## Metadata - Author: [[Colin Kidd]] - Full Title: Colin Kidd · Builder Bees: Mandeville's Useful Vices - Category: #articles - Summary: The text discusses the idea of virtue-signalling and ethical narcissism in today's society, as seen through the lens of the 18th-century thinker Bernard Mandeville's work. Mandeville believed that all good deeds are motivated by self-regard, whether openly exhibited or subtly concealed. He argued that both those who boast about their virtues and those who remain quietly smug are ultimately driven by pride and a desire for social approval. - URL: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n14/colin-kidd/builder-bees ## Full Document You have reached your article limit Subscribe now to get unlimited access to our complete archive. Get an entire year of the London Review of Books for $39.98 ALREADY REGISTERED? [LOG IN](javascript:;) The​ Presbyterian ministers of my Ayrshire childhood never harangued their congregations, and were almost to a man – they were all men – mellow and avuncular. Authority figures policed behaviour – all the way down to disciplining boys who walked around with hands in pockets or shirt-tails hanging out – but nobody propounded moral values; ethics tended to be intuited rather than paraded. Far worse than any actual offence was to ‘clype’ – to tell tales about the transgressions of others – just as it was not the done thing to boast about our own occasional good deeds. I have found the recent tendency towards ostentatious virtue-signalling unsettling. Why strive so hard to communicate good character, outside the confines of a job interview or a first meeting with prospective in-laws? Humblebragging in itself is, I suppose, innocuous, but much less so the sustained and coercive judgmentalism of social media. The work of the early 18th-century paradox-monger Bernard Mandeville supplies a devastating corrective to the fashion for unctuous grandstanding. Notorious in his own day as a cynical anti-moralist, Mandeville possessed a prophetic insight into the deformations of the social media age. The psychological traits we now parse as effects of Instagram and Twitter consumption, he recognised as deep-laid elements in our lives as social beings. Although 21st-century terms like virtue-signalling and ethical narcissism were outside his vocabulary, Mandeville knew the phenomena intimately. A connoisseur of hypocrisy and self-deception, he perceived that all good deeds are tinged with self-regard. Pride – ‘the vast esteem we have for our selves’ – lies at the root of our supposed virtue. Our motives are never pure. Mandeville also skewers the motives of non-virtue-signallers, however, unmasking the feelings of secret superiority that accompany such reticence. We merely deceive ourselves into thinking we might not be showing off. The seeming contrast between sanctimonious exhibitionists and the quietly smug is no contrast at all. Both groups are equally motivated by pride; the only difference lies in the subtlety of execution. According to Robin Douglass, Mandeville understood that ‘secretly concealing the outward display of our pride from others’ is pride’s ‘most sophisticated manifestation’. He knew that people felt the ‘pleasure of being esteemed by a vast majority, not as what they are, but what they appear to be’. In his reading, every one of us is a sleekit – and self-deceiving – attention-seeker: we brim over with self-admiration and spin our vainglory as altruistic and other-serving. Centuries before Facebook, he perceived the way that as social beings we constantly curate the profiles we disclose to the wider world and to ourselves. [Share on Twitter](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Builder%20Bees&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lrb.co.uk%2Fthe-paper%2Fv46%2Fn14%2Fcolin-kidd%2Fbuilder-bees&original_referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lrb.co.uk%2Fthe-paper%2Fv46%2Fn14%2Fcolin-kidd%2Fbuilder-bees)[Share on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?t=Builder%20Bees&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lrb.co.uk%2Fthe-paper%2Fv46%2Fn14%2Fcolin-kidd%2Fbuilder-bees)[Email](mailto:?subject=LRB%20-%20Colin%20Kidd%20-%20Builder%20Bees%20-%20Mandeville%26%23039%3Bs%20Useful%20Vices&body=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lrb.co.uk%2Fthe-paper%2Fv46%2Fn14%2Fcolin-kidd%2Fbuilder-bees)[Print](javascript:print();)[Letters](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n14/colin-kidd/builder-bees#Letters) Send Letters To: The Editor London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HN [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]?subject=Letter%20to%20the%20editor&body=Please%20include%20your%20name%2C%20address%2C%20and%20phone%20number%20so%20that%20we%20contact%20you.) Please include name, address, and a telephone number.