The illusion of virtue

Holier than thou is often a way of poking people in the eye, metaphorically, when doing so physically might get you poked back.

I was having a conversation with a friend this morning about pro-Palestinian protesters closing roads in Illinois, California, and Oregon. "Why,” my friend wondered aloud, “would anyone wanting to create sympathy for the Palestinians do something so counterproductive? Something that’s far more likely just to piss people off?”

I have an answer for that. It’s because virtually nothing about these protests is about creating any sympathy for the Palestinian cause—something that turns out to be a challenge even, perhaps especially, among Palestine’s Arab state neighbors. The people who are closing roads to show support for Palestine, who took to the streets to cheer for Hamas after October 7 and more recently to cheer for Iran after its attack on Israel, know exactly what they are doing: poking everyone else in the eye. It’s the easiest way to mess with people that they just don’t like that’s likely consequence-free.

There is virtually nothing emerging from movements on the radical fringes of current political discourse, both here and elsewhere, that’s designed to make the world a better place. Most partisans believe themselves to be morally and intellectually superior to everyone else and always right. It’s their way or the highway. Their actions aren’t about messaging, persuasion, or seeking compromise; they are simply acting out their impulses as smug, self-righteous assholes above reproach. They have many allies.

A few days ago, NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner excoriated his network in an article in the Free Press chronicling decades of liberal bias on the public dole. The bias at NPR is so pervasive and overwhelming anymore that it’s barely a topic of debate outside of the dingbat bubble of driveway moments and tote bags. Berliner’s thoughtful, reflective piece examined the various reasons that NPR has shed listeners in the past decade. It’s as good an explanation as there is of how NPR became widely regarded as a taxpayer-funded purveyor of liberal views to a shrinking audience of people who live in places where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

But that’s not the way that the NPR brass sees it. Self-reflection is hard. New CEO Katherine Maher, who manages to be a walking (or tweeting, anyway) trope for every smug, self-righteous liberal meme in the world, responded to Berliner without either mentioning him or disputing the gist of his arguments, referring to them only as “hurtful.” NPR has since temporarily suspended Berliner for failing to request permission in advance to speak with The Free Press.

When it comes to smug, self-righteous, virtue-signalling asses, it’s difficult to top what’s left of the NPR crowd. And that is a real shame. I, like many other erstwhile listeners, used to support NPR. I have an entire boxful of merchandise out in the barn somewhere to prove it, too. But years before their liberal bias became too much for anyone right of pretty far left, the objective quality of their news shows began to decline.

These days, almost every NPR news interview has the tenor of having been conducted on a couch inside an anechoic chamber in a high school counselor’s office. I want to jab myself with needles every time I hear them pontificate, in solemn tones, on how GMOs, climate change, or the social ill of the hour will be the end of civilization. You’d think that after a decade or so of the world not coming to an end, they’d come up with something new.

Along that line, there is a lot of talk from the driveway moments crowd about the evils of “privilege” (and the abundance of virtue among the oppressed). Typically, this comes in the form of dispersions cast against ordinary people for the sins of being white, straight, honest, reliable, talented, gainfully employed, or just capable of recognizing bullshit when they see it.

Now I’d posit an alternative definition for privilege, one for which I think there is far greater contemporary evidence. Privilege is being, quite inexplicably, the well-compensated CEO of a major corporation (like NPR), deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Nuclear Energy, assistant secretary of HHS, president of an Ivy League school, or media dilettante while simultaneously being an idiot.

Virtue signalling and smug assholerly are not, mind you, confined to the left. There exists absolutely no dearth of moralists on the right fully capable of walking off a cliff while immersed in the process of looking for a bible or pocket constitution with which to beat you over the head—though it’s generally clear they’ve read for comprehension, neither. But right now, academia, business, the media, and most of government are in the thrall of the left. When that changes, I’ll be after the self-righteous fascists and their religious screeds instead of the self-righteous socialists and their postmodern bullshit.

Back to the point: the entire shtick of the woke is wrapped up in positioning their ideals in terms of moral superiority. If you disagree with them, there must be something wrong with you.

You think that sex in humans is binary? You must be transphobic. You think that a work ethic is a good thing? You must be an oppressor. You think that committing acts of rape, murder, and kidnapping are tools of evil? You must be a colonialist. You think that law and order should be enforced impartially? You must be racist. You object to the flow of illegal immigration and its attendant problems over our southern border? You must be a nationalist xenophobe. You object to censorship? You must be in favor of disinformation. You object to ruinous government COVID mandates based on erroneous assumptions and scant information? You must hate the old, the young, and the vulnerable.

Because all of this is indefensible nonsense, the only way to press ahead with any of it is to eschew debate by painting those with whom you disagree as beneath the dignity of discussion. The whole pseudoscience of gender-affirming care is above debate because doing so harms trans children (like irreversible medical procedures do not). A frank examination of the social problems that lead to crime and incarceration is racist, so we’ll reduce this alleged harm to society with the actual harm of letting criminals go free in the interests of restorative justice. The Palestinians, who aren’t welcome anywhere else in the Arab world, absolutely have the right to murder, rape, and kidnap Jewish women and children as the price of the struggle to eradicate an illegitimate Jewish state.

When one is operating on a world view that consists of little other than pure moxie, shrewdness is characterized by excess. And making one’s own notions of what’s right tantamount to unassailable virtue allows the dismissal of inconvenient facts. That’s about as excessive as it gets in public discourse.

The people blocking the Golden Gate Bridge or the road to O’Hare Airport think that you and I occupy the low-rent moral spaces several tiers beneath them. The last thing that they want is to engage the hoi polloi in discussion; that wouldn’t work for them.

This has gotten as far as it has because the majority of people out there in the world are basically good souls who mean well. When they see human suffering—injustice, prejudice, poverty, and all of the other social maladies that get paraded before us every day—they want to do something about it. It’s very easy to make emotional arguments to those who are predisposed to feeling bad about the misfortune of others. That is how the entire woke DEI enterprise got a foothold in the first place. The grifters behind it exploited the good nature of their marks.

But the people out there telling you that you aren’t as good as them because you don’t agree with them aren’t peddling virtue; they are peddling the illusion of virtue. The sooner the word gets out, the sooner these people are consigned to well-deserved ignominy.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.