Against Fairness

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Most of the stories of children’s culture, however, pull a sleight-of-hand trick on kids and on us. They regularly address two worthy topics that every child should cultivate—namely, sharing and open-mindedness (toward people who are different). But while we all approve of the great virtues of sharing and multicultural appreciation, we are informed that these are matters of fairness and equality—which, in point of fact, they are not. Sharing what we have is a major theme of all the above kids’ television shows, but also a major theme of many fairy tales, fables, and narratives (e.g., Robin Hood, A Christmas Carol, Stone Soup, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Giving Tree, and so on).

  Many people think that when they’re teaching their kids to not be selfish, they are in fact teaching them fairness. We assume this is true because our culture uses the term “fair” in a sloppy way, to mean anything good or just. But learning to curb selfishness is not the same thing as fairness.

  Reducing a child’s greediness is not the same as making her egalitarian. One can eliminate greed entirely and still remain preferential with one’s goods, one’s time, and one’s affection. Like the characters in many kids’ stories, our children are encouraged to spread the wealth, whether it be money, magic beans, or candy.

  Greed is a terrible vice, and generosity must be cultivated in order to counteract it—but a child should not be expected to distribute her wealth to just anyone on the playground. And even if she has enough candy for the whole playground population, each playground kid does not have a moral claim on her to receive some candy. A child might be so generous, in fact, that she gives away all her candy and does not even retain some for herself. But the quality of her generosity—the strength of her virtue—is not compromised by the fact that she gave it all to her five friends. She is still a very generous kid. A person might give everything she has, in fact, to one other person and thereby show profound generosity. And this demonstrates the independence of generosity (or sharing) from fairness, even though the two are often conflated in our cultural conversation. A person can be both highly generous and highly biased at the same time. Being in favor of favoritism, then, is not being against sharing.

  Most kids first encounter talk of fairness while engaging in sandbox politics. Such play involves sharing toys and playing games (taking turns in who picks the game, how it is played, and so on). “Fairness” is the catchall term that usually gets applied to these diverse norms. And in some cases, it’s accurate. For example, taking turns at being “it” in tag or the seeker in hide-and-seek is an issue of how an inferior or superior position is equally distributed. But parents also misapply the term (and kids adopt it) to other sorts of ethical norms—norms that have nothing to do with equality. For example, sandbox politics asks kids to respect one another’s feelings and property, to share things, to compromise on conflicting matters, to learn how to defer to “experts” (e.g., kids to adults, kindergartners to first-graders, etc.), and generally to learn how to discipline and modulate oneself in the uneven context of other agents.

  Fig. 13. Most kids learn the language of fairness in the course of (parent-guided) sandbox politics and peer interaction. But “fairness” doesn’t begin to cover the real normative complexities of the social territory that kids find themselves in. Drawing by Stephen Asma.

  However, equal distribution of power and goods—even in sandbox politics—is quite rare and, more importantly, beside the point. Some kids have amazing plastic trucks, some kids are charismatic and dominate games, some kids are familiar play pals while others are new to the sandbox, and some frighten the whole group with dog-deafening screams and tantrums. The whole thing is a hierarchic, biased, imbalanced mess—but it works. It’s not really an exercise in fairness, and yet we tend to use this terminology in our attempts to moralize and guide the chaos.

  Our official language of fair play rides on top of the actual complexities of childhood values as a comically simple veneer. And even a closer look at the culture of children’s stories and programs reveals a more subtle and rich set of value representations. We say we’re all about the fairness, but our more enduring stories dive into deeper waters.

  The wildly popular Pixar/Disney franchise Toy Story, for example, reveals more depth about favoritism than most “official” ethical instructions to kids. The “emotional atmosphere” of the well-known trilogy of films is a boy who loves his toys, but some more than others. There is tension and humor because Woody, the favorite toy, feels threatened by a new contender for favorite status (in this case, Buzz Lightyear), but the value inequalities are recognizable and relatable to every kid who sees it. Thankfully, the film does not offer a disingenuous denouement in which the boy learns to love and treat all his toys equally. Instead, we find a mature ethical universe depicted, where the toys recognize their relative places in the boy’s heart—and in one another’s—and flourish just fine within the hierarchical realities of favoritism. My suspicion is that such Disney stories and many fairy tales, for that matter, work so well on us because they speak more directly to our limbic values, rather than our official socially authorized values.6

  Many folk tales, fairy tales, and contemporary kids’ stories reveal and even lionize favoritism, without ever admitting it. The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) and many similar-themed stories, for example, convey the idea that loving something or someone intensely enough can actually change the beloved’s metaphysical status. Favoritism can even transform an inanimate toy into a living creature. Or consider further the positive depictions of Christopher Robin and his favorite Winnie-the-Pooh. And The Lion King is not only about the favorite son of the savanna, Simba, but it is also rife with unapologetic social hierarchies that run exactly counter to most egalitarian values. To my mind, these stories are good and their popularity stems from their honest engagement with our unegalitarian limbic systems of favoritism. The stories speak truths that are not acceptable or discussable in the official grid of impartiality.

  Sowing the Seeds of Confusion: Open Minds

  Teaching kids to share and calling it fairness is at best a confusion and at worst a deception. A similar bait-and-switch in contemporary childhood education is teaching kids to appreciate diversity but erroneously calling this virtue of open-mindedness “fairness.” These two different values are so commonly confused with one another that any critique is immediately met with charges of prejudice, discrimination, racism, sexism, and bigotry. But I wish to suggest that having favorites and having an open mind about differences are not mutually exclusive.

  Lesson plans for elementary teachers are great windows into a culture’s value system. Studying educational guidelines and lesson literature in the United States and abroad reveals a mishmash of ethics-based learning objectives. A recent Texas elementary school curriculum document, called “Justice and Fairness,” is highly indicative. The teacher is advised to introduce the topic to students by first defining terms. “Justice” we are told is “treating everyone fairly under established rules and laws.” Equating “justice” and “fairness” is a pervasive muddle in education, but then things get murkier as “fairness” is used to mean the sum total of disconnected virtues: “treating all people with honesty and respect,” “cooperating with one another,” “giving everyone equal opportunities to succeed,” “making sure others are not treated badly,” and also “celebrating the uniqueness and value of everyone.”

  Students are taken through a series of exercises that reinforce the idea that “being fair” is the same thing as “being good.” Teachers of all elementary grades are told to display an egg and a glass of water to the children. Placing the egg inside the glass, the teacher tells the students (as it sinks to the bottom) that this egg is like a person “who is not being treated fairly.” The egg “represents how someone who is left out or mistreated would feel—sad, depressed, defeated, unappreciated, and unloved.” Now the teacher should remove the egg and add salt to the water, equating the salt with “honesty and respect.” Next, the teacher should draw a
smiley face on the egg and return it to the water glass. The egg will now float. The teacher should explain that the egg is now “being supported with kindness and ‘held up’ by the fairness and acceptance of others.”7 Students are then introduced to the pantheon of fairness fighters: Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Abraham Lincoln, and Susan B. Anthony.

  It’s daunting to launch a critique on this, when I am myself a moderate liberal and a dedicated devotee of the above pantheon. But my critique seeks to preserve these virtues and these heroes, while dispatching the hypocrisy of calling it all “fairness.” It’s not just bad speaking, but bad thinking to conflate all this stuff. Respecting diverse people is an obvious good, but it does not require or entail that I lay aside my own favoritism.

  I share the belief that xenophobia is ever looming and needs constant correction and prevention at the elementary-school level. The challenges of today’s globalization are really just continuations of those historical tests of pluralism in melting-pot American. A massive 2004 European training manual for teachers, called Diversity and Equity in Early Childhood Training in Europe, makes it clear that Europe is trying to combat the social exclusion of immigrant groups and strengthen pluralistic inclusion.8 European and United States education systems are valiantly and justifiably simmering their respective melting pots to ensure fewer boil-overs.

  The Diversity and Equity manual invites teachers and students to engage in a variety of exercises designed to give greater awareness and perspective on the inequalities of minority life. In an Irish workshop called “The Dominant Walk,” for example, teachers are asked to “walk a mile in the shoes” of different people. Each Irish teacher is given a “profile” of a child living in contemporary Ireland (e.g., a white Irish five-year-old with an elder brother in boarding school, or a black four-year-old Dubliner boy who is deaf, or a four-year-old Traveller girl living at a nomadic site, and so on). Then the teacher must walk around, adopting the profiled child’s identity, and “consume” the cultural images of race, gender, and class that abound in everyday magazines, billboards, television, newspapers, and so on. According to the manual, teachers learn how underrepresented groups fail to show up in the imagery of dominant culture (i.e., they’re invisible) or show up exclusively as “problems” (e.g., as criminals, poor, etc.). From this lesson, they are encouraged to wallpaper their own classroom environments with more inclusive imagery—representations of minorities that lead children to feel like they belong.

  This whole exercise seems like a wonderful way to sensitize teachers and students to subtle forms of discriminatory cultural exclusion. I have no complaint with its purpose or its execution, but here’s the rub. The Diversity and Equity manual, just like American schools, equates open-mindedness with fairness throughout its many exercises, and sees all tribal tendencies as the enemy. Favoritism and bias are demonized and treated as equivalent to bigotry. For example, the manual recommends exercises for kids using an “Anti-bias Persona Doll.” The Anti-bias Persona Doll started in the United States but has also been embraced in European diversity training. The method uses dolls of various ethnic appearances to tell stories of mistreatment. Kids are asked to help rectify scenarios wherein the persona has suffered some prejudice and mistreatment. So far so good, but children are taught that all bias is unfair and that fairness is equity, which is only possible after bias has been eradicated. Teachers join in this fight against favoritism and bias—the manual claims that the best way to fight against the evils of racism, sexism, and social power imbalance is to use what they call the “anti-bias” approach. Teachers are taught, in workshops, to find their own biases (in a therapeutic session) and then root them out—to cleanse themselves of any subjective hierarchic evaluations of students and colleagues. The manual states that we should find our idiosyncratic ways of “othering the other” and purify ourselves of these tendencies.

  I want to argue something radical here. Contrary to all this received wisdom, I want to suggest that open-mindedness is actually compatible with favoritism and bias.

  Recent child psychologists, focusing on group attitudes and relations, have discovered a more nuanced picture than the received wisdom of the last fifty years. In 1954 the Supreme Court cited a 1947 study (by Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark) in their landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. The “doll test” study showed that black children in segregated schools preferred white dolls to black dolls, and the investigators argued that this showed a loss of self-esteem resulting from the segregated school environment.

  Starting in the 1950s, researchers, inspired by this important study, began running children through a variety of racial preference play tests and “trait assignment” tasks. The Preschool Racial Attitude Measure II (1975) and the Multiple-Response Racial Attitude measure (1988) asked kids to assign positive and negative traits to images of black and white children. Researchers wanted to see if kids assign traits, like “nice” or “mean” or “dirty” or “clean,” based solely on racial features. Since some of this trait assignment does correlate with racial differences, it was thought to be evidence for early childhood racism. Kids seem to be negative and prejudiced toward outgroups—toward groups of different racial or ethnic or cultural background. This view fits with a long-held bit of folk wisdom: people come together against a common enemy or set of strangers. Racial differences seem to create solidarity out of negativity. And the “narcissism of minor differences” will lead ingroups and outgroups to form over more trivial differences than race. This view has mixed with developmental theories, like Piaget’s, and become part of a story that describes all kids as moving from early childhood selfishness, to intermediate group concern, to the final stage of principled fairness for all. Each predecessor is considered an impediment to its successor.

  More recent research, however, has shown something very interesting, something counter to all this folk wisdom.9 Yes, ingroup bias is very strong—we identify with people who most resemble us—but it doesn’t really correspond with negativity toward outgroups in the way we previously thought. The earlier testing (trait-assignment tasks) forced kids into false dichotomies. Given only a narrow set of positive and negative traits and racial subjects to designate, kids automatically preferred their own similar ingroups, and then had no other choice but to assign negative traits to those individuals and groups who were different. More subtle testing shows that group favoritism does not automatically entail negative judgments or attitudes toward outgroups. Without the forced dichotomy testing, kids will report neutral traits and other positive traits to outgroups, not just negative traits.10

  These more recent findings undermine the old assumption that favoritism automatically entails bigotry toward outgroups. Intergroup relationships and judgments, even among kids, are much more complex than we thought. Kids simultaneously make social evaluations based on at least three different criteria: self-interests, group interests, and justice interests.11 The old folk wisdom that group closeness comes from negative opposition to others is not borne out by recent data. Nor is the old developmental story that we all start out as egotistical Hobbesians who slowly learn to care for others. This last point ties in with my earlier argument in chapter 2 that our biological default interests are family (tribal) oriented before they are egoistically oriented. Psychologists now suggest, “Instead of characterizing moral development as a series of hierarchical stages beginning with a selfish focus that transforms into group concerns and culminates in a justice principle, social domain researchers have demonstrated that people weigh personal, group and fairness principles simultaneously when making decisions about the right thing to do.”12

  In short, favoritism or bias toward your group is not intrinsically racist, sexist, or closed-minded. Privileging your tribe does not render you negative or bigoted toward those outside your tribe. And to top it off, we’re now beginning to understand the flexible nature of our ingroup favoritism—it doesn’t have to carve up along bloodlines, race lines, or ethnic lines. Ps
ychological experiments reveal a whole range of criteria for ingroup bias.13 For example, test subjects have been shown to award higher payoffs to arbitrary ingroups, like people who just happen to share the same birthday as the test subject. And ingroup bias can be demonstrably strong when subjects share allegiance to the same sports teams, and so on.

  Young people in our schools are repeatedly exposed to a bogus association between “unbiased equality for all” and “open-mindedness.” But even with the laudable pantheon of fairness fighters, paraded before elementary students, each has an origin in ingroup favoritism. Rosa Parks and Susan B. Anthony were not fighting for the equality of all people per se, but for the inclusion of their ingroups. It’s no disservice to them or denigration of them to point out this basic fact of favoritism. Some serious allegiance to one’s tribe is, after all, how anything gets done at the social level—including civil rights.

  Cicero, in his essay on friendship, praised favoritism in a way that celebrates its positive aspects without accepting or acknowledging it (as moderns do) as some impediment to liberal tolerance:

  For it seems clear to me that we were so created that between us all there exists a certain tie which strengthens with our proximity to each other. Therefore, fellow countrymen are preferred to foreigners and relatives to strangers, for with them Nature herself engenders friendship… . Moreover, how great the power of friendship is may most clearly be recognized from the fact that, in comparison with the infinite ties uniting the human race and fashioned by Nature herself, this thing called friendship has been so narrowed that the bonds of affection always unite two persons, or at most, a few.14

  Envy and Fairness

  When a young child complains that something is unfair, it is often easy to see the envy lurking beneath the thin veil of moral indignation. Adults are slyer in disguising their feelings as piety, but they frequently have little more justification than the child. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was an acute observer of human subterfuge and noticed that some of the most righteous pious people are some of the most angry, lustful, and vengeful people you’ll ever meet. He famously dissected the virtue of chastity, for example, to reveal lustful sensuality seething—frustrated—just below the surface.15 Is there a similar psychodynamic in our indignant demands for fairness? Do we detect some bitterness and resentment skulking under our high-toned demands for fairness?