Democracy, Merit, and Presumptive Virtue

...for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit...

...It really is not one of the fixed points of our considered judgments that character should be ranked among the accidents of circumstance, and be treated as an impersonal good...

...His phrasing, where this distinction is first brought in, is remarkable for its balance and its lack of balance—intended balance I think, and real lack of balance, for he says, "There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive...

...The skepticism we share about presumptive virtue is plain in the reaction that sets in as soon as someone tries to invent it in a new shape...

...And yet this appeal is mixed, very uneasily, with the suggestion that such a policy must serve as a remedy of past injustices...

...The same pride forbids one's showing or selling work that does not meet an inward standard of worth, and we recognize that such a standard is itself the internalization of a common understanding...

...A liberal order can accept an acknowledged practice of presumptive virtue when the acceptance is tempered by irony, and this is so whether its index points to the past as a glorious or as a wretched inheritance...

...We see it in athletes, we see it in artists, we see it among ourselves, in our responses to the talents we admire either familiarly or at a distance...

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...One can see the peculiar blend in the sentence that brings together the good of equalizing salaries and a mention of the past discrimination that women and minorities have endured...

...We ought to question, but finally to admit, the claim of those we honor for what they have done and can do (merit...

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...Wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever state, condition, profession, or trade, the passport of Heaven to human place and honor...

...To the extent that minorities claim membership in this whole, they will want to be judged as individuals, and they will not scorn such ideas as merit or character or responsibility...

...But in attacking the idea of actual virtue, under a mask of indifference very like the mask Burke had worn against presumptive virtue, it seems to me that Rawls failed to do justice to the inveteracy of a common belief...

...Different societies enforce different versions of the idea...

...None of us can conceive of wanting to live in a society utterly liberated from these beliefs...

...And so I stand above you now, which is why you still do not know me: what I am I feel from within...

...It is a quality of the ambitious and the aspiring...

...The word occurs in Satan's opening speech to Beelzebub, when they lie "rolling in the fiery gulf/ Confounded though immortal," and Satan says he will not cease from strife with God, for how can he repent "that fixt mind/ And high disdain, from sense of injur'd merit,/ That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend...

...The status of the new beneficiary is presumed by a history of deprivation...

...In Satan it becomes the solitary motive of a selfconfidence without faith...

...It is right that he be defeated, and yet by the strength of his resolve he is associated, in the fable of the poem, with Adam and Jesus Christ, who are its genuine heroes...

...and the total dissolution of society must be the immediate consequence...

...Pride is always socialized and sociable and so he can move it from the column of vices to the virtues that assist common utility...

...It had more to do with fairness at present and the remedy of past unfairness...

...Merit, to repeat, in his usage corresponds to actual virtue, and he seems committed to argue that actual virtue is inferior to presumptive virtue...

...The sentiment of merit may cooperate with equality—it is against accepting any inequality merely because it is given—but it remains agnostic about the distributive equality that affirmative action was designed to answer to...

...Again when he first assumes his throne of royal state in Hell, we are told that "Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd/ To that bad eminence...

...On the other hand, someone interested in fomenting civil fury might well seek to destroy affirmative action programs altogether...

...Unselfish pride in a job well done and done not just for oneself, is perhaps the most obvious feeling by which we can trace the force of the idea...

...Merit anyway for us has become a fiction perpetually ratified, a human creation that may be as necessary as the fiction of 64 • DISSENT Democracy, Merit, and Presumptive Virtue just punishment...

...That is one reason why, in a society that does not want to be turned upside down, their rewards, though proportioned to their service, should be kept moderate and tempered by irony in the giver and receiver alike...

...No longer does it take the form of aristocratic titles...

...The eminence or height of fame that comes from merit wrongly turned is a bad eminence...

...The connection emerges in an apparently buffoonish moment of enormous psychological power, where Satan, disguised as a toad, is changed back to his fallen form by the prodding of Ithuriel's spear, at which, addressing this member of the squadron of angels patrolling Eden, "Know ye not then said Satan, fill'd with scorn,/ Know ye not mee...

...The virtue designated by this policy is presumptive in that it refers to what you are and not what you have done...

...But he says them surely in a triumph of pride: better to have qualities that are original and personal...

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...He himself belongs to the class of men of actual virtue, and though he wants to limit their power, and therefore his own, he cannot help indicating that their performance will shape the society that is coming, not only in France but in America and England...

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...Satan's private belief in his ability so coincides with his sense of public worth that his name has become to him another name for distinction...

...No policy that fails to reckon with the power of this belief can ever gain in credit what it has lost in faith...

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...But the truth is that he relishes the contrast: "It would not be gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say, that he [the duke] has any public merit of his own to keep alive the idea of the services, by which his vast landed pensions were obtained...

...The chief persuasive strategy of the new policy was to change the subject...

...I bring up this ambivalent characterization to recall that the idea of merit was by one of its earliest and most sympathetic observers supposed to be not free of dangerous satisfactions...

...This should apply to both actual and presumptive virtue but the word "actually" moves our interest again to the side of the individual bearer of talent...

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...I do not think Milton's judgment of this character is simple or without ambivalence...

...The appeal against discrimination may also be read as broadly liberal, egalitarian, and merit-centered: to put it into practice might lead to the sort of fairness now designated in rules of "comparable worth...

...Aristocrats, whom he believes to be a legitimate separate class of society, must, he says, be preserved among the compositional materials of government without any inquiry into their talent or want of talent...

...The good of filling a job in a workplace had partly to do with merit but that was something we need not talk about...

...And it is just that conversion that a skeptic of the heroic virtues will believe is neither possible nor necessary...

...Even when we know a good to be in some way derivative, we feel more sure of its worth when we bring to mind the ways in which it is original and personal...

...The rival versions of merit that I have associated with Milton and Hume persist to the end of the eighteenth century...

...He knows that the duke's fortune is in the nature of things, and yet he implies that the nature of things is kept as it is only by the exertions of men like him...

...In fact, the theoretical scorn for these ideas, and especially for merit, has been a tactic in the advocacy of affirmative action only among academics...

...I take it that merit is always in one sense a fiction: we could not project its social meaning from the nature of what is good or worthy, since it depends on a whole system of adaptations, a common history of acts admired and sometimes produced, but not too easy to produce...

...Merit continues to imply the sense of a reward properly belonging to oneself from a sociable disposition that issues in public benefits...

...but we should not exaggerate this variety...

...But it can also be a motive of action for those who have faith...

...Nevertheless we are shown that the feeling really does operate...

...My merits, whatever they are, are original and personal...

...Here merit, original merit, the merit he had associated with the FALL • 1997 • 65 Democracy, Merit, and Presumptive Virtue merely expedient bearer of actual virtue, seems to have become the virtue that the individual mind can admire most sympathetically...

...Yet the morality of merit looks on character as an irreducible good because it is intimately connected with self-respect, and you cannot have self-respect regarding something of which only the contingency and never the pride of association is present to mind...

...You do not know me because in Heaven I soared so far above you...

...This part of the argument is familiar and I rehearse it only to bring into view the context for Burke's interesting terminology...

...while he endorses actual virtue, or merit, as a tactical necessity for a state that belongs to the system of modern Europe...

...I hope it will not need much defense to assert that merit and the conviction of its importance is still with us...

...Its representative is Burke himself, who takes this occasion to mount a defense of the disinterested virtue of his entire career...

...That it did not override merit in theory is beside the point, for people grow quickly enough attuned to the texture of a widespread practice...

...The self-worth of a creature who ought to receive public recognition, but who anyway FALL • 1997 • 63 Democracy, Merit, and Presumptive Virtue recognizes himself, will, as the poem develops, come to be associated with self-consciousness...

...Burke ought to be able to say these words with humility, knowing his audience would take the derivative virtue to be superior...

...Presumptive virtue is still with us too...

...Where pride has thus become a gentle unmixed good, merit will be an acceptable but less interesting ideal, and Hume makes almost nothing depend on it...

...Our minds, as Hume points out, generously solicit company to help us admire ourselves...

...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...

...Ye knew me once no mate/ For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar;/ Not to know mee argues yourselves unknown...

...The first person in literature who seems to be driven by merit, and characterized by an attachment to it, is Satan in Paradise Lost...

...By eradicating from office and influence so many notable persons, the Jacobins denied themselves a significant provision of the talent they needed to govern...

...The last word is indicative: the policy is righting the wrongs endured by certain people, and the reward they ought to be given is due from a condition they have inherited...

...Affirmative action builds democracy" was the lead, and below it one read that "Affirmative action works toward eliminating centuries of racial and gender discrimination in jobs and schooling," that it "advances fairness, not favoritism," that it "brings us all closer to a more democratic, just workplace," and that it "helps narrow the gap in salaries, employment, and education endured by minorities and women...

...It was very late, in the 1960s and 1970s, to be planting a new strain of presumptive virtue in a social order like ours, but the policy is of almost thirty years' standing, and no conservative wants to tamper with a policy that has brought some satisfaction and little misery...

...How much good would we do if we did not think the result would be appreciated...

...Such people, Burke wants us to agree, are likely to be too coarse by disposition and too limited in experience to be entrusted with much power in government...

...He does not doubt that it is a necessity...

...The difference has to do with distinct intuitions about the nature of talents and the way talents do or do not belong to an individual...

...Burke does not escape its influence any more than Milton's Adam does when he follows a path of rebellion that becomes unselfish...

...I will be talking about merit in an older sense...

...But our avowed morality—and in this we are descendants of the nonconformist Milton and not the quietist Hume, of the iconoclastic Burke of the Letter to a Noble Lord and not the aristocratic Burke of the Reflections—inclines as none before ever did to the side of original and personal merit...

...Burke the man of actual virtue stands out in striking contrast against this unworthy beneficiary of presumptive virtue...

...We still grant our rewards largely on trust, but the residence of trust has changed...

...The complimentary phrases concerning an innate quality, by which divine-right theorists and puritan enthusiasts honor themselves and show their indifference to civil tranquility, are placed under interdiction and dispatched with impartial contempt...

...But the allowances for such a gesture are, and in a morality of merit they ought to be, circumscribed, since we are interested in actions and services that are not FALL • 1997 • 67 Democracy, Merit, and Presumptive Virtue derivative...

...Notice that only one word in all these statements, the detail against favoritism, plainly incorporates the liberal idea of merit...

...Only in a monarchical or a revolutionary regime could a form of presumptive virtue be supposed primary and its affirmation desirable...

...Meanwhile, presumptive virtue, the unearnable distinction of the born aristocrat, is here associated with the Duke of Bedford, a man who deserted his class to defend the French Revolution and an example, as Burke paints him, of the presence among the inert nobility of the democratic vice of ingratitude...

...and from despair/ Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires/ Beyond thus high...

...Indeed, merit holds a high position among the ideal goods that allow democracy to operate without being overwhelmed by resentment...

...We favor now instead an implicit acceptance of the claim once linked with upstart merit...

...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...

...Merit, or the belief that both one's abilities and one's deserts are ponderable, can be a motive for the greatest actions, including the greatest of wicked actions...

...for him, it is simply the sentiment we learn by reflection on ourselves as seen in others' eyes...

...Its beneficiaries include by definition all who gain a large part of their worldly tenure by birth and not by voluntary effort...

...I think that Burke in this Letter recognizes how far his irony has carried him, and that he is on the side of individual merit as distinct from, and not just as analogous with, inherited honor, whether he likes the fact or not...

...The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic...

...Yet Burke's tone is very different, and a different recognition is implied, when he turns back to the subject five years later in the Letter to a Noble Lord...

...The succession in the moral progress of this story from the supernatural demon to the natural hero turns on a conversion and purification of pride...

...The spur to a fierce contest of resentments would be too great...

...But this sense of self-worth once it has got into the world cannot be subdued...

...In a well-known passage of the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke remarks that a country ought to honor its men of talent if it hopes to survive, and yet the way to distinction ought "not to be made too easy, or too much a thing of course...

...An aristocrat inherited a prescription that sufficed to establish a title—his status was presumed by a history of privilege...

...It is the form of legitimate virtue that comes to prevail in a democratic society, but it is proof against assaults by the leveling command of democracy...

...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...

...Let me shift to the present time...

...At the same time it is a word for a faith deeper and less traceable than any of its possible effects...

...If egalitarian fairness is our sole concern, then personal abilities or gifts, which Rawls calls "assets" so as to treat them on an analogy with property, are indeed givens and as much in violation of an ideally constructed fairness as any title or estate could be...

...What we would call men or women of talent on the other hand—those who must have done something to deserve their status—he calls exemplars of actual virtue...

...Some way back in the genealogy of the idea lies a sense of election, of a worth deeper than institutions can precisely reflect, which is a legacy of the radical Protestantism of the seventeenth century...

...and I want to turn now to an observation of moral psychology that runs through his later writings...

...How then does the innovator in presumptive virtue differ from the citizen who takes his stand on actual virtue or merit...

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...Oddly Burke appears to grant unquestioningly the claims of presumptive virtue...

...Hume, for instance, gives a mild and ameliorative definition to pride...

...We accept those whose virtue is presumptive, but we do so with irony and the irony is now directed the other way, against the exist66 • DISSENT Democracy, Merit, and Presumptive Virtue ing title that is associated with aristocracy...

...The idea that it cannot belong to politicians—that they of all people are undifferentiated and exchangeable— is a delusion that will pass if our government is to survive...

...The attempt to discredit the older belief was only occasionally explicit...

...John Rawls said in A Theory of Justice that "it seems to be one of the fixed points of our considered judgments that no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one's initial starting place in society...

...Tocqueville saw without saying in quite these words that merit is the republican cure for the diseases most prevalent in a democratic morality...

...Adam exemplifies that kind of justified confidence when, sacrificing himself, he chooses to enter the world of mortality and freedom rather than live without Eve...

...By the measured accuracy of his words Burke raises an inquisitive jealousy of presumptive virtue even as he personally assures the noble lord how hard he is defending against the real inquisitors elsewhere...

...In a liberal order like ours, the prudent management of present interests for the good of the whole society is the only unquestionable directive of authority...

...his are derivative...

...Presumptive virtue is still included in the argument, by a quasi-official compunction, but it is sent out to pasture like those cattle Burke says the nobility resemble, who will go on chewing their cud forever...

...He says of the zeal with which he has guarded the duke's way of life from the Jacobin threat: "I have done all I could to discountenance their inquiries into the fortunes of those, who hold large portions of wealth without any apparent merit of their own...

...Fanatics may suppose, that dominion is founded on grace, and that saints alone inherit the earth...

...We ought to take for granted the people we honor just for what they are (presumptive virtue...

...Both elements have proved enduring, in the democratic understanding of merit, though when one is in view we tend to forget the other...

...And it shifts the range of application from conduct requiring and eliciting approval to a behavior whose value has been indexed before we enter the scene...

...It separates the meaning of merit from its evidence in works that benefit more than one person...

...We defer to the idea when we agree not to contest the privilege of the alumni child admitted to a good school, the scion of a fortune in big business, the imitator of an established parental example in any of the professions...

...The judgment is that nobody interested in the preservation and reform of our society would today want to widen affirmative action even if that were politically possible...

...Milton cannot be applauding this feeling whose cause is a jealousy of omnipotence and resentment at God's giving of preferment to God's son...

...On the face of it this intuition of our "considered judgments" seems to go merit one notch better by taking nothing as given...

...Merit, he thinks, is just our name for ascriptive virtue, and to learn its scope a philosopher need only ask "whether or not he should desire to have this or that quality ascribed to him, and whether such or such an imputation would proceed from a friend or an enemy...

...Burke refers to them as men of presumptive virtue...

...The movers of affirmative action saw eventually that its work would be more effectual if people could be converted from the belief in "original merit" to a belief in fairness, both distributive and what might be called reparative fairness, beside which merit would appear as a now discarded simplification...

...This logic is still going strong in an ad that ran in the New York Times on April 7, 1996, with twenty-eight initial signatures followed by hundreds of others...

...There is a touch of doubt in the suggestion that Satan was turned by a sense of injured merit, as if he might be justified in supposing he had been insufficiently rewarded...

...The trait is fostered by aristocratic society, but it is stronger than aristocracy...

...This hint of republican irony about the manners of democracy has begun to sound like an argument from Burke...

...For it was the thought that this contest is still with us, that we know today the tension between merit and presumptive virtue, that prompted me to trace some far-off episodes of its history...

...As soon as inherited titles and voluntary acts are put in the same moral scale, presumptive virtue will be seen as buoyed up by actual virtue, and as existing only on its sufferance...

...Once merit has realized that it is necessary for the support of prescription, it has taken all but public ascendancy...

...Consider the resentment that has gathered over the years against the policy of affirmative action...

...The Jacobins dealt bluntly with the small existing class of persons of real merit, and they dipped low in the social order when they constituted the tiers etat from professions like that of tallow chandler or hairdresser...

...Hume sets himself against the radical Protestant view of these matters when he writes, concerning a theocracy in which rewards of power would be proportioned to inward virtue, that under such laws so great is the uncertainty of merit, both from its natural obscurity, and from the self-conceit of each individual, that no determinate rule of conduct would ever result from it...

...All the leading affections of our political and imaginative literature are turned that way, and it would be easier to start a revolution than to try to reverse their course...

...Yet he returns emphatically in the next sentence to the reality that merit alone supports: "Wherever they are actually found...

...Maybe it is a dubious modern habit and, as Burke would have said in another mood, a vice to pique yourself on an attainment that is only individual...

...The idea of an aristocracy of talent flatters the mood of equality by permitting access to be potentially open everywhere, but it tames the envy this mood may incite by admitting, to the different walks of honor, sufficiently small numbers to assure that admission feels like a privilege...

...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...

...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...

...Still, it might be said the common good is just what the architects of affirmative action did have in view...

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...The relevant part of the argument in the Reflections closes on this note...

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...As Burke makes clear, actual virtue or merit is naturally energetic, and its principles of action spring from pride...

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...In their different ways, and sometimes, as in Jefferson, in a strange amalgam, they have a substantial share in the founding ideals of the American republic...

...That it is partly an accident no sane person doubts...

...We are either too certain that all its good depends on a service to common utility, or too tenacious of the natural virtue we think it can describe regardless of its social bearings...

...Merit as mere entitlement, a sort of badge or test score displayed in public that permits me to get something for myself, represents a debasement in two ways...

...I conclude with a judgment and a psychological observation...

...The advocates of the policy took no stock of these facts of morale when they devised a plan that, for the sake of a projected long-run good, temporarily overrode the claims of merit...

...but the civil magistrate very justly puts these sublime theorists on the same footing with common robbers, and teaches them by the severest discipline, that a rule, which in speculation, may seem the most advantageous to society, may yet be found, in practice, totally pernicious and destructive...

...He is a heroic consciousness perverted to evil ends...

...THE EDITORS q 68 • DISSENT...

...I have strained every nerve to keep the Duke of Bedford in that situation, which alone makes him my superior...

...A morality strongly invested with a belief in personal responsibility, and seeking to justify work or action toward a common end, will incorporate some version of merit...