Second Story: Status Does Have Moral Connotations
Central to traditional Christian thought was the claim that status carried no moral significance. Jesus was the most exalted among men, but he had been a carpenter. Pilate, who had been an important imperial official, was a sinner: this incongruence alone proved that a person’s place in the social hierarchy was not reflective of his or her actual qualities. An intelligent, kind, resourceful, quick and creative individual might be found sweeping floors, and a chinless, degenerate, fin de race, sadistic and foolish one governing a nation.
The assertion of a disjuncture between rank and intrinsic value was hard to refute when in Western societies, positions had for centuries been distributed according to bloodlines and family connections rather than talent, a practice which had resulted in generations of kings who couldn’t rule, lords who couldn’t manage their own estates, commanders who didn’t understand the intricacies of battle, peasants who were brighter than their masters and maids who knew more than their mistresses.
The pattern held until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the first voices began to question the hereditary principle. Was it really wise for fathers always to hand down their businesses to their sons, without regard to their intelligence? Were the children of royalty necessarily the best suited to run their countries? To highlight the folly of the principle, comparisons were made with an area of life where a meritocratic system had long been entrenched and accepted by even the most committed supporters of hereditary privilege: literature. When it came to choosing a book, what mattered was whether the writing was any good, not whether the author’s parents had been famous or wealthy. A talented father did not guarantee literary success, nor an ignominious one failure. Why not, then, import this same objective method of judgement into appointments in political or economic life?
“I smile to myself when I contemplate the ridiculous insignificance into which literature and all the sciences would sink, were they made hereditary, commented Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (1791), and I carry the same idea into governments. A hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary author. I know not whether Homer or Euclid had sons; but I will venture an opinion that if they had, and had left their works unfinished, those sons could not have completed them.”
Napoleon shared Paine’s indignation, and early on in his reign, became the first Western leader openly to move towards what he would term a system of carrières ouvertent aux talents,“careers open to talent.” “I made most of my generals de la boue,” he proudly recalled on Saint Helena, near the end of his life. “Whenever I found talent, I rewarded it.” There was substance to his boast: Napoleonic France witnessed the abolition of feudal privileges and the institution of the Legion of Honour, the first title to be bestowed on individuals of every social rank. The educational system was likewise reformed: lycées were opened to all, and in 1794 a polytechnic was founded, offering generous state subsidies to poorer pupils (in its early years, half the students it enrolled were the sons of peasants and artisans). Many of Napoleon’s leading appointees came from modest backgrounds, among them his prefects at the Ministry of the Interior, his scientific advisers and a number of senators. In Napoleon’s words, hereditary nobles were “the curse of the nation, imbeciles and hereditary asses!”
Even after his fall, Napolean’s ideas endured and won over influential proponents in Europe and the United States. Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed a desire to see “every man placed where he belongs, with so much power confided to him as he would carry and use.” Thomas Carlyle, for his part, was outraged by the way the children of the rich squandered their money while those of the poor were denied even a rudimentary education: “What shall we say of the Idle Aristocracy, the owners of the soil of England; whose recognised function is that of handsomely consuming the rents of England and shooting the partridges of England?” He railed against those who had never done anything or benefitted anyone, who had not had to prove themselves in any field but had instead been handed their privileges on a plate. He sketched a portrait of the typical English aristocrat, “luxuriously housed up, screened from all work, from want, danger, hardship. He sits serene, amid appliances, and has his work done by other men. And such a man calls himself a noble- man? His fathers worked for him, he says; or successfully gambled for him. It is the law of the land, and is thought to be the law of the Universe that this man shall have no task laid on him except that of eating his cooked victuals and not flinging himself out of the window!”
Like many nineteenth-century reformers, Carlyle dreamt not of a world in which everyone would be financially equal, but of one in which high and low alike would come by their inequalities honestly. “Europe requires a real aristocracy,” he wrote, “only it must be an aristocracy of talent. False aristocracies are insupportable.” What he was imagining was a system whose name had not yet been coined: a meritocracy.
The new ideology of meritocracy competed with two alternative notions of social organization: the egalitarian principle, calling for absolute equality in the distribution of goods among all members of society; and the hereditary principle, endorsing the automatic transfer of titles and posts (and partridge shoots) from the wealthy to their children. Like aristocrats of old, meritocrats were prepared to tolerate a great deal of inequality, but like radical egalitarians, they favoured (if only for a transitional phase) complete equality of opportunity. If everyone received the same education and had the same chance to enter any career, they argued, subsequent differences in income and prestige would be justified by reference to individuals’ particular talents and weaknesses. Consequently, there would be no need artificially to equalise salaries or assets; hardships would be merited no less than privileges.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century social legislation represented the triumph of the meritocratic principle. Equal opportunities were, with varying promptness and differing degrees of sincerity, promoted by the governments of all Western countries. It came to be generally accepted that a decent secondary—and in many cases even a university—education should be made available to every citizen, regardless of income. The United States led the way with the opening, in 1824, of the first truly publicly supported high school. By the time of the Civil War, in the 1860s, there were three hundred such schools, and by 1890, the number stood at twenty-five hundred. In the 1920s, it was the turn of university education to be reformed along meritocratic lines through the introduction of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, system. Its founders, the president of Harvard University, James Conant, and the head of the U.S. government’s Educational Testing Service, Henry Chauncey, aimed to develop a scientifically proven meritocratic standard by which to assess the intelligence of all applicants in a fair and dispassionate manner, thereby curtailing old-school bias, racism and snobbery in university admissions. Rather than being judged by who their fathers were or how well they were dressed, American pupils would now be ranked according to their real worth—which, in Conant and Chauncey’s understanding of the term, meant their ability to solve problems such as the following:
Pick out the antonyms from among these four words:
obdurate spurious ductile recondite