Cynicism for thee but not for me
Is it only your rivals and enemies who seek status and engage in virtue signalling?
Status Competition and Cover Stories
Humans are competitive, social apes. Like other apes, we are motivated by status. But it is low status to be motivated by status. So people develop cover stories that depict themselves as pursuing high-status goals: truth, wisdom, transcendence, justice, authenticity, and so on. In most cases, these cover stories are sincere. People are not lying when describing their goals this way, but the stories are—as with our beliefs and self-narratives more broadly—partly designed for social consumption.
Consider the popular slogan “Dress to express, not to impress.” Many people devote lots of energy, effort, and money to keeping up with fashions and being trendy. But it is lame—unimpressive—to do this just to impress people. So there emerges a cover story: the real reason people care so much about their clothing is to express their inner, authentic selves.
Because people compete for status and competing for status is low status, one way people can try to reduce the status of others—for example, rivals they are competing for status against—is by debunking their cover story. “This person” or “this group”, they might say, “claims to be motivated by lofty ideals, but really they are driven by selfish and petty motives.”
You see this in politics a lot. For example, conservatives often argue that progressives claim to care about “social justice” when really they are driven by status competition and virtue signalling. Likewise, progressives often argue that conservatives claim to care about “traditional values” when really they are motivated to maintain their privileged social position or suck up to those in power.
What is wrong with cynicism?
One objection to cynical stories is that they are wrong. It is often a good objection. It is easy—typically too easy—to concoct cynical explanations of people’s behaviour, especially when your goal is to demonise them.
Sometimes cynical explanations are simply mistaken. “Men only attend feminist protests so they can prey on the woman there.” “Libertarians only support free market policies because those policies would benefit them financially if they were implemented.” “People only feigned outrage at the killing of George Floyd to signal that they were lefty and progressive.” These and countless other cynical explanations fail for the same reason any bad explanation fails: they are extremely implausible on their face, there is no evidence for them, and there is lots of good evidence against them.
Another problem with cynical explanations is that they are often simplistic. Humans are complicated. Our actions are typically driven by many interacting goals, emotions, and drives. For example, an individual might go to the opera because she loves opera, because it elicits deep and meaningful experiences within her, because it relieves her of the stress associated with her job, because it inspires her—and also because being the kind of person who goes to the opera is high status. A cynic might be correct in identifying this final motive as one factor at play but wrong in suggesting it is the only one.
Finally, cynics often misrepresent the underlying psychology involved in human behaviour. They imagine a world of deliberate Machiavellian schemers, self-consciously pursuing power, status, and resources. Sometimes this analysis is correct, but this is generally not how the human mind works. Instead, even when status-seeking drives human behaviour, it typically does so by shaping our sincere motives, emotions, and passions. Someone who goes to the opera because it is high status generally does not consciously reflect on this as one of her motives. Rather, status competition and social signalling shape her genuine love of opera.
Cynicism, then, is often mistaken and simplistic. Nevertheless, our best scientific understanding of human behaviour supports a certain kind of cynicism.
The case for scientific cynicism
Humans are animals. We evolved through a competitive process of natural selection, and our fundamental motives and instincts reflect the demands and constraints of this process. This is obvious in the case of our great ape cousins. If you observe chimpanzees, bonobos, or gorillas, you see lots of dominance displays, status squabbling, and flagrant selfishness, just as one would expect on evolutionary grounds.
Selfishness and status competition are sometimes less obvious in our species because they are complicated, attenuated, and obfuscated by our extreme dependence on cooperation. In ultra-cooperative social worlds organised around norms, gossip, collective punishment, and partner choice, an individual’s ability to get along and get ahead often depends on cultivating a reputation as prosocial, generous, trustworthy, humble, and non-competitive. However, the same Darwinian logic still applies: outside the sphere of close genetic relatives, people cooperate for self-interested reasons; they often cooperate to out-compete others; and cooperation itself is rooted in incentives that channel self-interest into prosocial behaviour.
Moreover, a certain kind of cynicism is also vindicated by our best social-scientific research into specific domains of human behaviour like politics, religion, art, and science. In contrast to the cover stories we tell about these areas of human social life—that they are oriented towards noble ideals like justice, transcendence, beauty, and truth—we now have centuries of research documenting the undeniable imprint of grubby motives like self-interest, status-seeking, and power within them (see, e.g., here and here).
For these reasons, when people aim to debunk other people’s cover stories, they are often at least partly successful. Human behaviour typically involves much more self-interest, status-seeking, and impression management than we are willing to admit. Does this mean that cynical explanations are always warranted?
Cynicism as demonisation and self-aggrandisement
Many cynical explanations of human behaviour are not exactly wrong (even if they are often simplistic and hyperbolic), but they omit something important: the same kinds of self-interested and status-seeking motives being attributed to the targets of the cynical explanation also drive the cynic’s behaviour.
For example, the philosopher and writer Phillippe Lemoine recently wrote a viral post on Twitter/X about students protesting against Israel. It began:
“My basic model of student protests is that in general students don't know shit about what they're protesting against, they do it because it's cool, makes them feel like they're part of something important and they want to be with their friends. In the vast majority of cases, their beliefs on the topic are very superficial, they just repeat slogans they don't really understand, but that's not a problem for them because it's primarily about signaling group membership rather than loyalty to specific ideas.... In a way, students are just an extreme illustration of a more general fact, which is that most people are not ideologues and identify with groups before they identify with ideas. The ideas they defend flow from the groups they identify with, much more than the other way around.”
I think this is hyperbolic. I agree that many student protesters are ignorant and that social goals like seeming cool and signalling group membership play a big role in their behaviour. However, I also think that deep and sincere feelings against (what they interpret to be) genocide, atrocities, and injustice play a big role in their behaviour as well.
Nevertheless, here I want to highlight a different problem with this cynical analysis: the assumption that although motives like status-seeking, seeming cool, and signalling play a role in the “vast majority of cases” where people “identify with groups before they identify with ideas”, there are some people—presumably Lemoine himself—who are concerned with ideas, not just status competition, a difference presumably illustrated by the fact that (unlike the protestors) they are very well-informed.
Nate Silver expressed a similar perspective recently in his analysis of political beliefs. After arguing that the two primary motivations driving political opinion in “most people” are self-interest and signalling group identity, he writes,
“Notice what’s missing from my list? The notion of politics as a battle of ideas. This is not to suggest that people don’t hold reasonable moral intuitions about political affairs. But when it comes to mass popular opinion, the number of people who are interested in ideas for ideas sake is vanishingly small. As of this writing, for instance, the three best-selling books in political philosophy at Amazon.com are ranked only #1632, #2841 and #4261 among all books.
Among public intellectuals — you know, the sorts of people who write Substack newsletters — ideas are debated more seriously.”
In other words, whereas for most people politics is (notwithstanding their cover story) driven by grubby self-interest and social competition, there is a small class of people—including Silver himself—who are concerned with “ideas for ideas’ sake”, something illustrated by the fact they are very well-informed and engage with deep ideas in political philosophy.
I respect both Lemoine and Silver and think they often make very insightful intellectual contributions, but I call bullshit on this. Motives like self-interest and social competition play a role in student protestors' behaviour and ordinary people's political attitudes because they are human beings, and such motives always play a big role in the behaviour of human beings. They do not go away just because somebody is factually well-informed about an issue or reads books on political philosophy.1 Self-interest, status competition, and virtue signalling are just as prominent in the motives of public intellectuals and Substack writers. If anything, such motives are even more prominent among the best-informed than the least-informed. More generally, status-seeking and virtue signalling are fundamental motivations driving most forms of intellectual activity, whether in science, journalism, public debate, or anywhere else.
Given this, even when cynical explanations of behaviour contain an important grain of truth, they are often misleading because they are highly selective, functioning more like accusations than attempts at understanding. In debunking a person or a group’s cover story by identifying the role of self-interest and status-seeking in their behaviour, the implicit assumption is invariably: unlike in my behaviour. In this way, cynical explanations often serve to demonise (the accused’s behaviour is unusually characterised by low motives) and self-aggrandise (in contrast with my behaviour).
The opposite of cynicism is not idealism. It is selective cynicism
I am writing a book titled “Why it’s OK to be Cynical.” One of the central points I will make in this book is that the opposite of cynicism is not idealism—the belief that humans are fundamentally good and altruistic—but selective cynicism. Much of what masquerades as cynicism is selective cynicism, and much of what masquerades as idealism is Mannicheanism.
For example, it is sometimes held that a fundamental ideological difference between conservatives and progressives concerns their views about human nature: conservatives have a more cynical, Hobbesian view, treating humans as mostly self-interested, nepotistic, and morally limited, whereas progressives have a more optimistic, Rousseau-style view depicting humans as fundamentally good and altruistic.
However, in practice, the main difference between progressives and conservatives concerns the target of their cynicism: Conservatives tend to have a cynical view of the great unwashed masses but suspiciously idealistic views about those in positions of power. Similarly, progressives hold idealistic views about their own motives and the “ordinary people” whose instinctive benevolence ensures the success of their political projects, but extremely cynical views of their ideological enemies (e.g., wealthy people, corporate CEOs, right-wing elites, their political opponents, etc.).
Throughout history, there have been very few consistent cynics. Thrasymachus (the cynic in Book 1 of Plato’s The Republic) might be one, as might Hobbes and Machiavelli. Among modern writers, Robert Wright, Robin Hanson, Will Storr, and David Pinsof might be others. In practice, however, most of what passes for “cynicism” is highly selective in its application.
Selective cynicism is neither a form nor an application of universal cynicism. Even when it is accurate, its goal is not accuracy; instead, it functions as an accusation driven by the same kinds of grubby motives—status competition, demonisation, and self-aggrandisement—as the targets being accused. We should be cynical about such cynicism.
In Lemoine’s case, I suspect factors like status-seeking and virtue signalling might have played a role in the fact that he coincidentally possesses limitless expertise in whichever topic happens to be the main focus of debate and controversy on Twitter/X (pandemic science, Russia/Ukraine, Israel-Palestine).
re: "Similarly, progressives hold idealistic views about their own motives and the “ordinary people” whose instinctive benevolence ensures the success of their political projects, but extremely cynical views of their ideological enemies (e.g., wealthy people, corporate CEOs, right-wing elites, their political opponents, etc.)." -- I believe you are decades behind the times. Christopher Lasch's _The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy_ was published in 1996. These days it is the progressives who hold the views of ordinary people in contempt ("populism is racism") and believe that wealthy people and corporate CEOs are idealistic -- especially if they are tossing money at favoured progressive causes, and making hiring decisions based on progressive identitarian ideology. Left wing political parties now out-fundraise the political right¸ and left wing NGOs outnumer the right wing.
“Self-interest, status competition, and virtue signalling are just as prominent in the motives of public intellectuals and Substack writers. If anything, such motives are even more prominent among the best-informed than the least-informed. More generally, status-seeking and virtue signalling are fundamental motivations driving most forms of intellectual activity, whether in science, journalism, public debate, or anywhere else.“
Great point. If the true Truth Seeker is out there somewhere, surely they are not slugging it out on Twitter over the controversies of the day.
My view is that the best we can hope for is a kind of meta-rationality where you choose the status competition that best rewards good thinking.