Tolstoy and Watertight Bulkheads
15th September 2015
Richard Fernandez explores the fantasy world of ‘virtue signalling’.
In the world of anything goes “virtue signalling” can be substituted for the needless art of competence. That term, invented by British writer Libby Purves, describes an exhibition of moral superiority which wins the day. Moral superiority is now all it takes to fix things. Engineering — especially social engineering — has been radically simplified. Will it, and it is. In place of “true or false”, “correct or incorrect” the contemporary thinker can merely substitute the term “good or bad” or better yet “progressive or reactionary” to characterize any approach to a problem and make a judgment on that basis.
The two interesting things about relativistic world based on “virtue signalling” is that 1) there are an infinite number of solutions to any problem; 2) all these solutions are equally valid. This absurdity holds because answers in a progressive world are always compared to intentions. It becomes equivalent to solving a dependent system of equations, like the intersection of a line and a line equal to itself. High school algebra shows this yields an infinite solution set. To the question: what is the right policy in the Middle East comes the certain answer: anything Obama does.
…