Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger recently called political correctness moral condescension, a description that is as apt and appropriate as any I’ve ever heard. It even rivals George Will’s phrase synthetic outrage in pithiness and brevity.
Moral condescension is cheap and easy, and while it is nothing new, the rise of social media has made it more enticing than ever. UK columnist James Bartholomew coined the phrase virtue signaling to describe the cheap and easy way of telling the world one is a good, noble, and proper thinker that we see when people do things like change their social media profile pictures to show “solidarity” with the victims of some atrocity, use terms like “Faux News” and “tea baggers,” or share “I bet this cancer child can’t get 1000 likes” posts on Facebook. Virtue signaling involves no real effort, a feature that moral condescension shares.
Like its cousins moral superiority, self-righteousness, and egotism, moral condescension is something that has been around for a long time. People do want to believe that they are right and that those who have different opinions and beliefs are wrong, and it’s easier to embrace a sense of superiority than to give a fair hearing to every dissent or counterargument. Then there’s the psychological component. The Germans call feeling pleasure in others’ misfortune “schadenfreude,” and research supports the idea that it’s wired into us to some degree.
Its increased prevalence, however, suggests that there something more going on.
Ours is an easier, lazier, and more coddled society and way of life than that of our forebears. Fewer and fewer jobs require physical labor, and fewer and fewer of those are as purely physical as they used to be. So much of what we do nowadays happens at desks, and so much of what qualifies as physical labor doesn’t hold a candle to what people had to do 50 or 100 years ago. Houses used to be built with hand saws, draw knives, adzes, hand augers and hammers. Now, they’re built with nail guns, screw guns, power tools, cordless everything and all sorts of other technology. Cargo used to be loaded, box by box, by longshoremen and stevedores. Now, it’s containerized, and longshoremen operate cranes and other heavy equipment.
All these technological advances are Good Things, and the improved productivity they foster makes all our lives better. No rational person should want to make people work harder to produce the same level of output. But, we should take note of what we’ve been losing, and how modern societal attitudes have accelerated the losses.
There’s a special satisfaction found in making something. That something is often physical, but it doesn’t have to be. If you write a song or a book, or if you paint a painting or complete a complex piece of code, you can sit back and enjoy a genuine happiness. You don’t need outside approval, and you don’t need to seek outside approval, to feel that way. The accomplishment itself is the reward, and the greater the effort involved, the greater the reward becomes. The increased ease of our work lives, though, has created a bit of a void, and that void has infiltrated other parts of our lives.
Consider how little effort is involved in virtue signaling and similar activities that we intend to make ourselves feel good about ourselves. How much satisfaction can one get from such a trivial exertion of effort? Not much, and not nearly as much as one derives from achieving success through great effort.
Our society goes out of its way to undermine the satisfaction that is achieved through great effort. Children play sports without keeping score, everyone gets participation trophies so that no one’s feelings are hurt, graduation standards are dumbed down, schools are adopting no-zero policies, affirmative-action programs preclude high-achievers from receiving their due, the successful (aka the 1%) are vilified and told their success is not their own doing, gifted and hardworking students are neglected, black students who work hard at school are castigated by their peers for acting white… the list goes on and on. About the only place we see hard work admired is in professional sports (and even there, it seems that the gifted dilettantes don’t get their comeuppance as much as they should).
If expectations are dumbed down, there’s less incentive to work hard, and people are less likely to learn a work ethic. That, in turn, exacerbates the aforementioned satisfaction void, which is then filled by abasing others. Thus the ever-greater intolerance for others, the rise of social justice warriors and other scolds, and the devolvement of reasoned discourse into obnoxious condescension. If you can’t find satisfaction in your own efforts, you can lower the bar by knocking everyone else down a few pegs.
Now, for the title of this essay. We may conflate the critics that beset us upon all sides with the various social crusaders who stage rallies, sit-ins, “occupy” events, and the like, but the latter are actually expending some effort. They may be misguided, they may have ideas that hold less water than a rusted-out colander, they may have a “moral” base that’s terribly immoral, but at least they’re expending effort. The tool that responds to you with “stop getting your info from Faux News” and walks away is not even a crusader. He’s nothing more than a virtue-signaling time-waster, and the signal I see him sending is that he has so little to be satisfied about that he has to blindly denigrate others to make up for it. The impersonal nature of social media only exacerbates this problem. It’s REALLY easy to snipe at others and their work on the Internet. Roll down the comments pages on any Youtube video to see this in action.
It’s not hard to conclude that the anger and dissatisfaction we see throughout society is a result of a lack of real self-satisfaction that individuals feel. This itself is the result of the continued denigration of individual achievement and hard work. Society doesn’t acknowledge hard work the way it used to, and it sends very loud messages that those who don’t work hard are going to get taken care of and/or rewarded anyway. This is born out of the good but misguided intent that has corrupted the concept of equality of opportunity and supplanted it in many cases with equality of outcome. If everyone gets an “A,” that “A” is nothing special, and the person who worked hard for it feels like a fool for making the effort.
Crusading for a cause is something that can produce real self-satisfaction, especially if the crusade is difficult. The civil rights marchers of the 1960s put forth real effort, faced real peril, were often jailed, and had to persevere to achieve their aims. Today’s “crusaders,” though, are really mostly armchair critics, putting forth only token efforts while demanding big results. When they don’t get their way, they are far more apt to blame others, others who oftentimes have put forth strong efforts to achieve their own results.
We have very few true crusaders in today’s society. By contrast, we are awash in critics, people who seek satisfaction by knocking others down instead of through personal achievement. Our Best-and-Brightest have delivered all the wrong messages about success, and the price we pay is an increasingly angry, grumpy, uncivil, impolitic, and dysfunctional society.
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