Virtue will always be irritating

Social justice, social struggle and irritation

My position on the social justice movement, essentially, is that:

1. It was extremely irritating.

2. It was sometimes damaging, not least to its own cause, but to many lives as well. Some people even died (e.g., plausibly August Ames).

3. It was massively mistaken in its neglect of economic inequality and poverty abolition.

4. It was wrong about countless things, big and small, and monomaniacal even when right. Often the core of its theoretical wrongness was in regarding, e.g. men, white people, straights as beneficiaries of an alienated and discriminatory world, rather than joint victims. It also got a bunch of factual and technical points wrong.

5. Yet it was, in its core commitments, correct. Even as it frequently misunderstood racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, police brutality, the problems of the carceral system, sexual assault, etc., these are real and urgent problems.

6. It was correct, fundamentally, because it was motivated by virtue. It was motivated by concern for the other and fairness.

7. There will always be movements for moral reform that are extremely irritating, obnoxious, and sometimes cruel, but which are fundamentally correct. You are morally liable if you use the irritating and destructive elements of these movements as a reason to oppose them overall.

I want to explore why movements for virtue will always tend to be irritating. It is, I think, massively overdetermined. I have in mind social justice here, but I think everything I describe here applies to other movements as well, and will apply again and again in the future.

Why movements rooted in geninue virtue are irritating

Virtue is irritating because it doesn’t know when to drop the point

Virtue is often blind to questions of feasibility, the Overton window and contextual appropriateness.

Virtue is irritating because it attracts people without social skills

In my experience, people who are most attracted to virtuous ideas often lack social sophistication, interpersonal skills, and frankly, sometimes basic manners. The most obvious explanation for this is that, without beating around the bush, they are often autistic. This is a reason to esteem autism as something that drives people to take moral commitments seriously, rather than to despise movements.

A secondary reason for the lack of social skills is that these movements attract very young people. I’m not talking about people in their twenties here- I’m talking about people sometimes in their teens. A lot of the least nuanced, most dogmatic, least tactful, most aggressive and tone deaf accounts you see on Twitter are literally people in their teens, sometimes even their early teens. Young people are often, I think, directly responsive to the call of virtue because they haven’t layered over their own souls in rationalisations yet.

Virtue is irritating because it attracts people who have been harmed- and may tend to lash out as a result

You’ve been severely harmed by one of the things that the social justice movement opposes. It traumatized you. Maybe you even have features of what is sometimes called borderline personality disorder or complex PTSD. You tend to lash out at others. Naturally, because of your shared concerns about the trauma you have undergone, you become involved in social justice activism.

This isn’t just a SJW thing either. I’m sure many worthy movements, for as long as there have been worthy movements, have attracted those who have been injured by those things and forces they are arrayed against. Even when they are not ‘perfect victims’, people who have been harmed and are trying to prevent that from happening to others deserve our respect.

Virtue is irritating because it gives people a ready-made justification for dropping politeness

“This is urgent! How dare you tone police me when people are dying and being degraded right now? How are you arguing about a few measly insults when people are dying!

Virtue is irritating because it attracts people who want to bully

There’s no better way to disguise the fact that you’re a bully who likes bullying- from yourself and maybe from others- than adopting a righteous cause. The same goes for many other types of bad actors, from attention seekers to grifters.

Virtue is irritating because it is repetitive

Generally, when a point has been made, you are supposed to stop talking about it. Virtue does not permit such until it has won.

Social media brings out the bad qualities of virtue because it is brief

Social media tends towards brevity. Even Substack, the longest of the bunch, is not exactly full of book-length treatments. This tends to enable the monomanical, hyperventilating, and ever-rushing aspects of virtuous movements.

Social media brings out the bad qualities of virtue because it encourages mass dunking

Social media encourages mass dunking, and this trend is further enhanced when people feel like they can do something ‘good’ by joining in the dunking.

Social media brings out the bad qualities of virtue because it discourages mercy

The combination of briefness, mass dunking, and an algorithmic feed built on emotional salience means that mercy is largely absent on social media.

Virtue is irritating because it needs to keep itself pure

If you hold a fundamental insight, and society denies it, then it’s hard to hold onto that insight. People will seem to join with you, but tell you to water down the fundamental insight. Society will say, “If only they espoused 25% of their fundamental insight instead of 100%, I might ally with them, but alas, it is not to be. Perhaps they might compromise?”

In response to this, virtue gets protective of itself. It develops narratives to keep out interlopers who would reduce it. It takes its fundamental insight and goes beyond merely not compromising on that insight. It adds additional, more extreme postulates in an attempt to ‘put a fence around’ compromising on it.

Virtue is irritating because it almost always calls for punishment

If you’re drawing attention to forms of wrongdoing that have previously been ignored, swept under the carpet, or not even recognized as wrongdoing, then a natural corollary of that, for many people and many movements, is that you’re going to want to start punishing people who have engaged in that wrongdoing.

People seem to love punishment; I find it baffling. Right now I’m marvelling over a thread at r/interesting. Apparently, South Korean universities have developed a policy of rejecting students with a record of bullying. Most of the Redditors are fucking ecstatic. Two seconds’ thought would reveal to them that this basically amounts to quasi-judicial power over future lives given to, with all due respect, teachers, or worse, school administrators. I find the thought of punishing anyone for anything a fearful prospect. Most people don’t seem to feel that way.

But even in a world that loves punishment, calls for punishment in a disorganized way, in ambiguous cases, for something that maybe wasn’t even seen as wrong in the past, can be both alarming and downright irritating.

Virtue is irritating because a lot of people are grasping for spirituality

Now I know “social justice is a religion” is the most hackneyed s*** in the world, that’s not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that it has become very obvious to me that some people look to the social justice project for a combination of moral purification, identity creation, spiritual sustenance and release from trauma. This has often entirely conscious parallels to religion.

And there is nothing in this world so annoying as fresh converts.

Virtue is irritating, sometimes, because you know it’s right

Finally, virtue is irritating, at least some of the time, because in your heart you know that it’s right, but you don’t want to admit it. Virtue almost always wants you to give up something that you previously held, even if it is only an opinion.

Consider: Your record if you went through life from 0 AD to the present, opposing annoying things at every turn- your record would be abysmal:

Those damn Christians irk you. You probably take a certain satisfaction from seeing them eaten by the lions- why can’t they just bow down and worship Caesar as a God? Running around, street preaching, demanding fasts…

Slavery abolitionism- both ancient and modern- features endless histrionic claims that this is the most important issue. A total lack of respect for what has come before. Weird arguments by weird people.

Peasant revolts- urgh. Outlandish claims, mob politics. Ancient grievances just not allowed to rest.

The bourgeois revolutions- don’t get you started! Ridiculous notions and declarations. Plainly, unstable people are involved.

Women’s suffrage! The yelling, the moralizing, the ribbons are all bad enough- but the throwing axes, blowing up post boxes, destroying military docks- it’s all quite outrageous.

You might have had some sympathy for the Nazis, after all, they were opposing the excesses of the Weimar Republic.

You found those damn anti-Vietnam war protestors insufferable, particularly those hippies who thought they were so fucking cool just because they were weird.

Civil rights protestors? Oh god, why can’t they just shut up! The preaching. The stunts. The explicit entitlement to break the law till they get what they want.

Gay liberation? Oh The lack of decorum, the deliberate attention seeking, the thrown pies.

And on, and on and on.

Of social justice in particular

Scott once wrote:

Some recent adorable Tumblr posts pointed out that not everyone who talks about social justice is a social justice warrior. There are also “social justice clerics, social justice rogues, social justice rangers, and social justice wizards”. Fair enough.

But there are also social justice chaotic evil undead lich necromancers.

Scott Alexander is right. It’s not just about ‘annoying’. The social justice movement was full of Social Justice liches, very likely it always will be.

Nor will the excesses always be rhetorical [which is not to diminish the power of rhetoric- rhetoric kills people]. A recent article by Savage documented the travails of white men in certain industries. While my feelings on the article were complex, I am almost certain that he is right that in some select small-but-important sectors in the period of time he discusses, white men had a very rough time of it, whether by the standards of their representation in the candidate pool, or in some cases, even in comparison to their representation in the population as a whole.

Now, plenty of people have been harmed by peak woke more than me, and yet I have plenty of reasons to whinge about peak woke. A close friend of mine was ostracised by his whole friend group for something I’d seen firsthand evidence that he was the victim of. An event I’d created on Facebook led to hundreds of people harassing me. A creative project I was involved in fell apart because a potential contributor was unhappy I was involved, despite not having disowned the Facebook event. Many of my OCD fears could be said to be about some of the excesses of wokeness, in a sense. I’ve never been explicitly cancelled cancelled but I’ve probably had it about as bad as one could without being cancelled.

And yet, I’ve never turned anti-woke, at least not in the sense it is usually meant. Ultimately, we are all responsible for our choices, provocation or no. No one has ever been absolved by history for joining the forces of evil because the forces of good were fucking annoying, frequently nasty, and wrong about a bunch of things.

Turning on the left because of these stupidities would be stupid enough, joining the right another folly entirely. Particularly insane is the idea that a bunch of shouting 20 and 30-somethings being rude to you on the internet justified voting for Trump. If things get really bad, history will look back on that excuse with something like dark amusement.

And hey, you should see the liches on the other side.

Concluding coda: rationality and groups

You will be much happier viewing the social world if you see rationality as emerging at the level of the group and over time. Some people are very, very wrong, yes, this is true, but dialectically they might still play a useful role in bringing the whole towards understanding.

That’s fine for societies, but little comfort for individuals who have been bullied, mobbed or ostracised in one form or another. The root problem, I would like to think, is that we cannot participate fully in the group process of reasoning and negotiating through things because we do not trust each other. We do not believe each other because we cannot assure each other’s honesty. We dismiss each other’s pain as unreal, we dismiss each other’s repentance and regret as unreal, we worry that others are dismissing our pain as unreal, we exaggerate claims, and we think others are exaggerating claims, even when they are not. It would be so freeing to be able to speak of our vices, virtues, rights, wrongs, pains and pleasures honestly and with full assurance of being believed, like a weight we never knew we had removed. We would love each other a lot more, I think. I have zero idea how one would achieve this, except through at present purely science-fiction neurotechnological means, and of course, any such solution would have severe drawbacks. But perhaps there are other ways.