Sustained simulation of virtue may become indistinguishable from real virtue

Evidence

This fake saint then becomes a sacrifice. To what? Faith is not, after all, reasonable. And the line between virtue and the sustained simulation (making something happen by insisting it is so) of virtue is hard, perhaps finally impossible, to fix. So the book can suggest, in the end, that perhaps Raju is a miracle worker, after all: “Raju opened his eyes, looked about, and said, ‘Velan, it’s raining in the hills. I can feel it coming up under my feet, up my legs—’ He sagged down” (G, 220). A nice bit of controlled indeterminacy there, resting upon one of the most firmly established European cultural conventions: the transition from Christian psychobiography to Romantic Imagination. (In a broader field it is seen as the transformation of Christianity into “secular” ethics, theology into philosophy.) Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault, among others, have speculated about the relationship between these changes and the turn to capitalism. The dominant Hindu “colonial subject” in India came to terms with his Hinduism with the help of the epistemic trick allowed (often clandestinely) by this shift. At the colonial limit, sacred geography thus became an interior landscape. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1967

Categorization

• XREF: Uncannily close to the reader’s core question: the ‘sustained simulation (making something happen by insisting it is so)’ is precisely the strategic-essentialism bind — can performance be held without becoming genuine belief? — connects to: Simulation substitutes signs of the real for the real itself — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 9; Virtue ethics requires ongoing vigilance even after habits become automatic — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival…, 964; In simulation the real and its image become mutually reversible reflections — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 469
• DEEPTHINKING: Spivak here names the mechanism by which ironic/staged identity risks converting into genuine commitment, and asks whether the boundary can even be fixed — a direct theoretical resource.

Broader Connections

• Simulation substitutes signs of the real for the real itself #expands (0.78) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 9
• In simulation the real and its image become mutually reversible reflections #expands (0.75) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 469
• Virtue ethics requires ongoing vigilance even after habits become automatic #expands (0.72) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 964