Mercy vs. Merit
We live in a meritocracy, of sorts. But how do we measure merit?
When I was an English teacher at a public university, a student asked me if I would change their grade on an essay. They needed a higher grade to keep their scholarship, they said. If I failed them, they’d have to drop out, they said.
The funny thing is, I could change their grade. And they didn’t have to learn anything for me to do it. I could go into the computer and, although the student was unable to write coherent (let alone cohesive) paragraphs, I could tell the university that the student deserved to receive money to continue this farcical education. And it would work.
This student was under the impression that a grade ought to reflect a student’s desires or needs, and not their merit. Not only that, but they believed that it was reasonable to ask a teacher at an institute of higher education to honor this notion. To me, this would be like asking the master mechanic to give you a pay raise after you dropped a socket down the spark plug hole and blew up an engine. Where might a student get such ideas into their head? Why, in school, of course.
School prepares kids for society—the traits that are desirable in society are inculcated in our schools. And the traits we value in society change over time. I believe we live in a kind of imperfect meritocracy, in the sense that people who exemplify the merits society values will tend to be the people who succeed the most.1 The trick is to understand which merits our society values. They change over time.
In the case of my student, they clearly felt that society does not really value the kind of English that I was teaching—grammatical, logical, thoughtful prose. If you look at much of what passes for discourse or communication in our society, you’d have no choice but to concede that my student was right to dismiss the importance of the English I taught. And what did the student feel society values instead? Getting one’s way. Receiving more than what they worked for. Appearances. In such a society, the most important merit to cultivate might not be intellect or the acquisition of certain hard skills, but the development of rhetorical skills—for garnering sympathy, capturing attention, and marketing.
The thing is, though, I don’t believe anyone would actually defend a society that values these things above all else. I don’t believe they are intuitive values, nor that they foster human happiness or flourishing. And we don’t have to give in—we can live our lives according to our own values, society be damned. Society, after all, is just a conglomeration of individuals, and if enough individuals reject the status quo, it changes.
What might we value instead, and how do we express those values? How did society come to be corrupted by these rhetorical values, and how can we change the tide back to a society of shared, intuitive values? To explore these questions, I want to dive into what I consider perhaps the most important book of the 21st century so far: Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. This essay is the introduction to a series of essays I’ll be publishing here on Shop Class, in an effort to better understand and appreciate what I feel to be innate values of mine: manual competence, intellectual curiosity, community, empathy, growth, and meaning. Like Crawford, I suspect that these innate values are not particular to me.
I can’t remember if I ended up changing that student’s grade or not. This kind of request was not uncommon. Like the judges who hand down harsher sentences when hungry before lunch2, my decrees varied by my mood. Sometimes I tried to instill in students the lesson that they have to work hard for better results, that I am not giving a grade, but they are earning their grade. Sometimes I tried to show students that the world can be merciful when they need it most. Both are good lessons to learn. Some students need one more than the other, and I tried to parse out which were which. We all need both lessons, of course, but perhaps at different times in our lives. My students were 18 and 19, an age at which everything is so volatile and impressionable that g-d only knows which lesson they needed on that day, and which the following semester. I just wish they had grown up learning a skilled trade, where “mercy” comes from asking for help before you’ve done bad work, and where the lesson that better results come from hard work is baked into the activity itself, and is not a lesson that needs to be handed down from an authority figure. The next essay in this series will explore this very issue.
In some usages, “meritocracy” refers to an idea that it is merit alone that determines success, and merit is typically understood, implicitly, as intellect and skill. Here, I use “meritocracy” only to assert that, when all else is equal, merit is a good predictor of success. I take it for granted that a great many factors influence success, merit being only a part of the equation. I would also be prone to arguing that merit is itself an unearned quality, by and large—it develops according to our genetics and our environment, neither one of which we control when we are young. In this essay, I really use the term “meritocracy” to capture the idea that our success depends on our actions to some degree—that is, if you are rich and well-educated, you are more likely to develop your intellect and skill-set to their fullest; being born into money and an Ivy education don’t, in and of themselves, confer success in a given endeavor (I’m sure there are counterarguments to be made against that claim, but I think it is more likely to be true than not). This is a different claim than saying that meritless but fortunate (rich, connected, etc.) people can be rewarded out of accordance with their merit, whether financially, legally, or otherwise.
A different (perhaps more compelling) explanation has been offered for the data in this study: toward the end of judicial sessions, when the judges happen to be hungry, hearings are scheduled for defendants without lawyers. These unrepresented parole seekers receive harsher judgments.