The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

In the postwar era, social scientists have widely adopted the term “socioeconomic status” to designate what’s ordinarily meant by class, but they have merely tucked away the perplexities into the “socio” part, like a child hiding her spinach in a napkin.

Where there is nobility, alas, there is always its opposite—those stigmatized, rather than exalted, by their origins.

But she was often treated by people I knew in ways that reflected a conception of her as having an inferior status. And I suspect that the most important truth here is that this is how she thought of herself. She believed that she was somewhere below a world of superior others. Accepting the class system has meant seeing such forms of self-deprecation as natural.

Democracy, for Tocqueville, was, as much as anything else, a condition of society in which men addressed each other as equals. It was only indirectly a matter of the franchise. As he observed in Democracy in America, “What is most important for democracy, is not that there are no great fortunes; it is that great fortunes do not rest in the same hands. In this way, there are the rich, but they do not form a class.”16

To speak of the upper classes or of the lower classes is to invoke a system in which the latter are supposed to owe a kind of social deference to the former; and to speak of the middle classes is to imagine them as placed between these two, looking down, like the upper classes, toward the lower; looking up, like the lower classes, toward the upper. A class system inevitably involves elements of hierarchy, in which relations among classes are asymmetrical. This does not mean that people higher up the hierarchy are free to treat those below in any way they like: there are forms of respect that, so to speak, look downward as well as upward. But in general, there will be a pattern in which those in the higher ranks of a system of status—those with higher standing—receive deference from those of lower status, and can expect their needs and interests to receive more weight as well.

That’s because one of the central human goods is respect: both self-respect and the respect of others. Respect, at its most general, involves a positive attitude to a person, which is elicited by something about them—that’s why we speak of “due respect.” Understanding a society’s codes entails grasping what kinds of facts about people are seen to entitle them to this positive attitude and to the corresponding forms of “respectful” treatment. In social life, one central form of respect is the deference that we grant people whose identities give them a higher social standing than ours: and this deference is at the heart of systems of social class like those I’ve known in Asante, in England, and in the United States. Class involves a system of status and rights to respect associated with the family you were born into. Because honor is fundamentally a matter of socially ascribed rights to respect, class, in its earliest forms, was critically about the distribution of honor as a birthright.

Consider what, in the eighteenth century, was called “condescension.” It occurred when a person of higher status generously treated a person of lower status in a way that presupposed that they were equals. (“Voluntary submission to equality with inferiors,” was Samuel Johnson’s definition.) It was a kindness and, when it worked, it pleased the beneficiary as much is it gratified the self-regard of the benefactor.

You might suppose that nothing so clearly marks a rupture between that age and our own than this discarded notion that condescension is virtuous.

Nowadays we notice people treating others as inferiors only when we think they shouldn’t. When people treat others as inferiors appropriately—as when I say to a five-year-old, “You clever thing, you”—no one would see condescension.

Yet the background assumption of hierarchy is still available, however loath we are to admit it.22 It shows up in the fact that people will admit to resenting insolence, which is a sort of mirror image of condescension: treating a superior as an equal, or even as an inferior. And, in fact, something like eighteenth-century condescension is a common enough practice still; we have simply lost the name for it. When the president of a university stops to talk courteously to a student after a lecture, he or she is talking down a hierarchy of academic status and the student is likely to be charmed by that. Lay Catholics and nuns gain the same sort of gratification from the considerate attentions of a cardinal; the security guard from the museum trustee who remembers her name; the traffic-court judge from the politesse of a Supreme Court justice. In reporting events like these, it is natural for the beneficiary to describe the behavior of the superior as thoughtful or kind or humble or down-to-earth, and to suggest that it was not to be assumed.

When inferiors approach superiors, then, condescension, in this eighteenth-century sense, is precisely what they hope for: they want the superior to pretend to be their equal, and the gratification they take when he or she does is proof of that tacitly ascribed superiority. What would upset them most is the opposite response: that is, contempt. Contempt can be hate-filled or dismissive, intense or mild, amused or angry; but, like condescension, it requires the bac...

Again, what’s critical is that these are the evaluations of our betters. A scientist, with a large laboratory to run, learns that some of the junior staff think he’s an arrogant jerk, and he rolls his eyes, wondering why they don’t grasp that he simply has high standards; he learns that a Nobel laureate in his field considers him a lightweight, and he doesn’t sleep for a week. Within networks of hierarchy, people distinguish sharply between bearing the resentment of someone of lower status and bearing the contempt of someone of higher status. One annoys; the other wounds.

The fact that financial, social, and cultural capital are distinct is one reason why efforts to reduce class to any single hierarchy don’t work.

It’s worth recalling, though, that the word “meritocracy” was invented in a work of satire, Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy. Published in 1958, the book was not a sociological tract but a work of fiction, purporting to be a sociological analysis written in 2033, looking back at the development of a new British society.

As Michael Young recognized, however, this ideal was bound to conflict with a force in human life as inevitable and as compelling as the idea that some individuals are more deserving than others, namely, the desire of families to pass on advantages to their children. As he said in The Rise of the Meritocracy, “Nearly all parents are going to try to gain unfair advantages for their offspring.”45 And when you have inequalities of income, one thing people can do with extra money is to pursue that goal.

Poor children who attend elite schools will enjoy incomes close to those of their rich classmates. Yet, researchers have found, many elite schools—including Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, and Yale—take more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the bottom 60 percent.

In Markovits’s view, “Meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy, one might even say, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of wealth is not land or factories but human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.”

In other realms, too, Young saw an emerging cohort of mercantile meritocrats who “can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side. So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves.”50 Inequality rose as salaries and fees soared and stock-option schemes proliferated; and the carapace of “merit,” Young argued, had only inoculated the winners from shame and reproach.

A system of class filtered by meritocracy would, in his view, still be a system of class: it would involve a hierarchy of social respect, granting dignity to those at the top, but denying respect and self-respect to those who did not inherit the talents and the capacity for effort that, combined with proper education, would give them access to the most highly remunerated occupations.

Class identities in a meritocracy reduce people to a single measure of worth, the argument runs: and only someone with a very limited vision could suppose that human worth reduces to a single measure. And so the manifesto proposes an alternative vision in which we recognize many forms of excellence. This

This profound commitment to the social equality of people with a variety of talents can sound quixotic, but it draws on a deeper philosophical picture. The central task of ethics is to ask: what is it for a human life to go well? The answer, I believe, is that living well means meeting the challenge set by three things: your capacities, the circumstances into which you were born, and the projects you yourself decide are important. Making a life, my friend the philosopher and legal scholar Ronald Dworkin once wrote, is “a performance that demands skill,” and “is the most comprehensive and important challenge we face.”55 But because each of us comes equipped with different talents and is born into different circumstances, and because people choose their own projects, each of us faces his or her own challenge, one that is, in the end, unique. So there is no sensible answer to the question of whether one person meets her challenge better than another. Did Bertrand Russell have a better life than Mozart? The only sane answer is that Russell was a better philosopher and Mozart a better musician.

I know what it is for my life to go better or worse, but it doesn’t make sense to ask whether my life is better than yours. And that means there is no comparative measure, no single scale of human worth. As a result, a system of selection for jobs and educational opportunities cannot be designed by considering who is most worthy of those opportunities, because, as Michael Young argued through his Chelsea Manifesto, there isn’t a single scale of merit on which to rank them.

Indeed, because each of us faces a distinct challenge, what matters in the end is not how we rank against others at all. We do not need to find something we are best at; w...

The ideal of meritocracy, then, confuses two different concerns. One is a matter of efficiency; the other is a question of human worth. If we want people to do difficult jobs that require talent, education, effort, training, and practice, we are going to need to be able to identify candidates with the right combination of talent and willingness to exert themselves, and provide them incentives to train and practice. So we design schools and universities, and select people to fill the places in them. If the institutions are working properly, they aren’t merely handing out credentials (which is always a danger); they are building human capital. We then allow for entrepreneurship, social and commercial; and we offer jobs with salaries and other advantages—interesting work, respect and autonomy in your job, vacations, pensions, health care—and select people to fill them as

If these principles of selection have been reasonably designed, we can say, if we like, that the people who meet the criteria for entering the schools or getting the jobs “merit” those positions. This is, to enlist some useful philosophers’ jargon, a matter of “institutional desert.” People deserve these positions in the sense in which people who buy winning lottery tickets deserve their winnings: they got them by a proper application of the rules.

Institutional desert, however, has nothing to do with the intrinsic worthiness of the people who get into college or who get the jobs, any more than lottery winners are people of special merit and losers are somehow less worthy. Even if we are going to reward hard work, the capacity for hard work is itself the result of natural endowments and upbringing. So neither talent nor effort, the two things that would determine rewards in the world of the meritocracy, is itself something earned. Someone who, as The Rise of the Meritocracy bluntly put it, has been repeatedly “labeled ‘dunce,’” still has capacities and aptitudes, and the challenge of making a meaningful life.

The only decent way to select people for educational and occupational opportunities is to ask what schools and jobs are properly aiming to do and then decide whose admission will best advance those aims.

But there are constraints on what sorts of principles of selection are morally permissible. Social origin is not, in itself, a permissible basis for excluding people from places in colleges. Nor is race, gender, or religion. In a world poisoned by prejudices directed at certain identities, it may nevertheless be a good idea to take these identities into account in designing the selection process, if it contributes to ending those forms of prejudice.

It will be unhelpful at that point to insist that these others are equally deserving. It’s true that the lives of those who get the opportunities aren’t worth more than the lives of those who don’t. But this is not, to repeat the point, because we have some scale of human worth on which we have weighed them and judged them equivalent. It is because there is no such scale. True, then, that the lives of the less successful are not less worthy. But not because they are as worthy or more worthy. There is simply no sensible way of comparing the worth of human lives.

Money and status are social rewards that can encourage people to do the things that need doing. It will be a matter of luck whether you inherit the capacities whose development will be rewarded in the society into which you are born; and of more luck whether the capacities you actually develop turn out to be highly rewarded. You can respond to messages from the market and seek training, of course. And a well-designed society will elicit and deploy developed talent efficiently. But

And most people would have multifarious possible rewarding lives, if we made a world that respected a life well lived: a life in which a person gave others their due, had rewarding relationships with family, friends, and fellow citizens, and pursued projects they had elected with passion and purpose.

we also need to work to do something that we do not yet quite know how to do: to eradicate contempt for those who are disfavored by the ethic of effortful competition.

We can’t fully control the distribution of economic, social, and human capital, or eradicate the intricate moiré patterns that emerge from these overlaid grids. But class identities don’t have to internalize those injuries of class; it remains an urgent collective endeavor to revise the associated labels, norms, and treatments in the service of what we can call moral equality. If that sounds utopian, bear in mind that nobody

For Arnold, the poet and literary critic, culture was the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.” Arnold wasn’t interested in anything as narrow as class-bound connoisseurship—the postprandial flute duet, the recited Keats sonnet. He had in mind a moral and aesthetic ideal, which found expression in art and literature and music and philosophy.

It is to Tylor more than anyone else that we owe the idea that anthropology is the study of something called “culture,” which he defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”3 Civilization was merely one of culture’s many modes.

Nowadays, when people speak about culture, it’s usually either Tylor’s or Arnold’s notion that they have in mind. The two concepts of culture are, in some respects, antagonistic: Arnold’s ideal was “the man of culture” and he would have considered “primitive culture” an oxymoron; Tylor’s model denies that a person could be devoid of culture. Yet, in ways we’ll explore, these contrasting notions of culture are locked together in our concept of Western culture, which many people think defines the identity of modern Western people. In this final chapter, I’m going to talk about culture as a source of identity, and to try to untangle some of our confusions about the culture, both Tylorian and Arnoldian, of what we’ve come to call the West.

In this last chapter I want to make an even more stringent case about a “Western” identity: whether you claim it, as many in Europe and the Americas might, or rebuff it, as many elsewhere around the world do, I think you should give up the very idea of Western civilization. It’s at best the source of a great deal of confusion, at worst an obstacle to facing some of the great political challenges of our time. I hesitate to disagree with even the Gandhi of legend, but I believe Western civilization is not at all a good idea, and Western culture is no improvement.