Patrick West: Virtue Signalling

Showing posts with label Virtue Signalling. Show all posts

Thursday, 19 November 2020

Barnardo's should know better about 'white privilege' - Spectator Coffee House, 12/11/20

Barnardo's should know better about 'white privilege'
By Patrick West

Corporations and charities virtue signalling has become a familiar spectacle in everyday life. Sainsbury's, Virgin West Coast, HSBC, Ben & Jerry's, Gillette and Nike have all pronounced their various anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-gay, pro-trans principles. The latest to join in this festival of conspicuous compassion is Barnardo’s, which yesterday pronounced on the matter of 'white privilege'. Unveiling its new guide on this hot topic for parents, the children's charity said:

'Talking about white privilege means looking at how our own actions maintain and support racist systems and structures.'

Unsurprisingly, this has generated some angry responses. 'As a former Barnardo’s Boy, I find your stance as disappointing as it is nonsensical,' was one reply. 'Where was my white privilege when I was left in Hull Maternity Hospital at 2 days old? Where was my white privilege when I was in several short-term foster homes prior to going into care in?'

Another added: 'Been on the breadline for most of my life, been homeless too, is it too late to apply for my white privilege?'

This furious backlash is no surprise – and Barnardo’s should have known better. People are growing tired of smug institutions parroting ill-defined, contentious topics like 'white privilege'. As many of those replying to Barnardo's message have pointed out, poor people come in all colours. Being white doesn't automatically confer privilege. White working class people increasingly hate being demonised on account of their skin pigmentation, especially by affluent white liberals, who compensate by disdaining whites who are poorer and less sophisticated than them.

Walk into any bookshop and witness how the issue of race both consumes and narrows our thinking on culture and society. This monomania has made us blind to the issue of class, a category of people who don't exist in woke thought. According to Ibram X Kendi, the author of How to be an Antiracist, 'the original sin is racism', a statement which reflects how racism has become the ultimate transgression today, a heresy that has terrible consequences.

You would have thought that 'progressive' doctrine, with its emphasis on 'intersectionality' – the idea that people can face multiple forms of discrimination owing to their race, sex, sexuality and so on – would recognise that the categories of privileged and underprivileged are not a black and white matter, literally. But the public manifestation of Critical Theory, which has ravaged the academy in recent years, and which has now been adopted by big business and charities, has nothing to say about class (unlike the Marxist doctrine that preceded it, which was contrarily obsessed with it).

As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay wrote in their recent book Cynical Theories, How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity: 'Privilege-consciousness has...nearly completely replaced class-consciousness as the primary concern of those on the academic, activist, and political left. ' They continue: 'This shift away from class and towards gender identity, race, and sexuality troubles traditional economic leftists, who fear that the left is being taken away from the working class and hijacked by the bourgeoisie.'

The desperate plight of white working class boys and men – who, on account of their sex and skin pigmentation, place them at the apex of privilege, according to woke doctrine – has been much-publicised. Not only are they among the poorest performers in schools, they are frequently outshone by their co-patriots professionally. As Trevor Philips wrote recently:

'The notion of white privilege would be baffling to the families of white boys who have fallen to the bottom of the education attainment league tables, and who are staring at a lifetime of sweeping the streets occupied by their affluent Indian-heritage classmates.'

We can just about tolerate the insincerity of corporations flaunting their political correct credentials. This is usually done to ingratiate themselves with customers, and sometimes to distract from the fact that they have very few black or Asian people in their upper echelons. We can also understand white, middle-class undergraduates attending Black Lives Matter rallies, too. Boasting a compassionate, left-wing outlook on life is intrinsic to being a young student, after all. And what footballer would dare refuse to 'take the knee' on the grounds of disagreeing with BLM, knowing the public opprobrium that would result in such an action?

What is unforgivable is a charity like Barnardo’s joining in this charade. Unlike mere hawkers of consumer goods, it has first-hand experience of dealing with poverty, deprivation and suffering. Unlike those responsible for issuing such declarations as the one we saw yesterday, its front-line workers will surely understand that poverty and a lack of privilege affects children and carers of all colours.

Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of Conspicuous Compassion (Civitas, 2004) and Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)

Wednesday, 7 October 2020

Why it’s fashionable to hate your own country - Spiked, October 2, 2020

Why it’s fashionable to hate your own country

This is more about parading virtue than reckoning with history.

Patrick West

If one had to explain today’s culture wars in the barest, most simple terms, the best method would be to refer to David Goodhart’s division of peoples into the Somewheres and the Anywheres. In Britain, America and elsewhere we see a conflict between those attached to their homeland, its history and its traditions, and a more affluent, mobile elite, who profess to be more internationalist in outlook – because they can afford to be – and who are less likely to revere the tradition and culture of the lands, cities and towns of their birth.

This is to put it mildly. Going back to the 1930s, as George Orwell famously observed, the Anywhere class is not so much casually indifferent to the culture of their place of birth as positively hostile to it. The ostensible internationalists of Orwell’s time venerated anything that emerged from Moscow or Paris, in contradistinction to that which stemmed from petty, boring, philistine, church-going, beer-drinking England.

The culture wars of the 21st century illustrate that this division very much remains, albeit in mutated form. This was illustrated recently by the decision of a debating society at Trinity College, Dublin to rescind an invitation to Richard Dawkins to speak at a function, on account of his critical viewpoints on Islam. Dawkins, perhaps the most famous atheist of our times, has described the faith as ‘the greatest force for evil in the world today’, and referred to the ‘pernicious influence’ of Islamic faith schools.

Atheism is the default position of most students, and anyone in their twenties who likes to style themselves as a radical freethinker will call themselves an atheist, so you might think Dawkins would find favour in their numbers. And indeed he does – but only when he is attacking Christianity. When it comes to denouncing Islam he is implicitly making the grievous transgression of racism, of attacking the Other, of something sacred and international to the Anywhere class.

To attack Christianity, something that pertains to the Self, to the Somewhere people, is conversely positively fashionable and will find you friends and allies among like-minded, ostensible and ostentatiously international types.

It is a pattern repeated elsewhere. In America we have white, liberal, coastal types mocking Donald Trump and his blue-collar supporters for being small-minded, borderline or actual racists, and for never leaving their opioid-infested, ghastly Middle American towns. In Britain we have been all too accustomed to the Remainer depiction of anti-EU Brexiteers as low-information morons from the provinces who didn’t even know what they voted for.

The white-on-white narrative between the enlightened, educated Brahmin class and the brainless Morlocks is repeated on both sides of the Atlantic, whether it be Momentum or BBC executives versus brainwashed chavs stuck in the past yearning for Empire, or white Black Lives Matter and Antifa virtue-enforcers seeking conflict with redneck MAGA types. On both sides of the Atlantic we see Anywhere liberals denounce the history of their own country as one of genocide and racism.

The abiding and inherent tendency of the people of the Anywhere class is thus to denigrate their own country. The motivation for this should be obvious, if we view this conspicuous self-hatred in terms of virtue-signalling. It is to draw attention to oneself, to display what an enlightened and decent person you are, prepared to right the wrongs of the past and confront the wrong-minded folk of the present. It’s a modern form of self-flagellation, an egocentric, narcissistic, often insincere form of romantic primitivism that goes back to Rousseau, in which the childlike, innocent Other is always sanctified as superior.

The showy politics of the Anywhere liberal-left is often politics to make you feel good. It’s posturing to make others know that you are good.

The new dogmas

Back in the late 20th century it was often observed that Western society had lost faith in its old certitudes, in its faith in reason, progress, grand narratives and objectivity itself. According to a certain coterie of mostly French intellectuals, professors among the humanities departments in universities and journalists in elevated echelons of the press, there was a consensus that we lived in a postmodern society, hopelessly mired in relativism, doubt and multiple irreconcilable interpretations. No one could really say what was true or not as there was no ultimate arbiter of truth.

How things are different today. Our society now seems in precisely an opposite impasse. We now live in a culture suffused with ferocious certitudes, in which everyone believes they possess the truth. This is why verbal conflicts on social media have become so vituperative and unpleasant. This is why political violence and conflict between factions has returned to our streets for the first time since the 1930s. This is why people hold such tenacious views on transgenderism, race, the European Union or the future of America. This is the reason for our conformist and censorious cancel culture of No Platforming. Everyone knows what’s right and seeks to silence those who are wrong. Heretics are punished, fired or brought to bear. Doubt has disappeared.

As Matthew Syed of The Sunday Times suggested at the weekend, we are living in a Counter-Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment, from Immanuel Kant to David Hume, were guided by doubt and the desire to question dogmas held by others or themselves, in order to further human knowledge and progress mankind, dogma today rules.

This is why Friedrich Nietzsche, widely misunderstood as the godfather of postmodernism, was hostile to final, absolute truth. He believed it could ultimately lead to blind ideology. As he wrote in one of his notebooks (a passage that posthumously appeared in The Will To Power): ‘The claim that the truth has been found, and that there is an end to ignorance and error, is one of the greatest temptations there is. If it is believed, it paralyses the determination to examine, to investigate, to be curious and to experiment.’

Postmodern advertising

This is not to say the spirit of postmodernity has vanished. Its embers still waft around us. Consider two television adverts for coffee now showing. One is a series of adverts for Starbucks, in which people explain how and why they transitioned. One portrays a young girl changing her identity from Jemma to James. These tell us nothing about the beverages for sale. It’s all about selling a brand as a woke value. It’s thoroughly postmodern, in that the real and represented have become utterly divorced.

Another advert, that for McDonald’s coffee, is thoroughly rooted in modernity. Its message? Its coffee is tasty and cheap. I know which brand I would prefer to buy.

A pandemic of corporate virtue-signalling - Spiked, August 21, 2020

A pandemic of corporate virtue-signalling

Let’s boycott all the money-grubbing companies that pretend to care about us.

Patrick West

You have probably spent the past five months watching a lot of television or online broadcasts or messing around on the internet, which means you will have seen a lot of adverts – most of them woke.

There’s no point singling out any one corporation for trying to make capital out of the coronavirus pandemic, because everyone has been at it since March, preaching first about the imperative to stay at home and then to stay safe – all featuring face masks and Zoom correspondence. Companies have all been very keen to prove how much they care in this crisis.

A notable exception has been the cancer charities, who appear on every television ad break complaining openly that state cash has been diverted from their work towards the Covid-19 crisis – and I salute them for doing so.

If 2020 has been the year of the pandemic, it has also been the year in which insincere corporate virtue-signalling has reached pandemic proportions. We have had McDonald’s obsessing over Black Lives Matter; HSBC reminding us that ‘we are not an island’ (while not exactly being brilliant internationalists); the Dave channel reminding us to stay in (and watch Mock The Week or QI for the billionth time); and most egregiously, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream telling us on Twitter that Britain’s attitude to illegal immigrants is totally awful.

I don’t know what these corporations are playing at. I know that most corporations seek to sell values rather than products these days, but this is getting ridiculous. Most people, from left to right, hate the vacuous posturing of greedy corporations. It’s especially galling that we have to watch them at a time when we are all gradually becoming poorer. The last thing we need during lockdown is insincere sermonising.

Thank God it’s ending at last. Now, let’s boycott all companies that deal in these meaningless and sanctimonious platitudes.

Ghost cities

On Tuesday evening, BBC Two broadcast the first of its four-part series, Manctopia: Billion-Pound Property Boom, charting Manchester’s massive building development of recent years. ‘Since 2014 the population in the city centre has doubled to 60,000 and the rents have gone up by almost 40 per cent’, we are told.

The splurge in skyscrapers in the northern city this decade has been underreported, certainly in comparison to the same (albeit more awesome and awful) boom in super-tall buildings in London. This probably owes to the fact that most of those who write the opinion articles about skyscrapers are based in London, and all the journalists who have been complaining about London’s unaffordability, gaudy ghastliness or awful skyscrapers over the years also work in the capital.

The documentary suggests that Manchester is going the same way as London – it’s becoming a city of empty luxury, where the locals are also moving out, no longer able to afford to live in their native city. Like London, over-gentrification is proving to be a double-edged sword.

As someone who grew up in London in the 1980s and lived in Manchester in the mid-1990s, I can see both sides of the argument in both cases. Parts of London, especially the now fashionable East End of London, were grim no-go areas, while its underground was a ghastly, ghostly affair back then. And while the Manchester of my time was on the way up – as epitomised by yuppie comedy Cold Feet – much of it was forlorn. The horrid tower blocks of Hulme were then only just being torn down and much of its gangster ‘Gunchester’ culture around Moss Side and Rusholme remained.

While London has improved in so many ways, in others it has lost its soul. Soho and Portobello Road have lost their Bohemian charm. Kensington and Chelsea are ghost towns at the weekend, what with all the houses being increasingly owned by the transient or not inhabited at all. I hope Manchester doesn’t go the same way, though it probably will.

While I’m not one to romanticise or trivialise being poor, the fate of London and the likely fate of Manchester remind us that money doesn’t bring us happiness. That’s why so many people voted Brexit. They did so knowing that they could be financially poorer. They did so hoping that their neighbourhoods might once more resemble those they grew up in.

That’s why I don’t celebrate the opulence of London today. I still lament the old homeliness and shabbiness of the west London I grew up in.

Ashamed to be British, proud to be Me

One of the most common expressions you hear from ostentatious liberals is ‘I’m ashamed to be British’. It is being deployed in abundance this summer in relation to the migration crisis in the English Channel. It’s a reaction to the perception that the UK government has been callous and that the plebeian populace has displayed its customary and lamentable xenophobia and racism.

Being ashamed of one’s own country is usually the hallmark of the progressive, as George Orwell famously noted in ‘England Your England’. This loathing of one’s own country has always struck me as not only vapid – as meaningless as being ‘proud to be British’ – but also devious.

Declaring hatred of one’s own country is one of the countless means humans employ to draw attention to themselves. In this case, it implies an internationalist outlook, which in turn serves to parade that you are an open-minded person with intellectual cosmopolitan concerns – with a caring attitude for one’s fellow man irrespective of his or her nationality. And more importantly, it says you are not shackled by narrow-minded patriotism – unlike the uncouth, gormless man in the street.

In other words, it signifies that one is above the mindless herd, that you are a fearsome, independent thinker. ‘I’m ashamed to be British’ can be translated as ‘I’m proud to be Me’ – a more accurate motto for the liberal left of today. Its altruistic outlook is a disguise for its cunning, narcissistic politics of conspicuous compassion and caring one-upmanship.

People like to quote Orwell when it comes to this matter, but, as ever, I defer to Nietzsche, who described Rousseau as combining ‘self-contempt and… inflamed vanity’. That’s a pretty just description of today’s overgrown teenagers who protest how much they hate themselves and hate their country.

Tuesday, 6 October 2020

How virtue-signalling defined this decade - Spiked, December 13, 2019

How virtue-signalling defined this decade

Ostentatious ‘goodness’ is now the currency of our age.

Patrick West

This decade will be remembered for many global social and political developments: the rise of populist movements; a disenchantment with mainstream political parties; increased levels of migration, and consequent antagonism to it; the sharpening of political antagonism in the public sphere; the growth of veganism, and the often connected growth of environmentalism; and a radical re-evaluation of notions of gender and sexuality.

One of the most interesting and influential developments has been the emergence of ‘virtue-signalling’, a phrase coined in 2015 by the British journalist James Bartholomew to denote the habit of expressing fashionable or acceptable opinions to ingratiate oneself with strangers and increase one’s popularity – even if uttered insincerely.

It was the most important development of the 2010s because it helped to shape the debate on all the societal shifts named above. Without the evolution of public virtue-signalling, which evolved in tandem with social media, we wouldn’t hear so much noise today from folks declaring how much they care about women’s rights, gays, the NHS, transsexuals and the environment.

Saying certain words to gain attention and popularity (often from the opposite sex), or to make you appear morally righteous, is nothing new – it’s just that it’s far easier to do now. In his 1871 work, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin introduced the idea of adaptive traits conferring on animals and humans sexual advantage. He would have recognised virtue-signalling as part of the mating game. In the same century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote copiously about people who professed to ‘care’ in order to make themselves gain the upper hand. In The Genealogy of Morals (1887), for instance, he denounced ‘that Pharisee tactic of the sick, the loud gesture, whose favourite part is that of “righteous indignation”… this hoarse indignant bark of the sickly dog, the biting, rabid deceit of such “righteous” Pharisees.’

Nietzsche was often fond of writing in a manner that mimicked and referenced the Bible (his father was a Lutheran pastor), especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5). The Pharisees were a religious movement active in the life of Christ, and are denounced in all four gospels of the New Testament for their greed, ostentatious religiosity and, well, virtue-signalling. Most witheringly, in Matthew 6:5, Jesus says of them: ‘And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen [by] men.’

Just as Nietzsche wasn’t quite the ‘Antichrist’ he professed to be, the Jesus of the New Testament wasn’t the proto-hippy do-gooder who went around saying everyone should only be really nice to each other. He could spot dubious displays of morality long before it became the most useful cliché of this decade. He denounced virtue-signalling centuries before we did.

Why Die Hard is the perfect Christmas film

At this time of year we are subjected to Christmas films on television: Scrooge, It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, Home Alone, Elf, Love Actually, and so on. We all have our favourites. For my money, it’s Die Hard (1988).

The film is perfect Christmas viewing. John McClane (Bruce Willis) is a classic American cop of detective lore: slightly lost with a broken marriage, smoking too much, too trigger-happy, but with a human heart and true righteousness on his side. He really does want to kill the baddies and save the innocents.

Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber is similarly ideal, a German played by an Englishman (two evil accents in one man). Elsewhere, we have a sympathetic beat cop, corrupt Feds and an unctuous television journalist who gets his comeuppance.

Die Hard is a violent action film featuring very little realistic violence – most baddies are shot dead without shedding any blood. In this, it’s more like a comic book.

It’s a Christmas film that you can watch any time of year, the festival itself playing only a perfunctory role. It has emotion without being schmaltzy. And most of all, it has loads of explosions.

The year ahead with Mystic Dave

spiked’s resident clairvoyant gives his predictions for 2020.

January: Having been given a book token for Christmas, Jeremy Corbyn ventures into his local Waterstones to buy a book. ‘Hello? I understand that you sell what I understand are called books? I would like one, please.’ ‘What book would you like?’, replies the attendant. ‘A red one, please. And with pictures.’

February: Michel Barnier delivers a speech urging tolerance and understanding between the EU and the UK: ‘All we ask for is cooperation, teamwork and unity. If the UK doesn’t agree and once again issues the usual fugue of whining and complaint, it will be destroyed piece by piece, man, woman and child. Shall I be plain? I wish these bastards dead. Blood! Blood! Blood!’

March: Following Catalonia’s declaration of independence, Europe is hit by a wave of secessions. The latest is the Belgian enclave of Baarle-Hertog in the Netherlands, which declares independence from Belgium. In turn, the eight Dutch counter-enclaves declare autonomy from Baarle-Hertog. Eventually, everyone declares independence for themselves.

April: Shooting begins for Star Wars 10, featuring gay Ewoks and trans Stormtroopers. An intergalactic war ensues over who are the ‘real’ victims.

May: Television’s smash hit this spring is Channel 5’s The Boy With a Bum for a Face.

June: The UK and the US lower their voting age to the moment of conception. ‘Ageism is simply no longer tolerated in the year 2020’, says one campaigner

July: A new social movement, transracialism, sweeps Europe, with white people seeking operations to turn their skin black. Opponents are described as ‘literally worse than Nazis’.

August: The film Downton Abbey II gets a lukewarm response, with the audience pointing out that the Austin Eight didn’t go into production until 1939. Other glaring anachronisms include Mr Carson the butler wearing a digital watch, a Commodore 64 in the stately reading room, and the entire film being set on the International Space Station.

September: Breathairianism, the new fad diet in which people eat and drink nothing, sweeps the globe.

October: Coldplay denounce the new cult of Breathairianism. ‘Human breathing is literally killing the planet’, says Chris Martin.

November: An undiscovered manuscript by Friedrich Nietzsche is discovered, entitled: Beware the Below-Men: Why I really don’t like commuting on the subway. I hate their herd mentality. I really do.

December: Greta Thunberg’s cousin, Anna, currently in the womb, is named by Time magazine as fetus of the year.

Sunday, 1 December 2019

Spectator Coffee House, November 28, 2019

What happened to all the 'Vote Tory' signs?

General Election time in Britain invariably means you're going to see one thing on the streets: loads of Labour, Green and Lib Dem posters displayed outside people's houses and in front windows, but hardly any Conservative ones. In my 11 years living and travelling around Kent, I haven't seen a single one. The last time I saw one was in the Holland Park area of West London in the early 1990s. If you live in a city centre, they are a rare species indeed.

This has been the pattern for decades now, especially since the Thatcherite 1980s, when Rik Mayall's character in the comedy The Young Ones popularised the notion that all Tories were 'capitalist scum or 'fascists' (even though the character was an imbecile, and actually a send-up of student radicals). By then it had become the popular consensus that Tories were selfish and money-obsessed and that to vote Labour was an act of supreme virtue and altruism. In the last general election, I happened to find myself in the affluent north London area of Crouch End. Nearly every house was festooned with a Labour poster. These were not houses that had any material interest in seeing a Labour; quite the reverse. But I bet it made them feel as one and feel good.

As Twitter has also paradoxically illustrated since, some left-wing people, armed with an unshakeable sense of their own moral righteousness, can be quite nasty at times. There has always been that second thought that spiteful people with a grievance and who lack a sense of doubt might put a brick through a window bearing Conservative poster.

This consensus hasn't changed much, especially in more recent years. A few years ago, James Bartholomew of this magazine coined the term 'virtue signalling, to indicate people voicing an opinion, usually a left-wing one, and often without sincerity, to ingratiate yourself with your peers.

I like to think I got there first, at least in the context of British society, having written a short book in 2003 which described what I called 'conspicuous compassion'. This phenomenon had shown its roots back in 1985 with Live Aid, where people successfully joined in something bigger than themselves, sung along with Status Quo and Queen and helped prop up a Marxist dictator as a consequence.

The real watershed came in 1997. Like many people I found the public outpouring following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales unreal. There were signals that displays of emotionalism combined with ostentatious, unconvincing and indeed menacing signs of 'compassion' were becoming the order of the day. 'Show us you care!', some demanded of the Queen.

The 1990s was the decade in which Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, playing the uncuous DJs Smashy 'n' Nicey, would liked to boast: 'we do a lot of work for charidee.. but we don't like to talk about it.'

In real life, ribbons for all manner of causes began to proliferate. Remembrance Day poppies got bigger and bigger and were sported earlier and earlier. Minutes' silence began to be held for tragedies that were diminishing in gravity. Politicians like Tony Blair were beginning to apologise for historical sins, an act that cost him zero in emotional investment.

Anti-war marchers seemed less interested in actually stopping conflicts, but keener to brag about their personal distaste for them. 'Not in my name' was their slogan. This was compassion inflation, mourning sickness. It was not the sign of a more caring society. It was the symptom of a cynical, atomised one that would seize any opportunity to bond with strangers.

Of course, neither 'virtue signalling' or 'conspicuous compassion' described something new. The ideas have their origins in Charles Darwin's 1871 book, The Descent of Man, which describes how saying or doing the wrong thing is all part of the sexual selection game. You are not going to get a girlfriend at university if you declare yourself a Tory. Conversely, once you get to middle age you don't really care what anyone's going to think of your political views.

By the new millennium I was reading a lot of Friedrich Nietzsche. One quote from Human, All To Human convinced me that he had predicted the future and that I had to write a book about the cranky old German: 'Observe how children weep and cry, so that so that they will be pitied... Thus the thirst for pity is a thirst for self-enjoyment, and at the expense of one's fellow man.' Somehow his infamous loathing of compassion no longer seemed so perverse.

Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)