such as it is, is competing with Audrey Tatou in Amelie, the #2 favorite film of all time according to the Australian public from voting in the ABC’s “My Favorite Film” project. That’s just below The Lord of The Rings but above The Shawshank Redemption, Star Wars and Princess Bride. That’s powerful cultural force and there aren’t any French criminal gangs to cause a competing negative perception. Only mimes.
I don’t mean to focus here on the minuscule percentage of the Lebanese population who make headlines in this fashion — as though I’m making a negative counter point to his examples and like I’m arguing Lebanese contribution to Australian culture hasn’t been overwhelmingly good. But the point needs to be made that I don’t think Chris would like the answer the average Australian would give to that question. And that’s if they didn’t commit the even bigger faux pas of naming Maltese, Iranian, or other middle eastern Australians which would bring it’s own charge of erasing identities and white blindness to POC.
Without getting further into the weeds, including problematic aspects of sensationalist news reporting that leads building this infamy and Jean Pierre Jeunet’s white washing of Paris in Amelie, we don’t expect a Nigerian to care about an American plane crash more than the death of a local family. We don’t expect a rural Vietnamese person to care about the Fort Hood shootings more than they care the season’s weather. But when it comes to white people expressing empathy on a Facebook wall, well they’d better understand they are held to a higher standard.
No soft bigotry of low expectations for you white übermensch, you should have a natural gut level care for all life, no matter that not a single one of these chiding schoolmarms did anything to brings awareness of the Beirut bombing themselves.
Yes, that’s right. Neither editorialist Chris “Not that you probably heard anything about it” Graham, nor news site owner Chris “how do we explain our apparent indifference to… brown people” Graham and not even editor Chris “And no.. solidarity with the Lebanese” Graham did anything to bring the bombings to our attention. Not on his news site, not even on his twitter. On November the 11th he thought it was important enough to tweet about boycotting the 2015 Victoria’s Secret Show, but on November 12th when his “brown people” spider sense should have been tingling with 40 dead and 200 wounded he couldn’t even wrangle 140 characters.
The question really is, is this editorial a diary entry from Chris to himself? If it’s really so outrageously important where was Chris Graham’s article on Beirut when it happened? He is the owner and editor of a NEWS site. He obviously has both an organ to grind on the subject and an organ of broad voice to broadcast it. So why ignore Beirut and all the precious deaths we are belatedly being asked to care about but only rise to berate other people for not emoting in the fashion he prefers? It is an astonishing case of do as I say but not as I do.
As an editor he is very aware of the following fact. When people think of Beirut, they don’t think of a happy peaceful place like their own. The name falls off the back shelf of the mind with folders containing words like “war” and “death”. It is classic Dog Bites Man news. It doesn’t matter that the Beirut of today is not the Beirut of two decades ago. The reality on the ground doesn’t change things anymore than the beautiful beaches and gardens in Palestinian and Israeli land change the public mind’s eye of bullet ridden and sand colored buildings vaguely in the desert.
And so Beirut is still a war zone. Who has told us otherwise? Bombings in war zones is just what happens, it is the normal course of business. It’s stranger that Beirut would be a preferred travel destination than that so many people have died there. That’s is precisely why it wasn’t front page news, not even on the morally superior New Matilda. It’s expected.
Not only did the attacks in Paris happen in a place we watch #2 film-of-all-time romantic comedies set in, they happened in restaurants, sporting events and Eagles of Death Metal concerts. Not many people sporting French flags today were going to holiday in Beirut or anywhere else with a consistent DFAT Smart Traveler red alert. However, how many of these people are going to go to a restaurant, sporting or musical event in a Western city in the next few weeks?
It picks up your lizard brain and shakes it, subconsciously screaming that there may be an imminent and potential problem we hadn’t previously thought about.
New dangers get attention. Even those of us in cities, towns and villages that would feel perversely encouraged by a terrorist attack and happy just to be noticed or even improved by a vest full of ball bearings have uncalled for thoughts that pop suddenly into our heads. Wondering whether that bucolic local town festival is totally safe because the crushing crowds of tens of people before immediately brushing the silly concern away. We are prisoners to our anxious thoughts. That is what makes this act resonate with us horrible white people in the same way that I expect the seemingly bi-annual Hajj stampede tingles something deep in a devout Muslim before the idea that it’s gods plan pushes it back down below the conscious threshold. I don’t browbeat the pilgrim for feeling more for his brothers caught in a stampede than he will when my mother dies of western decadence because it’s human nature.
It’s a hangover from our survival instinct. We are going to pay more attention to There-But-For-The-Grace-Of-God-Go-I stories in direct proportion to exactly how likely I is to go there.
Chris knows this. No doubt this is why he didn’t lift the smallest of fingers to note it. Taking note of this hypocrisy, what then is the reason for this article and the thousands of shares it got that melted the New Matilda’s servers?
Why, to ignore all their own demonstrated indifference and show that they, unlike you, are thinking about BROWN PEOPLE with sudden bags of concern conjured out of air made thin from their initial lack of interest with Beirut. They do this because they are signalling to their overwhelmingly progressive liberal readership that they are more progressive and liberal. They have superior abilities in the moral outrage department and dammit if Chris didn’t just make you lift your game. Now you get to absolve that bit of guilt that you hadn’t paid any attention to Beirut and prove you’re not a racist by sharing his article. It’s weaponized morality.
I do have a final question for Chris though.
200 white people were shot down in an ISIS attack just before the Beirut bombing and we didn’t change our Facebook profile pics to Russian flags either. Was that because of our indifference to brown people too?
Finally, this whole rant isn’t to say that there isn’t a problem in the fact that we don’t care as much about people outside our Monkeysphere. It’s also a problem that we don’t have running tallies of current on the ground conditions in all countries and that we hold out of date notions, biases and ignorances. The solution however isn’t to vacuously chide about brown people. Like most things it’s an incredibly complex problem that would have to fight against the biology of our meat-computers and for market share of our ever dwindling attention. Do as I say but not as I do isn’t going to cut it. Luckily the solution likely has something to do with the inter-connectedness that brought the article to my attention in the first place.
