If you want to read more in-depth about how and why people seek recognition for themselves at all costs read The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. It's not clear whether the platforms we have at the moment are effective for healthy political discourse that operates in good faith and not largely on emotion and status-seeking. Generally speaking however the grandstanding people who need to read this condemnation most will not read it. College students would probably he helped by having this book assigned to them in classes. The best we can hope for is that new norms are fostered gradually over time, including recognizing and isolating obvious grandstanders. This is particularly bad on social media and it has had recognizable downstream effects on our politics. People often use moral rhetoric for the purpose of looking righteous or to dominate others rather than to effect positive change. If you understand what the term 'virtue-signalling' means you probably get the argument made by the book. I essentially agree with the thesis of the book but I found that the points it made were already very clear to me. Most importantly, they show how, by avoiding grandstanding, we can re-build a public square worth participating in. Using the analytic tools of psychology and moral philosophy, they explain what drives us to behave in this way, and what we stand to lose by taking it too far.

The pollution of our most urgent conversations with self-interest damages the very causes they are meant to forward.ĭrawing from work in psychology, economics, and political science, and along with contemporary examples spanning the political spectrum, the authors dive deeply into why and how we grandstand. As politics gets more and more polarized, people on both sides of the spectrum move further and further apart when they let grandstanding get in the way of engaging one another. To philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, who have written extensively about moral grandstanding, such one-upmanship is not just annoying, but dangerous. Nowhere is this more evident than in public discourse today, and especially as it plays out across the internet. We want to be seen as taking the moral high ground not just to make a point, or move a debate forward, but to look a certain way-incensed, or compassionate, or committed to a cause. We vilify those with whom we disagree, and make bolder claims than we could defend. We call people terrible names in conversation or online.

Grandstanding by Justin Tosi