Civilization requires virtue signaling

Since this is a big topic these days, here's an article by Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychology professor at UNM. A few excerpts follow:

“We all virtue signal. […] Let’s not pretend otherwise.”

“There’s virtue signaling, and then there’s virtue signaling. […] On the one hand, there’s what economists call ‘cheap talk’: signals that are cheap, quick and easy to fake, and that aren’t accurate cues of underlying traits or values. […] On the other hand, there’s virtue signaling that’s costly, long-term, and hard to fake, and that can serve as a reliable indicator of underlying traits and values."

“Virtue signaling includes the best of human instincts, and the worst of human instincts. The best, because virtue signaling is the best foundation for human morality toward strangers that we could reasonably expect from a process as blind and heartless as genetic evolution. […] Sexual selection and social selection for virtue signaling is probably the only way that humans could have evolved any interest in people beyond their family, their clan and their trading network—or in any animals outside their species. Without the evolution of virtue signaling over the last few hundreds of thousands of years, humans probably wouldn’t be able to co-ordinate themselves into any groups larger than a few dozen people, much less civilizations of millions. Without virtue signaling, we’d never have seen the end of slavery, animal torture, cruel and unusual punishment."

“Yet, virtue signaling can also be the worst of human instincts. It drives most of partisan politics, especially on social media. It drives the demands to censor, fire, cancel and ostracize people who express the wrong opinions. It drives moral panics about satanic ritual abuse, ‘rape culture’ and ‘porn addiction. It drives white nationalists to run over protesters. It drives antifa to beat up journalists. It drives social-justice warriors to take over media, academia and corporate life, and to impose their ideology of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ on everyone through enforced conformity of thought, inequity in hiring and promotions, and exclusion of heterodox thinkers from any positions of power or influence.”

“What distinguishes good virtue signaling from bad virtue signaling isn’t just the reliability of the signal. It’s the actual real-world effects on sentient beings, societies and civilizations. When the instincts to virtue signal are combined with curiosity about science, open-mindedness about values and viewpoints, rationality about priorities and policies, and strategic savvy about ways and means, then wonderful things can happen. These more enlightened forms of virtue signaling have sparked the Protestant Reformation, American Revolution, abolitionist movement, anti-vivisection movement, women’s suffrage movement, free speech movement, and Effective Altruism movement. But when the instincts to virtue signal are not combined with curiosity, open-mindedness, rationality and strategic savvy—that’s when you get Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, Stalin’s Holodomor, Hitler’s Holocaust, Mao’s Cultural Revolution…and Twitter.”