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Runners take part in the 2016 London Marathon
‘I have a lurking suspicion that a lot of what passes for modern morality is a kind of exhibitionism that convinces ourselves, and our children, that we are good people.’ Photograph: Niklas Halle'N/AFP/Getty Images
‘I have a lurking suspicion that a lot of what passes for modern morality is a kind of exhibitionism that convinces ourselves, and our children, that we are good people.’ Photograph: Niklas Halle'N/AFP/Getty Images

Modern morality is just exhibitionism

This article is more than 7 years old
Buying eco powder and doing charity marathons actually achieves relatively little – we just want to feel more powerful than we are

One of my daughters put out the recycling while the eldest, a vegetarian, regaled me with her passionate cheerleading for the socialist utopia of Jeremy Corbyn. Another vegetarian daughter asked if it was OK to ask if someone who had gone crazy with a knife in New Zealand was a terrorist. It was suggested by her mother that merely asking the question was making unfair assumptions.

Should we take refugees into our house? Should we buy coffee in Starbucks? Is it OK to have a bath rather than a shower? Was that T-shirt the product of child labour? It’s a limitless morass.

I miss my parents’ limited, practical live-and-let-live philosophy. Our moral universe was very simple – don’t do anything to anyone else that you wouldn’t wish to be done to you. They, and my other relatives, were kind and decent people, who never spoke cruelly of others and did all they could to help when help was needed.

As a working-class family, however, morals were confined entirely to domestic life, not global dilemmas. My parents had no views on Vietnam, or the Nixon presidency or the Biafran tragedy – one of those things that were sad but which you could do nothing about except give a couple of bob if you had it to spare. And in those more collectivist years, private charity was frowned upon, as it appeared to be letting the state off the hook of its collective responsibilities. Charity was a Victorian relic.

It was all my family could do to survive, pay the bills and go on holiday for a couple of weeks a year. The rest of the world was someone else’s problem – the powerful, those with a voice and enough social capital for the great middle-class hobby of virtue signalling and do-gooding (my parents intensely disliked “do-gooders”).

I have a lurking and possibly shameful suspicion that a lot of what passes for modern morality – buying eco washing powder, signing endless and usually pointless online petitions and doing charity marathons/mountain climbs/moustache cultivation – is a kind of exhibitionism that convinces ourselves, and our children, that we are good people, while actually achieving relatively little (and, not incidentally, letting the government off the hook).

We hear about microaggressions (unconscious, apparently innocent acts of aggression usually against minority groups) but these micro-moralities such as whether to go to Starbucks – the other side of the coin to microaggressions – seem to cause as much disharmony. I was ticked off by my children recently because I decided not to eat a restaurant meal because it was crap. This was that greatest of all crimes – wastefulness. You would think that instead of living in a time of relative prosperity, we were in 1950s austerity Britain, where my grandmother always kept tiny scraps of soap to press together into new blocks.

I have mixed feelings about the application of this moral mission creep to (and from) our children. Not all apparently moral activity is virtue signalling by any means. Yet to tell them to hurt no one, to be kind and honest, seems to me moral injunction enough – at least until they are grown up enough to make their own judgments. Perhaps the rising level of depression and anxiety among children is not unconnected with the sense that they must work harder and harder to qualify as good people.

Most of us are helpless to redress most evils. Perhaps we go through the theatre of morality to help us feel more powerful. Which is fine – so long as it doesn’t produce neurotic children and, later, judgmental adults, all in the cause of moral ends that are rarely, and sometimes never, achieved.

After a lifetime I have only come up with one ethical trope – be good, but don’t try to be better than you are. It just leads to hypocrisy. Which is not an argument against virtue. It’s a plea for honesty – and an injunction against the unstinting tiresomeness of middle-class guilt.

@timlottwriter

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