Dave's Daily Dose 2/18/2022
Matt Yglesias writes the obit for Slate/#Slatepitches that I wish I had the words to have written ~3 years ago. Oh well, I’ve at least got obits for Vox (which he won’t touch!) and Quora under my belt.
Hot Take: Virtue signaling isn’t as evil as it’s made out to be. Morality functionally requires virtues to be communicated. Okay, duh.
But it’s still valuable even if that communication is insincere on the part of some sizeable minority! You may not have ever heard of the concept of “publics and counterpublics”, but it basically says that people conceive of their identity or opinion in relationship to what they perceive as the majority identity/opinion. So, for instance, you move to a new city, and everyone are Bengals fans, but you’re a Steelers fan, so you modulate your behavior accordingly. This doesn’t mean everyone responds the same — some Steelers fans1 will lean into it and be jerks to everyone else, while others might just keep their mouths shut most of the time. But it does mean that people orient their expressions of individual identity around their perceptions of community identity expressed by the public and counterpublic. You can take the Steelers fan out of Steeler Country, but a Steelers fan will act differently in Bengal Country and Patriot Country than Steeler Country.
Anyways, the point is, a common understanding of morality would be undermined if everyone was required to be sincere and un-hypocritical in their virtue signaling. If every pastor who was cheating on their spouse were magically prevented from preaching about the evils of adultery, there’d probably be a slight but meaningful uptick in their communities’ incidence of adultery.
Or, to take it back to a more relevant time in our political history: What do you think things would have looked like if George W. Bush had gone full-steam with Islamophobic rhetoric post-9/11? Of course we know that he had the intelligence services do all kinds of bad things to individual Muslims over those years, and that he mismanaged us into two bad wars. It’s quite obvious that he was virtue-signaling his anti-discrimination rhetoric to some extent. But that virtue-signaling arguably bought us several years before the virulent, Trumpist brand of Islamophobia we currently live with truly started to metastasize.
Insincere virtue-signaling is plenty annoying. But the signaling itself isn’t inherently evil, and the insincerity isn’t completely counterproductive.One of the takes in Ezra Klein’s show today was basically a rehash of the Great Leveller hypothesis: Power tends to concentrate over time, and the only thing that really disrupts it are author Scheidel’s “Four Horsemen”: mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues.
Happy 3-day weekend to those who are getting it!
Fuck that, MOST. Every Steelers fan I’ve ever met was an asshole of some kind.