Vulture signalling heralds rise of snark

Suzanne Harrington delves into the psyche of ’The Do Gooder’ to fin dout what they’re all about.

Amid the library of parody Ladybird books for grown ups, there is one called The Do Gooder, which focuses on people who run marathons and jump out of small planes at weekends. “To make this eccentric behaviour seem less like a cry for help or the beginnings of a substantial personal crisis,” it reads. “The do gooder does it for charity.”

Although the Do Gooder book was released to coincide with Comic Relief – not to mock the event, but to support it – it still parodies what has become known as virtue signalling.

It's Red Nose Day! #RedNoseDay #TheDoGooder https://t.co/4M7CtlwG9a pic.twitter.com/QzcXbrXQHh

— FARRANTS (@Farrants_Cobham) March 24, 2017

This is a term used by individuals like Piers Morgan to denote disapproval of people helping others or showing empathy, which first appeared in the Spectator in 2015, although it had been floating around the internet for ages, along with terms like ‘empathy patrolling’.

Neither are meant as compliments, even though they denote benign behaviour. So low has the neoliberal bar been set that we now have a snarky phrase for being nice to each other - accusations of virtue signalling tend to be attempts by the terminally unpleasant to stigmatise human kindness as pretentious tree-huggery.

We live in a world where ‘social justice warrior’ is also a snidey put-down, denoting dogged po-faced activism (think the earnest Soso character from Orange Is The New Black, jailed for living in a tree so it couldn’t be cut down).

Extreme right wing sites like Breitbart, newly respectabilised thanks to ongoing monster signalling of the current POTUS, refer to it as “the odious cult of social justice.” That’s social justice they’re finding odious, kids, not rape and murder.

The mad wormhole into which humanity has toppled is such that we don’t even have a term for the opposite of virtue signalling. Vice signalling sounds too glamorous and hedonistic, redolent of cocaine and black rubber, or whatever your jaded vice may be.

And yet this unnamed opposite of virtue signalling is what is currently running our world, from Washington to Pyongyang via every government and corporate behemoth in between, with the possible exceptions of Narnia, Toytown and Fairyland. Vulture signalling?

Meanwhile, it’s marathon season. Tens of thousands of people continue to virtue signal by running 26.2 miles for good causes.

Training, getting sponsors, lining up, running, finishing in an agonising ecstasy. (I was at the finish line of one recently, as people crawled, stumbled, and limped towards the glory of the foil blankets, cheered on by the whole town). A ton of money was raised.

Back at the starting line, a ton of discarded hoodies and sweatpants were quietly picked up, stuffed in binliners, cleaned, shoved in a van, and driven to Northern France, to be distributed to the refugees there whose camp recently burnt down.

The people who did this did not have official sponsoring, or anyone other than their mates on Facebook cheering them on. By telling you about this now, am I virtue signalling?

Or sharing an idea? Well, that all depends on your ratio of virtue / vulture.