These feelings of superiority are about people wanting their emotional needs met
At last, there’s an official label for that thing everyone’s doing these days, and which makes so many forms of public conversation (and some private ones) so intensely annoying: “moral grandstanding”. Moral grandstanders are those obnoxious types who go around stridently declaring their beliefs, enthusiastically joining social-media shamings, and so on, not because they feel so strongly, but because they want people to admire them for how astoundingly moral they are. (It’s a better term than “virtue signalling”, for various reasons, including that the latter has become an all-purpose insult, flung at moral grandstanders and everyone else alike.) According to new research, it’s real, widespread across the political spectrum, and probably a big reason everything feels so fighty these days. There are real things to fight about, of course. But there are also lots of people who are just a little too happy to be fighting.
And yet I don’t think “moral grandstanding” quite nails the problem, either, because – as the philosophers who coined the term make clear – it assumes conscious intent. To be a moral grandstander, you have to know you’re being insincere, motivated by the desire to boost your brand. Whereas I’m almost certain that if you could get inside the heads of certain blowhards one might mention, just as they’re about to tweet, or blog, or address the House of Commons, you’d find them burning with sincere conviction. (Certainly, that seems to be the case when it comes to the only blowhard whose head I actually can get inside.) After all, if you were fully conscious of your outsized need for the adulation of strangers, you might seek therapy, or write about it in your journal, or grapple with it in some other way. It’s precisely to the extent that we aren’t aware of such needs, surely, that we instead go barrelling out into the world to try to get them met.
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