The Education of Marcus

What’s so bad about talking about virtue?

This reflection once occurred to us: How many democracies have been brought down by those who wished the governing to be done in some other way than under a democracy….
—Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, 1.1.1

Marcus Rashford had himself a week. On Wednesday he came on in the 63rd minute of a Champions League game, scored two goals against one of the best teams in Europe, gave away a penalty to a teammate, scored again in added time to complete his first career hat trick, and immediately logged onto Twitter to make fun of Tories. Real Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire shit.

But that wasn’t even what we’ll remember about Rashford’s week. The bigger story, the thing politicians were mad at him about in the first place, happened last Friday, when a bunch of English small business owners volunteered to help feed poor children their government didn’t want to feed. Rashford’s encouraging them to do so was “virtue signalling,” the mad politicians said. His refusing to take a penalty against Leipzig must be virtue signalling, too, the internet joked.

“On a serious note though,” Rashford tweeted innocently after the game, “what is virtue signalling?”

If you don’t know the answer to that question by now, don’t worry, there are plenty of people out there who would love to fill you in. The Spectator column that helped popularize the term defined it as “indicating that you are kind, decent and virtuous,” which sounds pretty great until you notice that most of the column’s examples of virtue signalling involve speaking up for the poor, which is apparently bad. The idea with virtue signalling seems to be that nobody really cares deep down about stuff like making sure kids can eat, so anyone who encourages others to care is either lying or bragging for attention. Shame there’s no other way for one of England’s best players to get press.

Which, listen, there are a lot of schools of thought about what virtue is, but one thing they tend to have in common is that you’re supposed to talk about it. Virtue is social. The first example that came to mind as I read about Rashford was from Xenophon, who wrote a sort of historical novel called The Education of Cyrus about the guy who founded the Persian Empire. In the story’s Persia, which sounds suspiciously like Xenophon’s Ancient Greece, children spend their time “learning justice.” For the most part this involves being taught to practice moderation; there’s a lot of talk about curbing appetites and putting others ahead of yourself. “Whenever there was a feast or a holiday, they perceived him giving of his own share rather than asking for more,” Xenophon writes of Cyrus, “and when in addition to these things they saw him superior to themselves in other respects, of course his agemates were intimidated by him.”

I don’t know what things were like for Rashford growing up at Manchester United’s academy, but based on everything I know about kids and sports I’d imagine it’s kind of like how Cyrus was raised. Lot of athletic training, lot of discipline, lot of just trying to get U-10s to share the damn ball. The hardest part about soccer isn’t wanting to score goals and win—that part comes naturally—but learning to put the team first.

When you go pro, things get more complicated. Suddenly the reason you play isn’t to learn to be better, it’s to win by any means necessary. You don’t get songs sung and columns written about you for being selfless—you’re loved or hated for what’s on the scoresheet. When Rashford was 19, the year he earned his place as a starter at United, his teammate Zlatan Ibrahimović earned £3 million in goalscoring bonuses alone. For some reason Rashford didn’t get offered any penalties that season.

And yet teams still need to play like teams if anyone’s going to score, and the tension between the individual and the collective is a constant part of the game. Cyrus’s feel for this is the reason he’s a great ruler. When he’s given his first military command, he delivers a rousing locker room speech reminding his teammates of the things they learned in the Achaemenid Youth League, but this time mixed with an appeal to self interest. “I do not think that human beings practice virtue so that those who become good have no more than do the worthless,” Cyrus says before they go marching off to war and plunder. “You rejoice in being praised more than in all other things, and lovers of praise must of necessity take on with pleasure every labor and every risk.”

This is basically coaches’ and captains’ job, trying to convince players that serving the team will serve their interests. One thing I’ve always found interesting is how much that job depends on the education of fans. If people learn to appreciate soccer’s subtler virtues, we’ll praise players for them, the players will notice they can be rewarded for stuff other than scoring goals, and they’ll start taking on every labor with pleasure. If we don’t, well, that’s how you get a guy like Zlatan. The simple act of talking about what it means to be a good soccer player, encouraging each other to care about unglamorous teamwork, helps improve our club. It’s a cultural thing. You might even call it virtue signalling.

What do those virtues look like? For the sake of pretending this letter is about soccer, I’ll suggest a few, using only the few minutes when Rashford wasn’t busy scoring goals against RB Leipzig:

The thing about this video is that nobody knows if it’s right. Success in soccer is easy to locate: it’s in the back of the net. Claims about the best way to get there, though, are essentially speculative—every game model, every training session, every decision to press an opponent or block a passing lane, is nothing but an educated guess. Maybe that’s why Xenophon’s neighbor Plato was so coy about virtue. When Meno asks whether it can be taught, Plato’s Socrates insists he’s never met anyone who even knows what virtue is. Rather than listen to people who would tell us how to be virtuous, Plato suggests, we’re better off learning to think for ourselves in hopes of arriving at some true beliefs.

I’m sympathetic to that part of the virtue signalling crowd’s argument. Talking about values can only get us so far; if we’re really going to be good, we need to learn to examine what that means. Nobody’s got the absolute truth in ethics or politics or soccer. That’s why different parties and playstyles exist. I’ve got a feeling, though, that the best answers we can find are going to look less like scoring goals and more like putting in off-ball work, and that talking about it will help us get there.

As for our guy Cyrus, he had a hell of a playing career. By the end of Xenophon’s book, Persia has grown from a quiet backwater into a vast and wealthy empire. But something else has changed, too: the appeals to self interest that Cyrus used to rally the troops have eaten away at the old values, the love of justice and moderation and sharing your plate at a feast that made his country great. In the end, the Persians are “more impious regarding gods, more irreverent regarding relatives, more unjust regarding others” than before Cyrus, Xenophon writes. The empire is already falling apart. If only they’d been a little more willing to signal the importance of virtue. ❧

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Further reading:

• Xenophon tr. Wayne Ambler, The Education of Cyrus (Cornell 2001)
• Keith Duggan, Touching response to Marcus Rashford’s clarion call reveals very best of England (Irish Times)
• James Bartholomew, Easy Virtue (The Spectator)
• Plato tr. G.M.A. Grube, Meno (Hackett 1997)

Image: Achaemenid period, Relief of a Persian Guard