Turn Off Your Virtue Signals

Not everyone can manage to do what you consider to be correct

A decade ago, a longtime friend was visiting our house and began to vigorously scrub out a bunch of empty yogurt tubs, to ready them for recycling.

“You need to pay more attention to your recyclables,” they said. “You can’t just throw these things away. Think of the earth!”

Photo by Alberto Frías on Unsplash

We already had a recycling bin, and we regularly used it for yogurt tubs, as well as aluminum cans, cardboard, and more. But sometimes, especially if I was in hurry, I tossed a plastic container in with the regular trash. Sometimes, because I was suffering from improperly diagnosed clinical depression, I gave up for a week.

When my friend was finished scrubbing, I said, “That was a lot of water you just used. If we lived in California, would you clean those out the same way?” (Clearly we were not communicating as honestly and directly as we could have been.)

They admitted they’d never thought of that before. I know my friend wanted to do the right thing. which is admirable. But when we start wanting to tell everyone else how to do the right thing, we can wind up entering the realm of virtue signalling: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “the public expression of opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or social conscience or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue.”

Let’s bring this back to my area of (at least a little) expertise: Books and reading. I have some strong opinions on what constitutes good writing and good storytelling (which I discussed in a previous post). If I think a book is poorly written or plotted, I don’t have to finish it — unless, of course, I’ve accepted a review assignment, in which case I need to give evidence for what I think doesn’t work.

But if I see someone else reading that same book, or know that they love an author or series or genre that I don’t, is it my purview to tell them it’s terrible? (I make an exception for this particular book.) No, it’s not. I don’t need to signal to anyone else that my way of reading or thinking is the best. When I’m in front of a classroom I do try to show what makes a particular story or essay useful, but I don’t expect the pieces I choose to be anyone’s favorites.

What we read is not as urgent as what we discard into landfills. However, it’s always more useful to model right action than to scold.

And let’s not forget about privilege. It is a privilege to have a house to live in that holds trash and recycling bins. A privilege to live in a town that offers curbside recycling collection. A privilege to buy food in containers and a privilege to have water to rinse out those containers.

It’s a privilege to be literate. It’s a privilege to have access to books and even more of a privilege to have time and space in which to read them. It’s a privilege to have opinions about books.

Sometimes I think, in our necessary efforts to save things, we forget that there is less need to show how virtuous we are and more need to work on providing some of the privileges we have to those who are underserved. To help someone find a warm place to sleep and, perhaps, eventually a home of their own. To remember that when a person isn’t participating in something you consider correct and urgent, that that person might have something else they’re coping with: Illness, sorrow, lack.