I’ve been thinking a lot about virtue signaling lately. It’s a term that’s been popular for a decade or so, peaking around the Black Lives Matter protests. It is used to refer to the practice of publicly displaying support for a cause in low-cost, low-commitment ways. Most often you’ll hear it accompanied by a sneer and the suggestion that if the virtue signaler really cared about their cause, they would do something more effective than just wearing a button, boycotting a restaurant, joining a march, or displaying a yard sign. You’ll frequently hear celebrities and college students accused of it. It’s never a compliment.
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I get it. I really do. The 1990s Red Ribbon Project drew important attention to the silence and shaming surrounding the AIDS crisis. But the full Pantone color chart of ribbons to raise awareness for other diseases has diluted the effectiveness of that original ribbon, which had been an important cue for the kind of media attention that helped spur a meaningful response to the AIDS crisis. And even at its most attention-getting, a ribbon is only a ribbon.
It would be easy to accuse ribbon wearers of virtue signaling and to hold them in contempt. Plenty of people do. Some people even go so far as to encourage “vice signaling” as a more honest counterpoint to virtue signaling. The mind of a vice signaler works like this: “We all know that dropping some spare change into a panhandler’s coffee cup won’t solve anything. It isn’t anything more than a cheap virtue signal used to make you feel better about yourself. To prove how superior I am to such meaningless charades, I will not only not give that person my spare change, I will also tell them to get a job or go to hell. That way everyone will know that I’m not falling for the con job of virtue signaling.” Rather than wearing a ribbon, a vice signaler might tell every ribbon wearer he meets that he can see how little they care about the disease in question.
I guess that’s one way to go about things, being so confident in the correctness of one’s answers, the superiority of one’s intellect, and the futility of addressing big problems with small gestures that mocking others’ good intentions might even pass for wisdom.
But at the same time I’ve been thinking about how big and intractable the problems we face are, and about the old joke that goes “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” I’ve been thinking about the opening of Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird. She writes,
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
Maybe small steps do matter. A political philosophy that is marked by skepticism about grand plans, men of system, and the romance of politics should recognize the importance of small signals that indicate that someone cares, even a little bit, about something we think matters. It’s nonsense for liberals to insist that people refrain from voicing opinions about politics until they can guarantee the kind of massive structural change that we otherwise find so suspicious.
I recently joined about a thousand of my neighbors to march in protest against a rally in favor of the mass deportation of immigrants. It was hosted near the quiet Indianapolis suburb where I live. Probably spurred by community objections to the opening of an ICE office in the next town over, by the presence in my suburb of the largest mosque in the state of Indiana, and by a lieutenant governor who has made no secret of his anti-immigration sentiments, news of the mass deportation rally was all over social media, and I was fielding daily queries from friends who wanted to know what the heck I was doing living in a town that could countenance this. My kids were getting angrier by the minute and despaired over a state and a nation where people could think that a mass deportation rally was something to celebrate.
Academic that I am, I spent a lot of time after I heard about the rally talking about the importance of free speech and the right to assemble. I talked to the kids and my friends about the Nazis marching through Skokie and why I thought their right to do so was important. I also talked about the research I’d seen on the contributions immigrants made to America, to my community, and to my own family, and why those were important. I talked about how the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in the country might be targeted at one or two groups to begin with, but it would be leveled at all of us soon. I wrote to my mayor to tell him all these things as well.
Those one-on-one conversations and targeted emails to people in power were almost certainly more effective than getting up, putting on my sneakers, and carrying a sign through the streets of Fishers, Indiana for a few hours. No one would have noticed if I hadn’t marched. (I almost didn’t, in fact, because thunderstorms were looming.)
But I did march. And while my state and my country’s cultural reckoning over issues as large, complex, and contentious as immigration is not going to be solved, or even eased, by the actions of one middle-aged Midwestern mom, it would be inaccurate to dismiss the importance of the march as mere virtue signaling. And that’s not because I think there’s anything particularly special about me. It’s because I think there are several things that are very special about virtue signaling.
Virtue signaling is visible. One of the reasons some people scoff at virtue signaling is because they say it is performative—that the actions taken by virtue signalers are only done because other people see them. David Shariatmadari commented in The Guardian that virtue signaling is a form of vanity. But I think the performative aspect is exactly why virtue signaling is valuable. I marched because I wanted my kids to know that anti-immigrant actions and sentiments are not something that I will silently accept. I marched because I wanted my neighbors to know the same thing. And, though I didn’t know it when I set out, I marched because I wanted the families who stood in their doorways wearing traditional dress from their home countries to see friendly faces on the sidewalks of their town on a day when they felt threatened. None of that will change the political kerfuffle over immigration one bit. But it might help change my neighborhood just a little. And that’s valuable to me.
Virtue signaling models the norms we value. Jacob Levy has persuasively argued here at Liberalism.org for the importance of norms in fighting for a liberal culture. He writes,
Even in a place with litter everywhere, we can still make sense of what a person is doing who declines to litter, or who makes it a point to clean up a little bit every time they go for a walk. They’re doing their part, even if no one else is. If they’re just one person, they’re probably exercising a virtue rather than following a norm, but they might be trying to set a norm: They aim to show by good example and to get others to think about what they’ve been doing.
Virtue signaling is one of the ways we can do that. It is valuable because it demonstrates and models support for the cultural norms that hold us together. In the case of the march, those norms include the ideal of America as a diverse nation that welcomes those from other countries, the importance of peaceful assembly, and the responsibility we each have to look out for one another and to protect the vulnerable.
Virtue signaling crowds out vice signaling. Levy’s piece also warns about the danger of norm erosion, which is what happens when our support for and modeling of important norms lessens and allows them to erode or collapse completely. In much the same way that bad money drives out good money, vice can crowd out virtue. Vice signaling can also crowd out virtue signaling, drowning us all in a tsunami of the worst of human behavior—and in cheap shows of support for it. We face a cultural moment when the space for liberal ideas is smaller by the day, and the voices ranged against those ideas are louder, angrier, and more uncivilized by the minute. Knowing that, it strikes me as irresponsible, perhaps even immoral, to discourage even the smallest effort—a button, a ribbon, a handmade protest sign—that raises a voice to support a virtue we value. There may be more effective and more efficient ways to support a liberal society, but every signal that someone wants to be on our team needs to be respected and valued, not rejected for not being enough.
Virtue signaling changes you. But maybe the most important thing about virtue signaling is not what it does to the world around us, but what it does to us. The day I left my house for the march, I was angry at my community and at my neighbors. I was full of the kind of sick despair that has immobilized me for some time now. But taking a small action—no matter how small—helped restore me. And seeing others willing to take those small actions along with me helped even more. I can’t change the world, or the country, or the country’s immigration policy, or even the bad actors who live near me, but I can change myself. When I do that, I get better and braver and more inclined to do the things—wear a button, carry a sign, write an article—that might change something somewhere down the line.
This is how we rebuild a liberal order instead of watching it collapse around us. Not all at once. Not by hoping for a strongman on our own side. Not by moving fast and breaking things. And not by mocking those who sincerely want to help. We do it bite by bite and bird by bird.
