Many kids and even adults see fairness in punitive terms. Lofty egalitarian philosophy about a utopian grid of equality is noble when legislators are framing constitutions, but the rest of us usually cry “unfair” when we feel slighted, snubbed, or envious of others. Feeling injured, as an individual or group, is strong fuel for our obsession with fairness.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), the French philosopher and historian, studied America and pronounced, “Equality is a slogan based on envy. It signifies in the heart of every [American] ‘Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I.’”16 More than an American problem, of course, envy seems built into the human condition. Social utopians suggest that vices like envy and jealousy are contingent upon political economy, and if we just got rid of private property, we’d have no cause to envy others. On the other hand, the story of Cain and Abel as well as the work of ancient Greek tragedians suggest that envy didn’t need to wait for capitalism to goad the hearts of men.
Fig. 14. The biblical story of Cain and Abel reveals a preferential God and also gives us an early glimpse into the madness of envy. Here God smiles on Abel’s blood sacrifice and frowns on Cain’s grain approach. Drawing by Stephen Asma, based on medieval representations.
Envy is considered a sin in Christianity and a terrible addiction in Buddhism, but it has an upside too. It can energize and motivate a person to strive harder for what they want. In the Buddhist Bhikkhuni Sutta (Anguttara IV), the monk Ananda—the Buddha’s right-hand man—avoids the righteous talk and admits that sometimes a transgression is the best way to kick-start a virtue. He says that sometimes conceit is the way to overcome conceit. For example, a young traveler on the dharma path may see the freedom and equanimity of a more experienced monk and say to himself, “I’m better than him, and if he can do it, so can I.” And so an immature feeling may lead, like a catalyst, to greater effort, resolve, and the real attainment of inner peace. Perhaps similarly immature feelings of envy can evolve into more noble efforts to fairly redistribute wealth or goods or influence. Regardless of this issue, it seems clear that fairness has a painful emotional feeling creeping inside it—the grieving feeling of wanting what my neighbor has.
What does my neighbor have? He has reputation, and I do not. He has wealth, and I do not. He has interesting friends, he has opportunity, he has a better wife, better kids, better morals, better fashion sense, better piano skills, a better diploma, a bigger penis. Envy knows no bounds and can thrive in the ghetto or the country club.
Theologians and philosophers have labored to unpack the nuances of envy and have noticed that we tend to envy those who are closer to our own lifestyle and class. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) writes, in his Summa Theologica, that “a man does not strive for mastery in matters where he is deficient; so that he does not envy one who surpasses him in such matters, unless he surpass him by a little, for then it seems to him that this is not beyond him.”17 I, for one, confess that I envy my neighbor’s big backyard more than the wealth of Bill Gates, whose net worth seems more remote, fantastical, and even preposterous. Aquinas also cites Aristotle, who commented that the elderly envy the young for their health and beauty, and nearly everyone hates to see another person gain with ease what you yourself acquired through sweat and difficulty. I have been heard to utter, “It’s not fair,” for example, when I contemplate that my neighbor doesn’t work any harder than me, and yet he flourishes in his obscene estate of a backyard—he and his enormous lawn mocking me. Okay, let’s move on.
Finally, Aquinas sums up, “We grieve over a man’s good, in so far as his good surpasses ours; this is envy properly speaking, and is always sinful, as also the Philosopher (Aristotle) states, because to do so is to grieve over what should make us rejoice, viz. over our neighbor’s good.”
I don’t share Aquinas’s characterization of envy as a “sin,” but I agree that it’s not one of our better human traits. If envy burns naturally in the human breast, then some cultural trends seem to fan the flames more than others. For example, children and parents were taught something very different about envy in the nineteenth century than in our current culture.18 Parents taught their children to accommodate negative feelings like envy by using Stoic resolve. When educational philosopher Felix Adler analyzed the biblical Cain and Abel parable, in his 1892 The Moral Instruction of Children, he exhorted young people to master and suppress their feelings of envy or else they would end up like murderous Cain (recall that envy led Cain to kill his brother Abel after God preferentially favored Abel’s animal sacrifice). Envy was to be treated with self-discipline. There will always be people better off than you, and the sooner you accept and conquer your envy, the better off you’ll be.
Historian Susan J. Matt argues that all this changed in the twentieth century, and by the 1930s a whole new childhood education regarding envy was in full swing. Social workers “praised parents who bought extra gifts for their children. If a son or daughter needed a hat, adults should buy it, but they should also purchase hats for their other offspring, whether or not they needed them. This would prevent children from envying one another.”19
The phenomenon of sibling rivalry had made it into the textbooks as a potentially damaging pattern of envy—one that is best addressed by giving all the kids an equal fair share of everything. Subduing or restraining one’s feelings of deprivation and envy was considered “old school,” and new parents (living in a more prosperous nation) sought to stave off these feelings in their children by giving them more stuff.
This trend—of assuaging feelings of deprivation by distributing equal goods to children—grew even stronger in the baby boom era and beyond. It has also dovetailed nicely with the rise of an American consumer culture that defines the good life in part by material acquisition.20 Today’s culture tries to spare kids the pains of sibling and peer rivalry, but does so by teaching them directly and indirectly to channel their envy into the language and expectation of fairness—and a reallocation of goods that promises to redress their emotional wounds.
If our high-minded notions of retributive justice have roots in the lower emotions of revenge, then why should we be surprised if fairness has roots in envy?21 I have no illusions and feel entirely comfortable with the idea that fairness has origins in baser emotions like envy. But most egalitarians will find this repugnant and damaging to their saintly and selfless version of fairness. For my part, I draw a comparison between some of the indignant, angry demands for fairness and those hypocritical priests who denounce the evils of sensuality but take their own illicit pleasures in private. “I have always observed a singular accord between supercelestial ideas and subterranean behavior,” Montaigne reminds us.22
Secular calls for fairness can frequently resemble, in emotional tone and language, the older religious calls for piety. Emotions of guilt, envy, and indignation energize religions, but in a post-religious era those emotions just find new secular outlets. The same demographic for whom religion has little or no hold (namely, white liberals) turns out to be the most virulent champions of all things fair. Is it possible that these folks must vent their moral spleen on egalitarian causes because they don’t have all the theological campaigns (e.g., opposing gay marriage, opposing abortion, etc.) on which social conservatives exercise their indignation? Don’t get me wrong, I think the liberal venting is healthier than the conservative, but I’m trying to expose the rarely acknowledged emotional core of the supposedly cool-headed principled egalitarian.23
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph found that elite white college-educated people are the only demographic that see morality as primarily a matter of fairness. For this demographic, justice is a contractual affair that fairly distributes goods and protects rights.24 This population tends to think of ethics in cost-benefit terms. Other demographics, both inside and outside the United States, have different emotional foundations for morality. The differences are often matters of degree and weighting, but it’s clear that some cultures stress compassion over
fairness/reciprocity, or they stress loyalty over fairness, or authority, or issues of moral purity.
I’m suggesting that envy plays a significant role as one of the building blocks of fairness morality. Social psychologist Jan-Willem van Prooijen argues that “fairness judgments are mostly based on how people feel about a situation: People intuitively feel good or bad about a situation, and based on this moral sentiment, people conclude whether or not a given situation is fair or unfair.” Van Prooijen suggests that most of us start our assessment of a moral issue from an egocentric perspective, and “it follows that people’s fairness judgments are based on the extent to which people experience a particular situation as good or bad for themselves.”25 If a person feels no envy when they encounter a specific scenario, they are unlikely to perceive it or label it as unfair. But somehow this important subjective ingredient is invisible to us when we reflect on (and implement) our moral convictions.26
It may be important to remind ourselves that the framers of the Declaration of Independence almost adopted John Locke’s three human rights: life, liberty, and property. When it came to our Declaration, Jefferson altered the precursor document (the Virginia Declaration of Rights) to read “happiness” instead of property—but everyone saw property as crucial. A political economy based on private property may not automatically engender a culture of envy, but I’m pretty sure that consumer ideology (emerging in the twentieth century) does. Fairness morality fits well with an idea of the good life that is bound up with consumption. This is because fairness (as a measurement) applies exceedingly well to quantifiable things like property and material goods. Morality as “distribution of wealth” turns the lens away from other moral issues like character, loyalty, and integrity, and focuses instead on equity and parity. We shouldn’t overstate the importance of this correlation, however, since envy also provides emotional underpinning for honor-based cultures too.
Excellence, Fairness, and Favoritism
“Honor” is not a word you’ll hear very often in contemporary America. You might hear it in military families and military culture, but elsewhere it only seems to crop up ironically. Honor used to be wed to the idea of merit and excellence, but it has slipped from ordinary language. The words “merit” and “excellence” are holding on for dear life, but they seem to be slipping too. Their last holdout arena seems to be sports. But notice the divorce between honor and merit in the fact that while many of us love their athletic prowess, we don’t consider athletes honorable characters—in fact, they frequently seem spoiled and ignoble.
Egalitarian values and cultures largely replaced Western honor cultures because those earlier ideologies of reputation had created inequities of prestige, goods, and opportunities. But along with the dispatch of honor came great threats to the cultures of excellence and merit. The merit-based critique of fairness is well known. Plato spends much of the Republic railing against democracy on the grounds that know-nothing dolts should never have equal political voice with experts (aristoi). “Elitism” is a dirty word in our culture, but it was not so for the ancients.
American hostility to elitism was made manifest during the election and presidency of Barack Obama, who repeatedly had to downplay his own intelligence and intellectual accomplishments so that he might seem less threatening (less eggheadish) to the public. It is common for American public figures to apologize for their intelligence, or try to conceal it, in order to win over the public. Bill Clinton, for example, is a highly accomplished intellectual (e.g., Georgetown University, multiple academic fraternity memberships, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Yale Law School, etc.), but he downplayed this in his campaign. Clinton defused anti-intellectual hostility by playing up his “regular guy” qualities, winning over many Americans by playing saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show and feasting on junk food.27
I am in agreement with many of the merit-based critiques of egalitarian fairness. I don’t want my political leaders to be “regular guys.” I want them to be elite in knowledge and wisdom. I want them to be exceptional.
As I mentioned in chapter 1, I don’t want my son and every other kid to be told they “won” the footrace at school, just because we think their self-esteem can’t handle the truth. Other elementary-school policies also foster the dogma of fairness. Sports and games have been modified so that no one scores, or at least the score is not kept or tallied. Also, kids in physical education class are now chosen for teams by random lotteries rather than the old-school method, wherein the captains chose from best to worst athletes. In those days—standing in the schoolyard lineup—all of us could witness the painful truths of our relative athletic excellence. But no one was “broken” by those painful truths. First, changing the game to a different sport frequently reorganized the order of best-to-worst players (it was painful to be last, but exhilarating to be first chosen). Second, learning (in the worst-case scenario) that you really suck at all sports is important information to discover as you claw your way toward some juvenile identity. Praising the tough love of ugly truths, writer James Poniewozik quips that “encouragement helps us reach for the stars; realism prevents us from pursuing a midlife career change as an astronaut.”28
The contrast of our system with merit-based Chinese preschool is astounding. The goals and assumptions of Chinese education are very different from ours, and some of this will be clearer in the next chapter, but consider one indicative example: the Storytelling King.
Imagine your four-year-old preschooler getting up the nerve to stand in front of her class and tell an elaborate story to her eagerly attentive classmates. It’s a sweet rite of passage that many children enjoy around the world, and it builds self-esteem and confidence too. Now, imagine that when your preschooler is finished spinning her yarn, she stands at the front of the classroom while the other children tell her that her story was way too boring. One kid points out that he couldn’t understand it, another kid says that her voice was much too quiet, another says that she paused too many times, and another tells her that her story had a terrible ending. In most schools around the world, this scenario would produce a traumatic and tearful episode, but not so in China, where collective criticism is par for the course—even in preschool.
At Daguan elementary school, in Kunming, China, this daily gauntlet is called the Storyteller King.29 Each kid gets up and tells a story to the whole class, and then fellow students and teachers dissect and critique the student, sometimes with brutal honesty. American teachers who saw this exercise were horrified by it. But it is indicative of Chinese merit-based culture. Similarly, consider that students’ test scores and grades are posted publicly in China for all to see. There is no anonymity to the grades—everyone can see their position and that of others in the meritocracy. Contrast this with my own situation as an American college professor. I am not allowed to reveal a student’s grade to anyone but the student, as it is considered a violation of the student’s privacy. If I publicly posted the merit-earned grades of my students, I could lose my job. And this reveals the radical difference between public morality culture (shame-based) and private morality culture (guilt-based). More importantly, it also reveals egalitarianism at work. Teachers and students in the West must present everyone as equal, even when they demonstrably are not.
The Chinese are not interested in cultivating individuality in their kids, but they are devoted to excellence and even virtuosity. This seems almost paradoxical to Westerners, who associate virtuosity with individualism. But excellence, as conceived by Confucian cultures, is more about mastery of established levels of refinement, rather than innovation. Chinese education and culture are extremely hierarchical, but this meritocratic system actually produces character modesty, rather than arrogance. It is well known that Chinese students outperform their American counterparts in most academic areas, but lesser known is the fact that they seem to outstrip Americans in modesty and humility.
When psychologists Harold Stevenson and James Stigler compared the academic skills of grade-school stu
dents in three Asian nations to U.S. students, the Asian students easily outstripped the American ones. However, when the same students were subsequently asked to rate their academic prowess, the American kids expressed much higher self-appraisals than their Asian counterparts. “In other words,” journalist Steve Salerno writes, “U.S. students gave themselves high marks for lousy work. Stevenson and Stigler saw this skew as the fallout from the backwards emphasis in American classrooms; the Brookings Institution 2006 Brown Center Report on Education also found that nations in which families and schools emphasize self-esteem cannot compete academically with cultures where emphasis is on learning, period.”30
While I am in agreement with many of the merit-based critiques of egalitarian fairness, I must distinguish these critiques from my main point about favoritism. In the same way that egalitarianism is no friend of meritocracy, neither is favoritism. Favoritism and meritocracy are both hierarchical and share an antagonism toward fairness, but in every other sense they are strange bedfellows and antagonize each other too.
Favoritism does indeed create social hierarchies of value, and frequently it does this at the expense of merit and excellence. My favorites are not the best or most accomplished at this or that. They are not virtuoso human beings. It’s my sheer affection for them, and my ability to relate to them, that raises their status above other people.
Against Fairness Page 10