Nice post. Contemporary virtue signaling by the Left is genuflection to 'pathological altruism', the latter a real and identifiable phenomenon in social psychology. The leftist virtue signaling we are witnessing nowadays is straight outta Raspail's "Camp of the Saints".
25 June 2017 at 04:46
I think people may have become so excited by the name-calling convenience of the term 'virtue-signalling' that they have missed the Main Thing about what is going-on; which is that it is not 'virtue' being signalled; that this is in truth anti-virtue signalling.
Modern virtue-signalling is in reality signalling the inversion of virtue.
Up to fifty-ish years ago (but you'd need to go back more than a century in the case of upper class intellectuals); virtue-signalling was advertising traditional virtues such as Christian faith, altruism, kindness, charitableness, prudence, courage and so forth.
What was wrong with old virtue-signalling - for a Christian - was that it was 'hypocritical' in a Biblical sense (the sense by which the Pharisees were hypocritical; of falsely-claiming actually to live by the highest standards professed. It was the false claim that was wrong - not the standards).
But with traditional virtue-signalling, the actual virtues being-signalled were indeed virtuous...
However, in contrast, the 'virtues' that are being signalled now, in our modern world of political correctness, are almost-wholly straightforward vices and sins; or abstract evil-in-practice principles - such as equality, diversity, or social justice.
So the real point about modern so-called virtue-signalling is that is an advertisement of, and propaganda-for, moral corruption.
Modern virtue-signalling is of achieved self-corruption in the sense of endorsing up-ended transcendental values of truth, beauty, and virtue in unity; and a recommendation that others become similarly corrupted.
Modern virtue-signalling is therefore celebrating and promoting tendentious dishonesty, ugliness and short-termist materialist selfishness (mashed-together in a metaphysically-incoherent mess).
That's why modern virtue-signalling is not merely hypocrisy: it is actively evil.
"A neglected aspect of so-called virtue-signalling in modern Leftism: it signals moral inversion and the desire to corrupt others"
1 Comment -
Nice post. Contemporary virtue signaling by the Left is genuflection to 'pathological altruism', the latter a real and identifiable phenomenon in social psychology. The leftist virtue signaling we are witnessing nowadays is straight outta Raspail's "Camp of the Saints".
25 June 2017 at 04:46