That's ridiculous, but being ridiculous doesn't matter. It would only matter if the pundit of the kind I'm talking about had a moral core. He does not make arguments, however, with concern for them being right or wrong, good or bad. He makes those arguments for the purpose of getting attention, which is the metric by which he measures the advancement of his self-interest. People who wear a mask don't make a big deal about it. Those who refuse to wear one, however, often do. Moral people don't draw attention to their virtue. Amoral people are the ones sending all the signals.
But now instead of religion we're supposed to argue about masks. Funny it's never even about public health (which apparently no longer exists as a social concern). The term doesn't even show up in that commentary, of which this is the last paragraph. The concept of public health sort of lurks in the background as the author talks about his decision to keep wearing a mask so he reduces his risk of picking up covid and taking it home to his family (and a child he says is too young for vaccination).
This bit, especially, I feel like I could have written myself:
In this, I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. I see plenty of mask-wearing in my part of New Haven.1 I see masks inside as well as outside, even though Connecticut's governor has lifted the requirement for wearing them outside. I see them at the grocery store. I see them as the gas station. I see them at the dog park. I see people wearing them in their cars. Nearly everyone was wearing a mask recently during Westville's outdoor arts festival. No one required or asked us to. We just did. Mask-wearing is a normal part of life. When will it stop? Well, it's obvious. When safety is again a normal part of life.
Every grownup I talked to at the arts festival I just mentioned had been fully vaccinated. The topic of conversation was about feeling safe without a mask. Some did, some didn't. That, to me, was the context for the CDC's latest announcement. That, to me, made the CDC's latest announcement seem reasonable. The more people are vaccinated, the less likely it is for the covid to spread. The less it spreads, the less risk the public is going to face. Those who are more risk-averse, like me, can keep doing what we've been doing without much inconvenience. After all, mask-wearing is so internalized some expect it to return periodically, as the flu season comes and goes.
I didn't get so much as the sniffles this year. Partly that's due to isolation; partly that's due to masks (I wasn't on a desert island, after all). I have a stack of masks my wife made for me. I'm not planning to throw those away. Come flu season, I may well drag them out again. What's it to you? Am I "virtue-signaling"? Or am I trying to avoid a respiratory illness? Wear a mask? Or risk the flu, or worse? Gee, that's a tough one....
The argument, while I'm here, is nicely summed up in this paragraph:
Wearing a mask, even when you're fully vaccinated, is morally justified in that you're not hurting anyone in the process of wearing one. You might have reasons for wearing one, but you don't need them. You can wear a mask simply because you feel like it. For some people, though, that moral justification is nearly impossible to see because they do not have a moral core with which to see it. For them, there are only incentives that either advance or do not advance their self-interest. Therefore, wearing a mask post-vaccination isn't just a sign of risk-aversion, as it is for me. It's a sign of "virtue-signaling." I wear one to show off my superior lifestyle and my superior virtue (ha!).
Which brings me back to the halcyon days of the on-line atheists, desperate to assert and establish their superiority. They didn't display any kind of moral code, either. They seemed to regard any public discussion of religion (all of which they equated with the most simplistic fundamentalism) as "virtue-signaling," even though that silly phrase hadn't been invented yet (and is largely the work of people with no moral code, and distinctly aware of their lack. What better defense is there than to claim someone else is faking something you can't even fake?).
The French are right: the more things change, the more they remain the same.
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