Tolerance and merit. These abstract concepts have been two of the great legacies of Western culture. They drive freedom, competition and wealth. But both are under incredible threat from those who prefer to see the world in terms of identity politics – this is the basic notion that the most important thing about any individual is the group to which he or she belongs. It’s not one’s ability to work hard or her moral character or his resilience or even one’s unique beauty or brains that matter. Nope. It’s the sort of reproductive organs you bring to the table. Or your skin pigmentation. Or the religion you practise. Or that your kind arrived somewhere first. That’s the core of identity politics and it has infected politics, the universities, the corporate world, the churches, the entirety of the Human Resources sector. Heck, the whole of the myriad DEI bureaucracies are based on identity politics.
It also lies at the heart of many claims of discrimination, of ‘unconscious bias’ (a notion, by the way, that cannot be cashed out and whose original mooters now doubt is coherent), and of the tediously frequent various days of ‘celebration’ for this supposedly downtrodden group or that – how many different flags fly atop your university alma mater do you reckon? Here’s how this identity politics thinking goes. You start by seeing the world solely in group terms. Then you look for differential outcomes (by group, never in terms of individuals where some were more talented and deserving than others). Then, by definitional fiat as it were, you attribute the differences between groups to discrimination, oppression, historical wrongdoing. Then you pick some highly desirable job or educational place or political party pre-selection spot and if there is a statistical discrepancy you allege – you take it for granted in fact – that the cause and the explanation is discrimination. (Again, it is always some desirable spot. No one says “almost all rubbish collectors are men so we need to use the power of the state to even things up”. Nor does anyone point out that over 95% of those who die at work are in jobs held by men and so “by God we need to change this sort of historical injustice so that we can get more women into these jobs where they can die at work and even things up. For too long women haven’t been dying at work”.)
In other words, this sort of thinking deals in the same sort of causal reductionism as old-fashioned Marxism (which also dealt in group thinking of course). It’s no longer all economic and control of the means of production. Now all explanations are in terms of discrimination and past injustice and oppression. But that only works today, or for Marxists, if you ignore individual merit, preferences, druthers and instead see everything through the prism of some single feature – their sex, race, religion, take your pick – and of groups not individuals.
And that takes me back to the current attacks on tolerance and merit in the West. For the first of these you might not at first glance think that tolerance is under attack because all one ever hears is the demand for tolerance. But the sort of ‘tolerance’ demanded by today’s identity politics warriors is very different to the one that drove the success of Western countries since the Enlightenment. The old-fashioned variant of tolerance – I call it ‘real tolerance’ – grew out of the religious wars in Europe between Protestants and Catholics. The numbers killed were big. It eventually dawned on people that things would be a lot better if we in this principality left you in yours to worship as you pleased. We leave you alone and you leave us alone. ‘Live and let live.’ You can run very successful societies with that underlying core foundation. But notice that old-fashioned tolerance is a means of getting along, of being polite. It in no way requires anyone to believe that others are living good lives, fulfilling lives, or worthy lives. Heck, the Protestants and Catholics stopped killing one another and indeed often lived in the same countries but both still thought the others were going to hell and were wholly misguided. They certainly did not think the others’ views were worthy of respect – full disclosure here, I come from a long-line of Scots-Canadian Calvinists (my parents being atheists, but culturally in that same mould) and no one in my extended family thought the Catholic worldview was anything other than massively wrongheaded. Put bluntly, tolerance did not include any notion of respect for the life choices of others. But today’s language of ‘tolerance’ has wholly inverted things. Groups based on whom they sleep with, or whom they worship, or what their culture happens to practise demand total ‘respect’ – if you don’t give it to them then you’re not being tolerant they say. You’re probably a bigot. That is not sustainable; it doesn’t deal in honest behaviour. ‘Live and let live’, with a healthy dose of politeness, is the sort of tolerance that works.
And as for merit, this idea is daily trashed by the wokester identity politics crowd. Once you’ve gone down the path of seeing people only in terms of the groups to which they belong and then dealt in statistical outcome differences with all group-differences always and everywhere being explained as discrimination then there really isn’t any room left for the notion of merit. Is there? But boy oh boy a society throws out the idea of merit at its peril. Merit drives competition and hard work. It delivers wealth, innovation and indeed self-respect. Jettison merit and you go back to feudal times. Or to the quota-obsessed India after independence. Everything collapses into box-ticking. Sure, the quotas won’t always be explicit but that’s what life will amount to.
At this point some of you are probably thinking, “Allan’s overstating things here”. I’m not. Last week the Vice-Chancellor of the Queensland University of Technology – be clear readers, not my University of Queensland – announced that QUT was going to remove all references to ‘merit’ from its hiring policy. The new approach would factor in gender, ethnicity and departmental balance. This is what societal decline looks like. That is politics all the way down (and as an aside, balance will not include any spots for conservatives I can assure you). If law firms and other employers had any cojones – they don’t, this is a wish – they would announce that merit does matter to them and no QUT graduates would henceforth be hired by them. Full stop. Same for governments. And alumni would simply announce that they will never give another penny to QUT until it reverses this policy.
I wonder if the Vice Chancellor of QUT believes that she earned her spot at the top on merit? I’m betting she does think that. Almost everyone who imposes these anti-merit quota-type policies on others believes that she, herself, got there on merit. If not, maybe she could just handover her VC job to a disabled, homosexual, Zarathustrian, vegan – or whoever better ticks all the ‘departmental balance’ criteria. What an embarrassment to QUT.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia.
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What a fantastic essay. Many thanks.
Absolutely. Sums up modern life in general for me.
A brilliant article. Many thanks.
Superb. And timely.
The latter part of that final paragraph – poetry!
As for the Thursday evening clap-for-key-workers ceremony I doubt I’m the only one eerily minded of Orwell’s two-minutes’ hate from 1984.
I’ll be honest- I take part. Originally, I thought it a nice idea, but as it dragged on and it became apparent that there were some people clearly watching to see who was and was not complying it started to feel a little creepy and not a little like an episode from ‘The Prisoner’- especially in a small village. I now take part to save my family from being declared ‘unmutual’…
Wonderful article! Thank you!!
Brilliant. Far-ranging analysis of modern society which goes way beyond just a critique of the lockdown.
The emphasis that the government – or, perhaps better, the state – places on citizens’ emotions and perceptions is a hallmark of dystopian societies: in “1984” Winston must not merely say that 2 + 2 = 5, but actually believe it; in Zamyatin’s “We” the state surgically removes the imagination from the population to reduce them to mere functionaries; and in “Brave New World” people are relentlessly conditioned to identify with the state: “everyone’s happy now”. This of course goes hand-in-hand with our new-found love of censorship – “dangerous” is the new “degenerate” – and the constant appeal to security. The principle of individual autonomy – probably the defining idea of the West – is apparently now the greatest threat. Thanks for the article.
A good essay which eloquently deconstructs the message but fails to name the ‘science’ behind it: Applied Behavioural Psychology (see Edward Bernays et al). Call it spin, call it what you like, governments have been ramping up their use of it for decades and it is now an insidious virus with far more potential for harm than SARS-COV-2.
Susan Michie of Sage, Boris Johnson’s new BF advisor, is one of those (Applied Behavioural Psychologist). An avowed communist to boot. Lordy, Lordy.
Emotion and fear (whether because of a supposed internal or external threat) have always been two of the many tools of government.
This quote from Fahrenheit 451 is pretty apt:
“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them.”
I think a lot of the lockdown supporters have yet to really understand the extent to which the world blew up around them: the avoidable non-Covid deaths and the massive economic damage which means we’re probably in for another 10 years of so-called “austerity”.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay, 1852
Been speculating they’ll start waking up when they visit Walmart and can’t find their favorite coffee brand on the shelves. “Oh no! Who ever thought economic devastation could disrupt my creaturely comforts while staying home forever.” Or the coffee will be there and suddenly cost $30 a canister instead of $2.50.
Spot on. The PM is at it again in the Mail on Sunday today, saying he understands our “frustration”. In other news, Spain has said it is planning “one last extension” of the emergency decree imposing restrictions, before “most of the country” returns to normality in June. Note how they need to explicitly extend it, in contrast to ours that is more or less open ended (ministers I believe can extend the Coronavirus Act) and how there is no mention of “new normal” (though I have to admit I don’t follow Spanish news closely so I may simply be ignorant of this). Who would have thought a country that has seen a long running fascist dictatorship in living memory would make our government look like sinister despots. I am placing my hope in two things: The strong drive of the British people to go to the pub and to want to make babies, and the strong drive of the government to look like it knows what it is doing when we are the only country in Europe living a “new normal” and the sky has not fallen in for them.
The Nanny State has Munchausen’s by Proxy.
Almost as bad across the pond.
Things will change (probably not for the better) come November.
Great! Thanks so much for this. If only it could be headline news instead of the lies and scaremongering that has become ‘normal’! Everyone needs to know this.