Indeed, in societies in which the wealthy were given sufficient opportunities to trade and develop industry, “so great a quantity of everything is produced,” wrote Smith, “that there is enough both to gratify the slothful and oppressive profusions of the great and at the same time abundantly to supply the wants of the artisan and peasant.”
Here, then, was an unexpectedly delightful story for the better off. The villains of economic theory since the early days of Christianity, they now found themselves recast as its heroes. It was the wealthiest who deserved praise for helping all the other social classes; it was the rich who housed the poor and fed the needy; it was the great fish that provided for the little fish swimming in their wake. Furthermore, they did all this even when they were personally reprehensible—in fact, the greedier they were, the better.
The story was less flattering to the poor. While the rich were hailed as creators of national prosperity, the poor were credited with only a modest, functional contribution; on occasion, they were even accused of draining resources through their excessive numbers and reliance on welfare and charity. Already freighted by material deprivation, they now had added to their burden the implicit contempt of many above them in the social hierarchy. In such an atmosphere, it seemed rather less fitting for poets to devote their verses to celebrating the nobility of ploughmen.
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 scientific
ally 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
and:
Say which word, or both or neither, has the same meaning as the first word:
impregnable terile terilevacuous
nominal terileexorbitant teriledidactic
Those who correctly met such challenges could be counted upon to merit academic success, jobs in Wall Street firms and ensuing membership in country clubs. In Conant’s words, the SAT was “a new type of social instrument whose proper use may be the means of salvation of the classlessness of the nation … a means of recapturing social flexibility, a means of approximating more nearly the American ideal.”
This American ideal did not, of course, entail actual equality but merely an initial period of strictly policed equal opportunity. If all citizens had the same chance to go to school and find the antonym among a list of words and enter university, there would be justice in any aristocracy that ultimately emerged among Americans.
By 1946, the year of the publication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the promise of its twenty-sixth provision had become, at least in many parts of Europe and the United States, more or less a reality: “Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.”
Alongside these educational reforms came legislation fostering equal opportunities in the workplace. In Britain, the landmark meritocratic measure was the introduction, in 1870, of competitive entrance examinations for the Civil Service. For centuries, the service had been home to the penniless and dim-witted relatives of aristocrats, with some catastrophic results for the empire. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the costs of employing these well-mannered, partridge-shooting fools had grown so high that two government officials, Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan, were asked to devise an alternative system of recruitment. After studying the bureaucracy for a few months, Trevelyan remarked in a letter to the Times,“There can be no doubt that our high aristocracy have been accustomed to employ the service as a means of providing for the waifs and strays of their families—as a sort of foundling hospital where those who had no energy to make their way in open professions might receive a nominal office for life at the expense of the public.”
Seventy years later, in The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell was still protesting against the ingrained evils of nepotism. Britain needed a revolution, he insisted, but one without “red flags and street fighting;” instead, what was required was “a fundamental shift of power” towards those who deserved to wield it: “What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the old. Right through our national life we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion that a halfwitted public-schoolboy is better for command than an intelligent mechanic. Although there are gifted and honest individuals among them, we have got to break the grip of the moneyed class as a whole. England has got to assume its real shape.”
Throughout the developed world, replacing the undeserving with the able became a leading ambition behind employment reform. In the United States, equality of opportunity was pursued with a special intensity. In March 1961, less than two months after assuming office, President John F. Kennedy established a Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and charged it with ending employment discrimination in all its forms in government departments and private businesses. A series of specific laws followed: the Equal Pay Act (1963), the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Equal Employment Opportunity Act (1964), the Older Americans Act (1965), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967), the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1976) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). With such legislation in place, it was plausible to believe, however old one happened to be and whatever one’s religion, colour or sex, that one would be guaranteed a fair chance of success.
Although progress towards a purely meritocratic system may have been slow, at times haphazard and as yet incomplete, already from the middle of the nineteenth century, especially in the United States and Britain, the trend had started to influence public perceptions of the relative virtues of the poor and the rich. Once jobs and rewards began to be handed out on the basis of dispassionate interviews and examinations, it could no longer be argued that worldly position was wholly divorced from inner qualities, as many Christian thinkers had proposed, nor could it be claimed that the wealthy and powerful must a priori have attained their station through corrupt means, as Rousseau and Marx had suggested. Once the partridge shooters had been ejected from the Civil Service and replaced with the intelligent offspring of the working classes, once the SATs had emptied Ivy League universities of the witless sons and daughters of East Coast plutocrats and filled them instead with the hardworking children of shop owners, it became harder to maintain that status was the result entirely of a rigged system.
Faith in an increasingly reliable connection between merit and worldly success in turn endowed money with a new moral quality. When riches were still being handed down the generations according to bloodlines and connections, it was natural to dismiss the notion that wealth was an indicator of any virtue besides that of having been born to the right parents. But in a meritocratic world in which prestigious and well-paid jobs could be secured only through native intelligence and ability, money began to look like a sound signifier of character. The rich were not only wealthier, it seemed; they might also be plain better.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, many Christian thinkers, particularly in the United States, revised their views on money accordingly. American Protestant denominations preached that God demanded of his followers a life of achievement both temporal and spiritual; the possession of riches in this world, it was suggested, was evidence that one deserved a good place in the next, an attitude reflected in the subtitle of the Reverend Thomas P. Hunt’s best-seller of 1836,The Book of Wealth: In Which It Is Proved from the Bible That It Is the Duty of Every Man to Become Rich. Wealth came to be described as a reward from God for holiness. John D. Rockefeller was unabashed to state that it was the Lord who had made him rich, while William Lawrence, the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, writing in 1892, avowed,“In the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes. We, like the Psalmist, occasionally see the wicked prosper, but only occasionally. Godliness is in league with riches.”
Thanks to the meritocratic ideal, multitudes were granted the opportunity to fulfil themselves. Gifted and intelligent individuals of the sort who for centuries had been kept down within an immobile, castelike hierarchy were now free to express their talents on a theoretically level playing field. No longer was background, gender, race or age an impassable obstacle to advancement. An element of justice had finally entered into the distribution of rewards.
But there was also, inevitably, a darker side to the story for those of low status. If the successful merited their success, it necessarily followed that the failures had to merit their failure. In a meritocratic age, an element of justice appeared to enter into the distribution of poverty no less than that of wealth. Low status came to seem not merely regrettable but also deserved.
Without doubt, attaining financial success in an economic meritocracy, without the benefit of inheritance or advantages of birth, provided a measure of personal validation that the nobleman of old, who had been given
his money and his castle by his father, had never experienced. But at the same time, financial failure became associated with a sense of shame that the peasant of old, denied all chances in life, had also, and more happily, been spared.
The question of why, if one was in any way good, clever or able, one was still poor became more acute and painful for the unsuccessful to have to answer (to themselves and others) in a new meritocratic age.
Third Story: The Poor Are Sinful and Corrupt and Owe Their Poverty to Their Own Stupidity
There was no shortage of people willing to answer the question on behalf of the poor during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For a certain outspoken constituency, it was clear (and scientifically provable) that the downtrodden had only their own degeneracy and lack of intelligence to blame for their lot in life.
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