Ugly Virtue: The Fights That Don’t Look Pretty, But Actually Matter

It’s so damn easy to get caught up in the causes we see on social media. And there’s no doubt that some of them are incredibly important. There’s also no doubt that some of them aren’t anywhere near as meaningful as we’d like them to be.

Because what goes viral isn’t necessarily what matters — much less what’s true. And what shares well on social media doesn’t always present the real story, much less enough nuance for us to understand the story we’re looking at.

And that’s a serious problem. Because it affects how we expand (thousands of hours!) of human energy.

We focus on (proven) hate crime hoaxes instead of (proven!) hate crimes. We debate the sex lives of celebrities instead of trying to fund shelters and help for people fleeing abuse. We’re pressured to focus on what looks good on social media, rather than things which might do good.

There are people who openly admit and embrace hatred and bigotry. There are vulnerable people suffering harm. We could tackle either problem and know we are directly working towards our goals of improving the world.

But that’s not what we’re encouraged to do. Because if we fight things that are real, visible, documentable, provable —

We take away power from those who want us to live in fear.

They want us to need specialists — they want monstrosity to be horrific and omnipresent, yet also to be unnaturally strange, so that normal people can’t quite detect it. We can only rely on them — the witch-hunters — to tell us what’s what. They know what we should fear; they know the secret remedies. All we know is that we’re told we must fear, but that we’re helpless before these invisible monsters. Only the experts can help us, and with that power, they own us.

Sounds like science fiction, or hyperbole? No, unfortunately. I wish it were; I like science fiction. But this is our actual world, one in which we’re told at every turn that monstrous things are loose, that we cannot see them, that there are horrors which can only be revealed when trained experts see them, comment on them, and whip us into a frenzy via our various media outlets — both news and social.

And this is why I reject a world of “invisible monsters”. If we’re to battle with serious problems, then we need to start with the ones right in front of us — not the ones that make for the best photo opportunities or the biggest show of virtue.

Shouting how angry you are can feel good, and sometimes it’s needful. But we can’t let shouting overcome listening. We need to do the difficult critical thinking necessary to weigh evidence. We need to talk to people who disagree with us to find out what their views really are — not just slap labels on them and hope our labels stick. We need to fight the unglamorous fights, because it’s that ugly, difficult work that actually gets things done.