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Take, for example, murder. We spend a tremendous amount of resources to investigate the clues surrounding the actions of a nefarious moral agent. We turn the state into a bloodhound. Public (and sometimes private) agents look for motives and means; they seek out dust for prints; they go over timelines and locations of fellow citizens to determine opportunity. We search for weapons, we interview, we corroborate. We post bulletins seeking information from the public. We even go so far as to demand that the dead body tell its own story of its demise; the autopsy is a ghostwritten last chapter of autobiography. Murderers want to get away with it, but usually they don’t. We won’t let them.
Yet, we devote none of this energy toward publicizing a good deed done in secret. We’re happy to let people get away with secret good all day long. What gives?
We’re happy to let people get away with secret good all day long. What gives?
Yet there is something more to it. Good deeds can be done with impunity, sure, but there’s a general understanding that good deeds are made better by their privacy. We don’t work to uncover good because there is an unspoken belief (verging into a fear) that to be seen or publicly acknowledged as doing right, may, in some way, make the deed less right.
There are, to my knowledge, two intertwined traditions that have contributed rootstock to our cultural concern about public displays of good: the one Greco-Roman, and the other Christian. And while they seem to be identical species, they lead to very different moral fruit, and only one produces fruit that can sustain life.
Goodness Rings True
In Plato’s Republic, there is a conversation that centres on the nature of justice and happiness. Socrates, the protagonist, says that justice is “among those goods which he who would be happy desires both for their own sake and for the sake of their results,” while Glaucon, one of the antagonists, places justice “among goods which are to be pursued for the sake of rewards and of reputation, but in themselves are disagreeable and rather to be avoided.” To make his case, he enlists the myth of the ring of Gyges. The myth tells the story of a shepherd named Gyges. After an earthquake in Lydia, Gyges discovers a hollow bronze horse in a fissure opened by the quake. Inside that horse is a dead body. And on the finger of the body Gyges discovers a golden ring. It turns out that, just like Sauron’s ring, it makes the wearer invisible. But, unlike Bilbo, Gyges takes the ring, goes to the king of Lydia’s court, seduces the king’s wife, kills the king, and takes the kingdom. The implication?
The indifference is personal to the doer. Virtue is its own reward.
Socrates doesn’t buy it. He says that doing injustice is harmful to our nature, and harmful to our soul. We should, instead, seek to act in ways that are in accordance with our nature. And the soul is in its most natural state when it loves wisdom. Socrates says that if you want to see the soul in her nature, you need to look at “her love of wisdom”:
I think it’s safe to say that Plato is against virtue signalling. Good is a thing to be loved for its own sake. It’s not just that we shouldn’t do good for the sake of pleasing others, but that we should be indifferent about others when it comes to doing good. For the Stoics who came later, doing good was to be done with genuine indifference in the face of an indifferent cosmos. But even for Plato, for whom doing good arises out of an erotic love of the good, others in the vast ocean of humanity don’t really enter into it. The indifference is personal to the doer. Virtue is its own reward.
Vain Empty Praise
The indifference to the opinions of others when it comes to doing good seems very much in line with Christianity—particularly the words spoken by Jesus in his ministry on earth. Take this well-known passage from the Sermon on the Mount:
Yet I don’t think you can say that Jesus is opposed to virtue signalling, nor can you say that he is opposed to being just for the sake of rewards. On the contrary, Jesus seems to acknowledge that there is a built-in sociality to good deeds.
Consider the parts of the passages above that I left out. In the text, the places where I placed ellipses, Jesus says “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.” Those rewards are, ostensibly, worth something or they wouldn’t be rewards. And those rewards are real. Have you ever had someone call you a good man or woman? Has anyone ever praised you for doing good? I have. I know I’m really not a good person. If the same people who compliment me could see inside the recesses of my mind, or see how much it sometimes grieves me to get off my backside to do anything, let alone good things—or, worse, if they could see me when I get angry at my children—they’d call the cops first. But even though I know it’s not really true that I am a good man, the compliment still gives me a chemical rush, a warm glow, a sense of satisfaction that is real. And just think of the person who benefits in business deals and other worldly goods that come from being known as a person who does good. Are those things unreal? I don’t think you can say that such rewards are somehow not real without denigrating our material world. I especially don’t think this is an option for Christians, for whom the material, created world is a thing that God created and that he loves.
So why should we heed the warning that opens this section of the Sermon on the Mount? “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”
The message seems to be that while the praise you get from others for doing righteousness might seem valuable, it is a poor substitute for a more valuable thing: rewards from God. It is no coincidence that the passage on the Sermon on the Mount that immediately follows Jesus’s command to do good in secret is about treasures in heaven. Having your fellow citizens praise your good deeds is real, but at the end of the day, like the treasures that moths and vermin destroy, or that thieves may steal, they are fleeting. As Ecclesiastes teaches, they are a chasing after the wind.
Virtue as Communion
All good deeds send a signal. All signals communicate. And the highest end of communication is communion with someone else. And communion requires trust.
I’ve often wondered why Jesus seemed so obsessed with keeping his miracles secret. Scripture tells us that it is because Jesus is mindful of the timing of God, and does not want to reveal himself as the Messiah until the proper time. There is a sense that Jesus will send out a clear signal at some point, but he wants to keep the beacon hidden for the time being. Those who have eyes to see will see it, but most won’t. This makes sense.
All good deeds send a signal. All signals communicate. And the highest end of communication is communion with someone else. And communion requires trust.
I wonder: As good deeds send signals, and signals communicate, and communication is aimed at communion, does it also work the other way? Pride and concern for the self are the opposite of communion. This desire to see the self become greater leads us to untruthful communication—we send signals, but they’re false, like a beacon that leads a plane to land in the sea, rather than a runway. Why? Because we’re not really interested in communion, we’re interested in ourselves.
Worthy of Being Pleased
It’s easy to see this excess in a lot of the virtue signalling that goes on today. John Lippitt’s article in this same issue (or a quick check of most public communications platforms) shows that most of what goes for virtue signalling is really self-righteousness rooted in lies and “moral grandstanding.” On the one hand it’s pride, pure and simple. And it’s easy to condemn it. But charitably, I think even moral grandstanding has, at its root, a virtuous and deeply social impulse. The fact that we seek recognition from ideological groups (or the blue-check gods at Twitter) reveals both a deep sense of anxiety about worth and belonging that is simply human. We all want to be known, loved, and trusted. We all want to be recognized by someone whose recognition is worth it. Parents don’t condemn their kids when they say, “Look at me!” after doing something good; they delight in it. We all want—need—something like this.
Thus the answer to the problem of virtue signalling isn’t going to be found by trying to douse our signals, and following the path set out by Plato. Plato’s view—following the path of wisdom and loving the “superior principle” of the good will only exacerbate the anxieties that emerge out of the self-isolation that leads to virtue signalling in the first place.
In discussing this essay with me, my colleague Lisa Richmond pointed me to a passage in Pride and Prejudice that shows this well. Mr. Darcy, in confessing to Elizabeth, offers a good example of where a life of following a principle leads:
This illustrates the point beautifully. A life spent doing good for the sake of principle alone may be as likely to lead to pride—perhaps more—than a life spent doing good in order to gain the approval of others. The former sends a signal into a cold ether; the latter is like sending a signal into a mirror. But when we act out of a desire to please those worthy of being pleased, we have illumination.
And so, it seems, that virtue is most clearly displayed in the course of murder.
And so, it seems, that virtue is most clearly displayed in the course of murder.
There is a line in Dorothy Sayers’s novel Murder Must Advertise where the investigator of a murder in an advertising firm, Death Bredon, asks,
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
But not all advertising is created equal. Billboards, bumper stickers, most tweets and Facebook posts are rigid advertisements making one-way promises that they may or may not keep. There is media that has the pretense of being personal, but is really just a more sophisticated, subtle version of the billboard—Google ads, for example, and guerilla marketing. More traditional means include buildings named after donors, medals pinned on your lapel, a Jesus or Darwin fish, complimenting someone else’s good deeds in a public meeting to show that you, too, are part of the inner ring.
The alternative, and really the type of virtue advertising that is most virtuous and effective, is also the type of advertising that cannot be bought or sold: word of mouth. Our good deeds should be done in such a way that the focus remains on the person for whom the deed is being done. Do the deed for someone; do it for God. Focus on nothing else but the other person’s good; think of nothing else than that, in doing so, you are pleasing your neighbour and pleasing God. Don’t think of yourself at all. In doing so, you will find that the signal sends itself.
Think of the words in 1 Peter 2: “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” The signal of a good deed is clearer when you don’t stand in the way. This is how the good deeds that are associated with the kingdom of God are advertised: by the mouths of people whose lives have been changed by the good deeds. I find it particularly amusing that the only thing more insistent than Jesus’s desire not to be credited with his healings and miracles is the desire of those who are healed to let everyone know.
Jesus says, “Don’t tell anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them. Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses.”
When you do the good deed, let others do the talking for you. Care not about the talk. Care for the person, and then do what Jesus did when others started talking about his good deeds: withdraw to lonely places and pray. Your Father in heaven sees you; what more reward do you need?