Virtue Signaling

This June, only five us stood outside our city’s cathedral to hold up our “Ordain Women” signs as men only were being ordained inside. So few were able to attend the witness this year, we almost did not come at all fearing we would look weak or pathetic with such low numbers. But it was the pandemic that had reduced the numbers, and we hoped the risks some of us were able to take in coming at all (masked and distanced) would signal our commitment to justice.

I have one regret about the day: instead of casually chatting to each other as we stood there, I wish we had spread even farther apart and, with our masked faces and plaintive signs, held a totally silent witness. How more powerful a signal that would have been.

Experts have written volumes and volumes on the art of persuading others, and we still so often have so little knack for it. Shout, cajole, tell poignant stories, project vivid images. Or try resistance or persistence, witnesses, reasoned arguments, furious actions, tears, satire, listening, reasoning, waiting, and that especially trying for me option, patience and still so little transformation so many areas. Let’s look, for example, at trying to convince, hmmm say, the Catholic Church hierarchy to change its attitude toward, and treatment of, women who are called to leadership and ministry. What means of persuasion could we possibly have left?

Actually, I came across one, a nicely counter-intuitive possibility which only makes it more beguiling. How about if we all do a little – or a lot – of “virtue signaling”?

Of course, the nasty definition of this usually stops us. None of us want to be accused of “moral grandstanding,” of publically touting our righteous support of a cause merely as a way of self-aggrandizement or self-promotion. None of us want to be like oil companies that advertise their gifts to charitable causes as they pollute and destroy the earth; organizations that publically voice how Black Live Matter when their corporation’s employees are all white; politicians that…oh, let’s not go there, you get the picture. The whole point is we don’t want people or groups to just “signal” their virtue and do nothing virtuous. We want them to act on what they signal, to mean what they say, to change for the better. I’m also talking about you, Catholic Church hierarchy.  

Yet, as much as we want true reform, not just empty gestures, there is something valuable in the actual signaling itself. Jamil Zaki and Mina Cikara, professors of psychology at Stanford and Harvard Universities respectively, wrote a short piece “In Defense of Virtue Signaling” in the July 6/13 issue of Time. They pointed out that too much emphasis on the motives of the signalers “obscures their most important role”: their ability to persuade.

The psychological theory goes something like this: People are often insecure when it comes to how and when to respond to issues and need the voices of others to affirm what they are thinking and planning to do. In fact, despite social media, most people are not sure what the majority of people think about many issues, and so they “gravitate toward whoever they can hear, … and when a particular viewpoint gets a lot of attention, people assume it’s popular and shift toward it. We receive signals and are changed by them.” The motive the signalers have – well, it would be nice if they were genuinely virtuous and eventually it will be critical that they are – may not initially be as important as the power of their voices.

It’s worth a try, I think, and so I propose, let’s take a chance and signal our virtues. Let’s tell people about the work we are doing, the causes we are supporting, the volunteering, the self-searching, the listening, the books we are reading and the speakers we are hearing. Let’s be dramatic where that is effective and humble where that is. People want to know they are not alone in what they are thinking or feeling. As the authors say, we should “realize that the power that signals have in and of themselves in helping people locate one another on the path to change.” 

And the good news is: We really are virtuous. So let the signaling begin!