All Animals Are Equal
For several years I was a member of the Boy Scout Movement, first as a cub, then a scout, and finally for a short time as an assistant scoutmaster. It was a long time ago, before the Boy Scouts morphed into Scouts in 1976 and became a co-educational youth movement. I’m not sure what first attracted me to the world of camping, walking, knotting and fireside talks: it certainly wasn’t the physical demands, more likely the link to the local Anglican church. However, what quickly became the real attraction over the years was the badges! As you grew up in scouting, so you acquired badges. Some were quasi-military, indications of membership, rank and responsibilities. Far more exciting were the merit badges, obtained by taking various tests, completing tasks, and making submissions. I can remember looking with awe at a senior scout whose uniform was covered in dozens of badges: whatever my initial reason for joining, my motivation morphed into wanting a collection like his!
It didn’t take me long to realise there was a strange divergence between collecting scouting badges and getting grades at school. At school, everything was organised to reward the student who performed the best: under the rather strict eyes of my mother, that meant I had to aim for ‘A’s all the time, and at least 90% in examinations. Well, I was academically inclined, and could live with that, as well as my mother’s tangible disappointment when it came to my less than excellent marks in subjects like French (ugh) and art (double ugh). In scouting, you got the badge if you met the requirements, and there were few rewards for excellence. Students I knew at school who were academically weak were getting badges just like me (and some got them for activities like swimming – a no go area for Sheldrake the stone!). In education, it was the opposite: entering a grammar school, I was in the academic stream, the top 10%, and only vaguely aware of the other much larger system of Secondary Modern schools. We were aiming for GCE O-level and A-level exams; pushed to get the highest marks possible. Did students at ‘other’ schools get their variety of certificates, too? I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t know, nor did I care. [By the way, yes, they did.]
Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, those two systems contrasted merit against the operations of a meritocracy. Scouting merit badge were just that: they were evidence of merit – skill – in a defined area, without subtle grading, just proficiency. I’d left scouting by my late teenage years, but by that time I had been working with younger boys, helping them develop proficiency and obtain their collections of badges, just like mine. At school, however, I was in a different and very clearly meritocratic world. Back then the British system was built around creating an elite based on academic excellence.
If I am honest, the system was built around failure. At each stage, most students failed to get up to the next level, failed to get into the grammar school, failed exams at each year, so that by the end of secondary education there was a small group left, ready to go off to university (many failing to get into one of the best universities), and graduate (many failing to get a top degree). With just a little luck, those who cleared all the academic hurdles successfully would then be ideally qualified to get the best jobs, be paid the highest incomes, garner recognition and respect. After all, they deserved to, didn’t they? It now embarrasses me to admit I didn’t see much of this when I was young: I loved study, I was lucky enough to do well, and kept aspiring to achieve more. It wasn’t until my second year at university I slowed down enough to think and began to realise how pervasive that meritocratic system was.
Recently I was exploring this topic with a couple of friends, as we examined the arguments put forward in Michael Sandel’s book The Tyranny of Merit. Sandel argues, “Meritocracy, like any ‘-ocracy’, is a mode of rule, a way of distributing income, power, wealth, opportunity, honour and social recognition. The principle of meritocracy, simply put, says that if chances are equal, the winners deserve their winnings. So what distinguishes meritocracy from simply aligning people’s skills with social roles for which they are qualified? The idea of moral deservingness. What makes merit a kind of tyranny is the way it attributes deservingness to the successful. As inequalities of income and wealth have widened in recent decades, meritocratic attitudes towards success have tightened their grip and led the winners to believe that their success is their own doing.” Just so.
Sandel goes on to point out that a previous -ocracy had been the aristocracy, where people received privileges and rewards simply because of the lottery of birth. Drawing on the dangerous ideas inspiring the French and American revolutions, an alternative view emerged that obtaining rewards based on your family background was unfair, and a new practice based on merit took hold. However, “As meritocracy has tightened its hold on our public life, however, what began as a principle that seemed to offer an alternative to inequality has become instead a justification for inequality. What’s more, meritocracy has become a kind of hereditary system, much as aristocracy was. Affluent, privileged parents have figured out how to pass their privilege on to their kids, not by bequeathing them land or estates, as in aristocratic societies, but instead by equipping them to compete successfully on standardised tests and win admission to highly competitive universities. … a seemingly attractive principle — that if chances are equal, the winners deserve their winnings — by implication comes to mean that those who struggle and fall short must deserve their fate as well.”
No wonder there is resentment in society, especially from those less well-off, egged on by conservatives (many of whom, paradoxically, are beneficiaries of the meritocratic system). It isn’t just the fact that meritocracy seems to be another form of social stratification, the elite grabbing most of the rewards and passing them on to their children. It isn’t just that there is this moral overtone that being less academically qualified is equated with failure, with not deserving rewards and recognition. It is also a response to what is promoted as the best way to address inequality, which is through getting educated. That story seems simple: if everyone has access to high quality education, then they will be able to develop their skills and capabilities and have a fair and equal chance in obtained a good job, a good income.
As I type these words, I realise I must be careful. I don’t want to suggest that education doesn’t matter. Rather, the issue is to do with the current educational system, especially as it has emerged over the last 50 years. Before that time, I’d like to believe that education was about learning, reflecting, the skills of thinking, assessing ideas and information, and grappling with scientific, social and ethical issues, all in preparation to ensure citizens were thoughtful and considerate. Students who emerged out of the system were educated.
I know, it was never like that. However, it is very far from that today. Now the purpose, the outcome of education, is to obtain a credential. Credentials are the tickets needed for employment, and most of the best paid jobs require them, the rewards if you like, for years of successful study. The educational system today isn’t concerned with producing better people, but rather it is a sorting machine. As you move up in the system, you qualify for a more attractive position. Of course, this sorting process does take account of your aptitudes and preferences. Quite early on, you are allocated to one track in the system, as others become clearly less relevant, partly because of competence, and partly because the sorting system must ensure a good and appropriate supply of people for all the important roles to be followed. We want lawyers, but not too many, we want doctors, but in the right areas of practice, and so it goes on. If you kept on passing the examinations (the sorting system) then you would deserve your employment as a hospital doctor or a barrister – and everyone who had failed along that path didn’t deserve the kind of rewards to which you were now entitled!
Why am I so aggravated by this? Let me point out three aspects that are troubling. The first and obvious problem is that the sorting mechanism is biased. I won’t go over all the detailed figures, but just point out that children from affluent families are more likely to get into higher education, much more likely than those from the poorest families who seldom make it through. It would be convenient, and false, to suggest this is because well-off youngsters are more intelligent. Considerable research shows that simply isn’t true. However, the system rewards performance, not intelligence. If your family can afford books, educational programs, tutors, and even take you on trips to places where you can see and appreciate history, geography, and various forms of culture, you are likely to perform better.
It’s just like athletics: a good coach can make a mediocre performer improve. That doesn’t mean they can suddenly win races, as raw physical ability matters, but they can be trained to do well. In fact, the athletics analogy is a good one. We know there are different kinds of athletic performance, from running short or long distances, throwing javelins or the discuss, jumping, through to the various kinds of hand-eye coordinated activity from batting to golf, to throwing balls into a basket. The same is true for intelligence. We know there are varieties of intelligence, logical, mathematics, spatial, verbal and more. Indeed, we have all different mental gifts, just as we do in relation to our physical abilities. A good system would ensure individual mental strengths are assessed and outcomes managed equitably.
A system that selects and then rewards and praises some people based on a limited set of measures is clearly inequitable. So, improve education. If improving education means improving a system to give people credentials, then we are back where we started: fitting people into boxes and leaving everyone feeling they deserved where they ended up. If ‘deserved’ means many still find they ‘lost out’, it is still a poor system. What we need is to rethink education. Addressing this leads to the second issue with the current system: education has become focussed on fitting people to the technology of work, or, as Michael Sandel puts it, we are living in a technocracy. However, it does a poor job: ask employers, and most will tell you the first thing they have to do is to ‘train’ their new staff on how to do the job . Just think what that means. The meritocracy offers credentials and does so in an inequitable manner. The beneficiaries of the system feel they deserve what they get by way of rewards, while the rest feel they ‘deserved’ less. But those who get the good jobs aren’t sufficiently prepared and still need be trained to do what is wanted. Great system!
Michael Sandel argues higher education has been subverted. “Instead of being about teaching and learning and providing a moment for young people to reflect on what’s worth caring about, higher education is increasingly enlisted as the arbiter of opportunity in a meritocratic society. Higher education is also essential to this story because, in addition to becoming an arbiter of merit, it has also taken an increasingly technocratic form … a stark departure from traditional, even ancient, notions of merit in governance, which, all the way back to Plato and Aristotle and Confucius, connected the concept of merit to the concept of virtue. In this tradition, to govern well required not only technocratic expertise or scientific knowledge; it also required the capacity for good judgment about human and political circumstances. This in turn required the ability to reason and deliberate with and to persuade fellow citizens and also to care for the common good — that is, to have a certain understanding of what the good of the whole consists in, which cannot be captured in strictly utilitarian or technocratic terms. Aristotle thought that moral and civic virtue, along with reasoning about the public good with fellow citizens, was a necessary component of excellence in governing.” As Sandel comments, if merit is defined in terms of technocratic expertise, so we slip further into seeing economics as the way to manage human behaviour. Well, you knew that already. We live in an instrumental world, in which the measure of all things is money, and that view of human society is so deeply embedded we scarcely notice. Capitalism has done a good job, to the point politicians and business leaders see the world through an economic lens. Any values other than economic are incidental or secondary, left to be pursued in leisure time, living out fantasies through television and computer games, except for those so poor they even lack opportunities for contemporary ‘bread and circuses.
There is one further issue in this current system, which is the role of effort. This was an argument used by Adrian Wooldridge in a recent podcast debate with Michael Sandel. He suggested that rewards should be a function of merit, defined as ability, skills, etc, and sweat, the amount of effort the individual has put into their work. For him this solved the issue about deserving a reward, because it wasn’t just that you had some appropriate skills, but you worked hard to make use of them. I’m not averse to recognising effort, but it does little to address the problem of a meritocracy. If we reward airline pilots more than street cleaners and encourage them to believe they deserve their rewards, then telling the cleaner to work harder will scarcely change the fact their pay packet makes it clear they ‘deserved’ less.
What is to be done? This is an issue about equality. Telling people they earn less and that is what they deserve because they didn’t do well in the sorting machine denies human equality. Shakespeare knew about equality. In the first scene of Act III in The Merchant of Venice, Shylock says, “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?” For Shylock, this leads on to a justification for revenge, but for many of us, that phrase ‘If you prick us do we not bleed’ makes the point about equality clear. Four hundred years later, a dry-eyed George Orwell made a similar observation in Animal Farm with another horribly memorable line, ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ It could be a catchcry for our current meritocracy. They abandoned equality at Animal Farm, and it may be too late to recover it in human society. All humans are equal, but it is going to be a long and hard task to make that real.
Sandel argues this is about the dignity of all work. He pointed out that in Biden’s campaign in 2020 he gave little emphasis to the idea everyone should be able to go to university. This had been one of Clinton’s arguments, who’d responded to wage stagnation by telling people to better themselves through more education, the standard meritocratic offer of Democrats and Republicans over the previous four decades. What the rhetoric missed was the insult implicit in it. By implication, if you didn’t go to college, your failure was your fault; you had only yourself to blame. Biden appeared not have swallowed that meritocratic rhetoric. Certainly, he was more inclined to put the dignity of work at the centre of his candidacy.
At the beginning of 2022 it appears Biden’s policy proposals are already in trouble, but let’s hope his philosophy prevails. Steps towards real equality are critical, especially those that take away the nasty values embed in a meritocracy. Before it collapsed, in Animal Farm all animals were equal. Then an elite took control. We should strive to make equality true for human society but do so remembering Orwell’s cautionary tale: no backsliding allowed.
