At last, there’s an official label for that thing everyone’s doing these days, and which makes so many forms of public conversation (and some private ones) so intensely annoying: “moral grandstanding”. Moral grandstanders are those obnoxious types who go around stridently declaring their beliefs, enthusiastically joining social-media shamings, and so on, not because they feel so strongly, but because they want people to admire them for how astoundingly moral they are. (It’s a better term than “virtue signalling”, for various reasons, including that the latter has become an all-purpose insult, flung at moral grandstanders and everyone else alike.) According to new research, it’s real, widespread across the political spectrum, and probably a big reason everything feels so fighty these days. There are real things to fight about, of course. But there are also lots of people who are just a little too happy to be fighting.
And yet I don’t think “moral grandstanding” quite nails the problem, either, because – as the philosophers who coined the term make clear – it assumes conscious intent. To be a moral grandstander, you have to know you’re being insincere, motivated by the desire to boost your brand. Whereas I’m almost certain that if you could get inside the heads of certain blowhards one might mention, just as they’re about to tweet, or blog, or address the House of Commons, you’d find them burning with sincere conviction. (Certainly, that seems to be the case when it comes to the only blowhard whose head I actually can get inside.) After all, if you were fully conscious of your outsized need for the adulation of strangers, you might seek therapy, or write about it in your journal, or grapple with it in some other way. It’s precisely to the extent that we aren’t aware of such needs, surely, that we instead go barrelling out into the world to try to get them met.
And while it’s an unacceptably Freudian stance to take, these days, it probably makes sense to view a lot of life this way: to assume that everyone you encounter is engaged in trying to meet various emotional needs, of which they’re at least partly unaware. I assume that anyone who boasts about how happy they are being single, or married, or childless, or a parent is probably insecure about those choices; that people who behave destructively do it in a misguided effort to heal deeply buried wounds; and that people become celebrities, not because of a surplus of talent, but because they lack the thing that makes non-celebrities OK with being ordinary.
Maybe it’s not an iron law. But I’m fairly sure it’s a more useful working assumption than the inverse one, which is that we mainly understand ourselves, and mainly have everything together, and that when people do bad things, it’s because they just arbitrarily decided to be bad. (You must apply the same reasoning to yourself, though; otherwise it’s just another way to try to maintain your feelings of superiority.)
None of this is to excuse appalling behaviour. But there’s a certain rueful camaraderie in the thought that none of us knows exactly what’s motivating us – and that our moral grandstanding, along with all the rest of our obnoxiousness, is as much of a mystery to ourselves as it is an irritant to everyone else.
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In his recent book Living An Examined Life, the therapist James Hollis ponders Jung’s observation “that whatever is denied within us is likely to come back to us in the outer world as fate”.
