Virtue signaling is great actually.
Clearly communicating our values can prevent a lot of grief and help stand up for what’s right.
Early on before I started writing more explicitly about politics I got a couple of “I love your blog but why don’t you write more about the supremacy of the Aryan Race?” and I’m like oh no, down the line something went wrong and I’d better make it more clear how I feel about the world and why. Everyone is welcome to read and since I have a lot of opinions on everything, some of them wrong, I don’t expect anyone to agree on everything but if I can make someone see the world a li’l differently that’s great.
In discourse lately I’m seeing a gap where on the one hand we have straight up apology for evil, excuses for abuse, for sexism, for racism, and DARVO attacks on “woke” and on “virtue signaling”. On the opposing hand we have self-proclaimed saints who have never (or at least never since they proverbially woke up) had a kyriarchal or jealous or problematic thought or notion. And when these saints fall they fall very far and very fast.
What’s missing is a way to cultivate awareness of our shortcomings and in order to better ourselves. I’d trust “I sometimes have racist thoughts that I try to catch and see through and examine and not get fooled by” over either “I’ve never been problematic (or I haven’t since I became a born-again intersectional feminist)” or, worse, “here’s a 39 chapter book on why racism is good actually and anything else is virtue signaling woketry”.
The former camp, intersectional social justice, y’all know I love you and this isn’t a slag on you but what I wanna add to that worldview is a bit of solution-orientedness and awareness practice. I have thought, said, and even done things I would wanna cancel myself over but treating each other right is a process.
I think this one example of this that’s easy to understand just for how ridiculous it is, is how sometimes new vegans can forget how up until three months ago they themselves were among the meat-eaters they now attack.
We’ve all been there, so I don’t blame them, it’s just illustrative of how sometimes it’s so easy to see the motes in our fellow humans’ eyes while we ourselves are so deep in timberland we don’t even notice the forest.
That’s not an apology for bad things; it’s a reveille against bad things, against the bad things in us all.