The benefits of virtue signalling
The need to be seen to be green among cultural elites might have salutary trickle-down effects
These are “mysterious times”, says Lucy Siegle in The Times. “Not only is it cool to care, but it’s also the only game in town.” If the climate scientists are right, then we all need to start caring a great deal more than we do and “stop pillaging the Earth”, otherwise “we are toast as a species”. And who better to serve as exemplars of what is needed than Leonardo DiCaprio and other A-list celebrities? When they turn up to the red carpet in electric cars and sporting “rented fashion”, they might be doing more good than we realised. Indeed, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has factored consumer behaviour into its plan for the first time, and the way to change that, it says, is for green living to become a “status symbol”.
In fact, this is “already a thing”, says Siegle. The Oscar goody bags this year, for example, contained the rights to a plot of land in Scotland for rewilding. DiCaprio is a long-standing environmental campaigner and a champion of Tesla’s electric cars. The shift at the top is away from “conspicuous consumption” and towards “conscious consumption”. For us ordinary mortals, that will mean working from home more, driving and flying less, taking public transport and going vegan. Governments have a role in “nudging” us into such behaviours, for our own good, one of the report’s co-authors told The Telegraph.
This shift towards eco-consciousness has already begun, says Hillary Hoffower in Business Insider. The top 1% have been spending less on material goods since 2007 – according to Elizabeth Currid-Halkett in her book The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of an Aspirational Class – and instead “investing in intangible things that signal their cultural capital to each other”. They make a show, in other words, not of buying unnecessary things, but of investing in education, health, or in companies that promise to help end climate change. The hope is that the more people who make an eco-friendly lifestyle a conscious status symbol, the more people will want to have the same cachet, and the world will benefit from that collective change. In other words, what is routinely condemned as “virtue signalling” may be no bad thing.
The cost of the simple life
Virtue signalling, though, like talk, is cheap, and the change needed costly. Conservative critic Theodore Dalrymple recently attended a meeting of Extinction Rebellion and found the eco-rebels were demanding an end to carbon emissions by 2025 and the abandonment of all fossil fuels by that date, he reports for City Journal. No one even considered the costs in terms of power cuts, unheated homes, or the collapse in industrial production. In other words, what they are really demanding is “a world in which no trade-offs are necessary for the things that they desire”. You might well desire your own couple of acres and a groundsource heat pump so that you can do your bit for the environment. But just look at the prices. The trouble, as the “recovering environmentalist” Paul Kingsnorth put it in a recent talk, is that to live the simple life in Britain, you’d have to be a millionaire.
“The top 1% have been spending less on material goods since 2007 and instead investing in intangible things that signal their cultural capital to each other”