Several years back I happened to meet author James Bartholomew, the person who can legitimately claim to have coined the phrase, “virtue signalling”. If social media had been around then, I guess I would have felt pressure to post some cheesy photo and say how “humbled and honoured” I was to meet him. As it was, I recall we had some nice tea and scones in one of the more upmarket parts of London and discussed his excellent book, The Welfare State We’re In.
These days, I see that Bartholomew is dining out far more on the fame of those two words than any of his other more well-researched writing, such are the ironies of journalism.
It is one thing to provide a name for a social disease and quite another thing to provide a safe and effective cure. Fortunately, a new and promising breakthrough has recently emerged in the form of a book by Lucinda Holdforth entitled: 21st Century Virtues: How They Are Failing Our Democracy.
Holdforth, a former speechwriter for ex-Labor leader Kim Beazley, rightly recognises that the “virtue signalling” disease has metastasised from its initial outbreak in traditional media and on early social networking sites such as Facebook. The focus of her book is on the form that has now infected the corporate world – the dreaded LinkedIn variant. Her controversial argument is that values espoused endlessly on this dominant professional networking platform, while seemingly innocuous and well-meaning, in fact pose a real threat to our democracy by undermining the ethical framework necessary for our system to survive.
Whether one accepts that or not, anyone who has spent any time on LinkedIn will certainly recognise the cultural phenomenon of which Holdforth writes:
“On LinkedIn, it’s all about being authentic, honest and transparent; promoting diverse, inclusive and caring workplaces; and respecting work-life balance – while at the same time bringing our whole selves to work. As long as you know these secrets to success, life is a generous feast of mutual backscratching, humble bragging and virtue signalling. And a lot of nonsense.”
Insipid and insufferable, for sure. But more of a concern than Beijing-controlled TikTok or the wilder rhetorical shores of Elon Musk’s iteration of Twitter, X? Holdforth argues yes. Not just because of its outsized influence on the people who run the world, but because of the governing philosophy the platform encourages.
Using a phrase taken from Nietzsche, she perceptively notes that there has been a “transvaluation of values” among our LinkedIn-using corporate elite. Absent are the classical stoic virtues from pagan times such as courage, order and vigour. Gone, too, are traditional Christian virtues such as self-denial, pity, forgiveness, and truthfulness. Instead, these have been replaced by a new therapeutic catechism, which Holdworth traces to folksy Texan self-help guru Brené Brown, that proclaims above all the importance of things like authenticity, empathy, self-care, vulnerability, and “my truth”.
Holdforth points out that these are not only underwhelming – Would Caesar have inspired men to conquer Gaul under their banner? Would Dietrich Bonhoeffer have found in them the necessary strength to resist the Nazis? – but they are also fundamentally solipsistic and narcissistic.
Displays of “vulnerability” are more often than not just attention-seeking and an unwise breaching of the boundaries between private and public life. The valorisation of “self-care’’ is similarly typically just an excuse for selfishness. “Authenticity” is invariably just self-promotion of an uncompromising personal brand. “My truth” or “truthiness” (as comedian Stephen Colbert disparagingly refers to it) means all reality becomes subjective and any good-faith debate becomes impossible.
Holdforth notes that any overt dissent from the sanitised estrogen-heavy Brené Brown vapidity that dominates LinkedIn is seen as not only uncouth but legally dangerous – as likely to trigger a visit from the human resources department in Sydney in the same way the public security bureau would respond to a similar outbreak in Tiananmen Square.
The book is a delight to read. With lovely literary and historical references and touching anecdotes, Holdforth brilliantly identifies and then skewers much of the corporate woke ethos of our times.
I should add that Holdforth is quite clearly of the progressive left and worked for a long time at such notoriously politically correct organisations as the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Qantas. She is quick to praise sainted left icons like Greta Thunberg and Jacinda Ardern, who are not everyone’s cup of tea. She is also at pains to point out how some Orange Man in America, a former TV star from The Apprentice, is of course very, very, bad indeed. Some of this appears pro forma and lacks the nuance of her other sections in her book, but I suspect may well have been necessary to get a fair hearing by her intended audience.
I found it hilarious imagining the reaction of some of her former colleagues.
Holdsworth is of a certain age – I won’t say baby boomer as that term tends to cause more offence these days than getting a millennial’s gender pronouns wrong. But she has recognisable attitudes typical of that particular generation who, with boundless self-confidence and self-righteousness, thought they could discard and reinvent all traditional moral frameworks.
“Instead of morality, I had causes,” she writes of her youth.
As with her previous book, Why Manners Matters, she is obviously uncomfortable with much modern shallow thinking and behaviour and wants to replace it with something better.
It is also clear she is imbued with the intellectual rigour and a certain flintiness of character that owes a debt to a different time. Yet at the same time she appears oddly incurious about how we arrived at this new moral universe – like a child who pulled away bricks from the base of an ancient wall and is surprised why it fell, but is somehow supremely convinced she now knows how to build a better one.
Thus, while it is a very useful and much more in-depth diagnosis, we do not have a cure for “virtue signalling” just yet.
Where one might be found? The book had me thinking again about how virtues were communicated in the non-digital age, like those found etched in marble and painted on canvases in the great cathedrals of Europe. The unmistakeable but very non-LinkedIn-style message emphasised repeatedly was that humans are flawed fallen creatures in need of redemption. “Wretches”, in the words of hymn Amazing Grace, in need of saving.
It got me wondering also what the exact opposite of a virtue-signalling LinkedIn post might be. Perhaps something like sitting in a very silent place where you confess anonymously how you are not really that virtuous at all. A place where there is no chance of any immediate feedback or “likes’’ from friends or colleagues. Where there is nothing to provide an instantaneous dopamine hit, but which might nevertheless have the potential to make you feel somehow much better afterwards. Somewhere like that, I suspect, is where we might go looking for a remedy.
First published in The Australian as “It’s Time Business Woke Up to Itself” on 12th August 2024. © Dan Ryan 2024. All Rights Reserved.
