I've been fascinated, in a slightly horrified way, by how right wing propagandists constantly try to reframe public discourse by the repetition of a small vocabulary of loaded words and phrases. The pejorative use of "woke" is seems to be the most common of these linguitic tics right now, but accusing your opponent of "virtue signalling" is still widely used as a catch-all way of dismissing an opposing view.
These sort of prefabricared buzz phrases fit together like Lego blocks, so you don't have to go far on social media before you trip over people complaining angrily about "woke virtue signallers". The point seems to be to keep using the same linguistic cues, over, and over, and over again in that hope that, thanks to availabilty bias, these negative connotations will stick in people's minds like mud.
The assumptions underlying this sort of language are, of course, highly questionable. What does "woke" really mean, and is it necessarily a bad thing? Are all examples of alleged "virture signalling" really always examples of people insincerely paying lip service to virtuous behaviour merely to look good? These are the things the propagandists using this sort of language doesn't want you to think about.
None of this stuff is new, but I did come across a new phrase that underlines how incoherent the right's weaponisation of "woke" and "virtue signalling" is. I was listening to a recent episode of Michael Rosen's Word of Mouth* radio programme about language and how we use it. The episode dealt with the language of online dating and introduced me to a new phrase I'd never heard before; "wokefishing".
Wokefishing is a more specific form of "catfishing", which is deceptively creating a fake online identity to lure somebody into a relationship under flase pretenses. In wokefishing, the romance scammer pretends to subscribe to a set of what people are shorthanding as "woke" beliefs, which could cover things like social justice, women's rights, minority rights, tolerance, green issues and so on, in order to lure somebody into a relationship.
Putting this new word next to the way the right weaponises "woke" and "social justice" prompts some interesting thoughts:
Firstly, culture warriors on the right want us to see "woke" as a pejorative term of abuse. If people are pretending to be woke and using woke identities it to make themselves more attractive to potential partners, this suggests that being woke is an attractive trait in a dating profile, a plus, like interesting, good sense of humour, honest, etc. So not only is it unclear how being actively opposed to social justice is a bad thing, as the "anti-woke" brigade claim, but wokeness is also a plus on a more superficial, social capital, level.
Which brings us, secondly, to the crime of "virtue signalling". In a literal sense, that's what wokefishers are doing; pretending to believe in virtuous things for selfish and cynical ends, while actually not believing in them at all. So who is doing the "virtue signalling" here? By definition, the people who are wokefishing aren't woke. Woke people saying that they subscribe to woke beliefs, or even better, honestly saying that they live by those beliefs and try to advance their principles in the world aren't "virtue signalling", they're just being honest about their core beliefs.
So we've got that rare beast, a genuine example of virtue signalling in the wild. And the culprits are, by definition, people who aren't woke.
I would say that this is an example psychological projection from the right's keyboard warriors. It sounds good, but I'd be falling into the same trap as the people who routinely use "virtue signalling" as a taunt; using a superficially sciency, technical-sounding term that's really quite sloppy and imprecise. After all, the term psychological projection comes out of Freudian analysis, a field which doesn't exactly come top of the class when it comes to having a rigorous evidence base.
Not psychological projection, then. An older name will do. Hypocrisy.
*Link to the episode on BBC Sounds here. Also available on at least one podcast app (I listen to Word of Mouth on Stitcher)
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