Hindsight
About this idea (or taunt) that discussion of slavery or colonial conquest and plunder or similar injustices in the past is mere “virtue signaling.” One, there is the fact that it is a taunt, and depending on the context can be a very snide one, but two there is the fact that there are other ways of looking at it, one of which is the “I could have been part of that” awareness.
That is to say, when we discuss the awful things that some people did to other people in the past, we’re not necessarily patting ourselves on the back; we can just as well be cringing at how easily we could have done the same depending on time and place of birth.
I can’t possibly be the only one who thinks about that in such discussions. Surely most people do! People who think enough to read about it, that is. People like Trump don’t, of course, but people who give a rat’s ass do.
It’s not “virtue signaling” so much as it is “thank fuck we didn’t live there at that time or we could have been doing what everyone else was doing.”
The inverse of that thought is “why wasn’t it as obvious to them as it is to us?” That question was a live one in the Congresses that preceded the Civil War. How did Preston Brooks manage to be so confident of his righteousness that he nearly killed Charles Sumner on the Senate floor? What wrongs are we overlooking that will be blindingly obvious 100 years from now?
I think that’s part of the reason trans ideology has such a firm grip: its fans are convinced it’s one of those revolutions that all decent people will approve of 100 years from now.
Fun fact: when people are asked what they would have done if they had been subjects in the Milgram experiment, the vast majority say they would have stopped pushing the button. That can’t be right, because in reality the vast majority did not stop. That’s a useful thing to remember, in my view. Maybe we wouldn’t have been abolitionists, maybe we wouldn’t have been anti-fascists. Maybe we wouldn’t have been on the less evil side. We don’t know, we can’t know.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks about that. I always assume I would be on the side of the abolitionists, and I might have been with my family’s history, but that isn’t anything like certainty. I look back at my younger self and think of some of the things I once thought, and how much I find those things wrong now, and some of them wrongheaded. It’s a humbling exercise.
It’s a counterfactual, and so unknowable. I readily accept that if the historic circumstances had been different, I could well have finished up in the Nazi Party heiling Hitler and helping fellow Nazis herd Jews, Gypsies, dissidents and the rest into the gas chambers.
However, there is such a phenomenon as empathy, which like skin melanin, we all have to various extents. It is well summed-up in that saying of Confucius: ‘Do not do to others what you would not have others do to you.’ I contend that it rests in turn, possibility, and practice on our innate and varying abilities to empathise; to mentally project ourselves into another’s place.
I once caught and stopped my son (he was 5 years old at the time) while he was in the process of making petrol bombs. It turned out that he was planning to use one or more of them on a CSIRO animal research laboratory nearby to where we live, and which he had learned somewhere was into performing experiments on live animals that he deemed to be cruel.
He could have finished up featuring as top story on the TV news.
I often think that while I might well have questioned the morality of slavery–simply because I’m a questioner in general–I’m not at all sure I would have done anything about it. Would I at least have spoken up? Or would I have simply rationalized it, accepted it–That’s The Way Things Are Done (passive voice)–what you gonna do?
That of course is what the Milgram experiment showed. Most of the subjects were conflicted about pushing the button, but they did it anyway, because they were told by an authority figure that it was the thing to do. It was a necessary part of the experiment.
I’ve been thinking about the “virtue signalling” thing, wondering what exactly it is that I think it is, and I think you’ve clarified a piece of it for me—I respond with disdain when I perceive the signaller to be assuming that they are pure. That they are certain they are on The Right Side of History, simply because they (think they) are Good, and belong to the Tribe of the Good. That, I think, is behind many a fluff of many an autogynephile–the signaller isn’t lying; she really does think the trans-identified man she’s praising is brave, and even stunning in some sense–but she’s moved to speak primarily by a desire to signal “Here I am on the Good Side.” Or so I imagine. Very possibly wrongly.
Sometimes, of course, we imagine ourselves on the losing end of these historical scenarios. What if I were a slave? What if my nation had just lost a war? I’m sure that imaginative empathy underlies many a supporter of the trans narrative: “what if I were a trans person, and was always getting stared at and laughed at and was the object of sneers and nasty comments?” But there is where empathy can lead us astray: our sympathy for individuals can lead us to accept any narrative that promises it will ease their suffering.
Lady M @ 3 – and of course there’s also the possibility of questioning the morality of abolition. “These people are not equipped for what you call freedom. They would be lost without us. We provide them with food and shelter; they are safe with us; they don’t want to leave; it’s cruel of you to force them into independence when they won’t know what to do with it.” Margaret Mitchell included a rationalization of that kind in GWTW.
I like iknklast’s point about realising that things one thinks and feels are wrong, and how humbling it is. And, really, it is more ‘feels’ than ‘thinks’, since one imbibes prejudices unwittingly from one’s earliest years (this is far from being necessarily a bad thing, since it helps our survival), and is formed by them. There is no other way of growing up, and there is no ‘intellect’ or ‘intelligence’ or ‘mind’ standing above us in some Platonic space that knows in some absolute way what is right and true independently of that which has formed us.
To live outside your country, in a culture that is very different to yours, as I have done for fifty years, can be (and should be) often an alarming experience since it brings to the conscious level prejudices that you hadn’t realised you had, and are ashamed to recognise that you have; though there are those who prefer to remain trapped in a bubble that they strive to keep impermeable, largely, I suspect, out of fear. I know that there are still remnants of such a bubble about me.
That ‘Platonic’ and pure intellect is of course the dream of AI. In his book ‘The First: How to think about Hate Speech…’, Stanley Fish has a splendid chapter entitled ‘Why Transparency is the Mother of Fake News’, in which he takes issue with the dreams of Zuckerberg, Musk, et al. I would say it is required reading.
Indeed. William F. Buckley Jr. used an updated version of that argument when he opposed desegregation and civil rights legislation. (He did apparently change his mind, eventually.)
I’m a coward, but I’m honest. My BFF got in a tizzy when I said I probably wouldn’t have hidden any Holocaust victims in my cellar, but I figure how much is he really willing to risk? He has a kid; I don’t, I just want to remain unmolested. It’s the same with all these armchair revolutionaries. I’m very much the sort of person MLK was bitching about in his Letter from a Birmingham jail (the bit about the “white moderate” I’m pretty sure).
Would I be more virtuous if tested? Perhaps, but as conflict adverse (despite the name!) as I am I’d probably just go with the flow. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t engage in stuff that made other people’s lives harder on purpose, but am pretty sure I wouldn’t be part of any movement or revolution that sought to change things all that much in a short period of time.
For many years, now, I’ve often said that to be a true progressive, you actually have to embrace the idea that someday, your descendants will wonder how the hell you could’ve thought the things you do today. In many ways, it parallels the scientific thought, which must not merely accept, but enjoy, discovering that you’ve been wrong about something. When you stop testing the possibility of your own wrongness, that is when you have ceased to be either a progressive or a scientific thinker.
This is what I meant to express with the ”landmine” metaphor (as opposed to the ”ticking time bomb” metaphor). It’s not that some people – other people – are pre-set to go off at a specific time regardless of the environment (like time bombs). It’s that we all have buttons that will set us off if pushed. Some may have the dumb luck to get through their whole lives without having any of the wrong buttons pushed, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. It is my sad conviction that the only thing that keeps most of us from blowing people’s legs off is that the right set of impossibly shitty reasons simply haven’t presented themselves yet, and when they do nothing can stop us from embracing it with every fiber of our being and letting others pay the price – any price.
And once again nothing defines humanity like the ability to make ourselves believe whatever it takes to make us right and ”them” wrong. This is why the ”good intentions” excuse can only get you so far. There are no brownie points for doing the right thing as one sees it if the way one sees it is based on motivated reasoning rather than any honest effort to find out. Again William Clifford’s article on The Ethics of Belief is essential reading.
Sadly enough, there are plenty of people left and right that are concerned about racism who are adamant that had they been born back then, they would definitely have been as anti-[bad thing] as they are today. Because they’re good, dammit, and good people would never stand for that bad thing. It’s as if personalities and moralities are built into a person, rather than shaped by their circumstances and experiences.
Aaaaand pipped at #4.
Thank you, Bjarte – I have ordered ‘The Ethics of Belief’ on your recommendation. i also largely agree with your general pessimism; and that native pessimism is why I regard Hobbes as one of the very greatest political philosophers – he has few, or no illusions.
Thank you, Tim. I think you will find it interesting. :)
The closure of the thread which inspired this slightly annoyed me, because it happened in between when I started writing a meditation on the macroeconomic effects of slavery (in particular, whether slavery is a source of wealth for societies in general and for Age-of-Exploration European powers in particular, with the upshot being “probably not” and “it had a non-negligible but probably not overwhelming effect”, respectively), but I guess I can spruce up that a bit and publish it at me own someday.
On the subject of hindsight (and implied foresight), two points spring to mind. One, naturally, is that it is very difficult to imagine how one would have felt at a given time in the past — you will have grown up in a different environment, with different values and different information. Perhaps, by sheer luck, you would have been sympathetically exposed to the views and individuals who laid the ideological groundwork for your current beliefs, but that is, at best, a roll of the dice. (I can imagine Ophelia being drawn to Emmeline Pankhurst and John Stuart Mill and Thomas Paine were she a contemporary of theirs and thus articulating similar precepts to those she has in real life, for example, assuming she were fortunate enough to have become literate…but even that assumption is an enormous one to take.) The exercise, taken honestly, requires a level of imagination and empathy and knowledge of the past that are beyond most people’s patience to develop.
I recall a former colleague of mine commenting on judging people in past eras; his insight was that if they were a good enough person for their era and circumstance, then they were good enough, even if they hadn’t magically found the constellation of traits considered virtuous by early twenty-first century Westerners. Of course we have our Malcolm Xes and Frederick Douglasses and John Browns whose answers to one or a few specific questions may still be seen as something to which we should aspire, but each of them had attitudes and attributes we may consider failings which a sufficiently-woke person could use to cast them into the abyss.
The second point that comes to mind is that history does not progress in one direction (contra the rhetorical flourish from Dr. King), and neither does morality; imagining future generations looking back on us with baffled disgust, as we are prone to do to our own ancestors, does not guarantee that we would not do the same to them. Those collective descendents of ours will be just as fallible, just as amenable to group think and biases and bad incentives, and just as certain in their own righteousness as we tend to be.
A corollary is that the people we would not consider moral exemplars, people who just went along to get along (or perhaps even people we consider to have been actively evil) deserve some measure of sympathy for the circumstances of their births and lives — even the psychopaths were prisoners of the materials of their minds. Most of them were content to live their lives as more-or-less “good people”, and indeed, the worst of the worst of them tended to be the most convinced of their own righteousness.
It seems the opening of the Milgram archives at Yale a few years ago, and availability of the actual recordings of the experiments, have led some scholars to re-evaluate Milgram’s general popularised conclusions, and look more specifically at what variables and conditions were most likely to lead subjects to obey the experimenters (and thus what conditions were conducive to leading subjects to defy the experimenters):
https://theconversation.com/revisiting-milgrams-shocking-obedience-experiments-24787
Some of the few women subjects, in particular, were not having it:
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/women-who-defied-milgram-experiment/
@Ophelia:
I have a suspicion that the opening sentences …
… might be related to my comments on a previous thread. So, just for the record, I was not suggesting that any and all “discussion of slavery or colonial conquest and plunder or similar injustices” amounts to “virtue signalling”.
I was using that term specfically about the exaggeration of faults, the painting of people as pantomime villains, in order to distinguish oneself from them. That’s the opposite of an “I could have been part of that” awareness.
(People can judge for themselves which of those two attitudes the comment I pointed to was displaying.)
Despite what some commenters are surmising, I’m all for a factual, open and honest account of history.
DD @ 16 – oh damn, I’m sorry about the lost comment.
Coel. “Just for the record” you were aggressively snide, and then you repeatedly refused to apologize. I don’t care what you are or aren’t “all for.” I object to the de haut en bas way you talk at us. I don’t want to block you but I wouldn’t be at all sad if you just stopped talking at us for some time.
Re: #11 (Bjarte Foshaug)
++1 about Clifford. Essential. I’ve been foisting his essay off onto friends for more years than I care to acknowledge. Many profess gratitude and eye-opening-ness. Some have found it too inconvenient to bear, and so ignore it.
For those interested, the Clifford essay is available to read online at infidels.org.
BTW a Google search found this online.
I last re-read it a few years ago.
https://infidels.org/library/historical/w-k-clifford-ethics-of-belief/
Well … That can also be virtue signaling. For instance, if I express agreement with your post, I’m not just conveying to you that it is right and proper to respond thus to history; I’m signaling to you and anyone else who sees my agreement that I am one of those who holds this view. (There’s even a sense in which I signal to myself, but I’m not sure that’s how the phrase is technically used.) Could I agree without signaling? Sure, by keeping my agreement to myself, or keeping it anonymous, like with a blind vote or anonymous poll. Likewise, expressing disagreement would signal to those who disagree. Even a middle-of-the-road response can signal the virtue of being above the fray, using literary references would signal erudition, and so on. Signaling is all but impossible to escape or avoid, because language is signaling. More fundamentally, social is signaling. It’s just a matter of figuring out what is being signaled in any situation.
The implicit subject of most charges of virtue signaling is the extent to which one’s actions, attitudes, and beliefs are shaped by social feedback. There’s an intuitive appeal to the idea that there’s something wrong with expressing a position solely because doing so is of social benefit. It smacks of dishonesty, among other things. But our motivations are hardly ever binary, univariate things, so we’re hardly ever entirely cynical or entirely naive. So we generally have to resort to the “too far in this direction is bad” way of thinking about it. Mostly naively expressing your opinion? Good. Significantly cynical in your choice of shibboleth? Bad.
This, of course, means introspective vigilance similar to what we get from reading history. Because falling too far in one direction due to social pressures is exactly how we end up doing what everyone else is doing. In other words, there but for the grace of God go we.
This needs to be a meme or something. A motto. A slogan.
@Ophelia:
OK, no problem, if I’m too irritating I’m happy to go elsewhere. Will do.
As for a superior tone, several here adopt that towards me, and as for being “aggressively snide”, Tim is regularly aggressively snide in making personal attacks on me, and, indeed, sometimes is quite deliberately dishonest in making those attacks (no doubt he feels he has a moral licence to act like that; such people usually do; and while I can be combative and opinionated, I’m never dishonest in that way). So I can be excused for mistaking what is acceptable here.
One of the other ways of looking at it is that it is part of history and that non-trivial events and practices in history require informed analysis and debate so that we may better understand our present culture.
Coel, I didn’t say “too irritating.” I said I object to the de haut en bas way you talk at us. All I asked you to do was withdraw or apologize for the “virtue signaling” insult. You refuse. I’m not impressed.