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::: one ::: Kids and Körperkultur On the Dif‹culties of Fostering Civic Independence Most citizens of modern liberal democracies endorse equality of opportunity as a fundamental political value. Many people don’t think that it is enough—for them, equality demands more than opportunities —and others aren’t quite sure what exactly equality means or requires , and for good reason. As I argue throughout this book, those questions are not easily answered. But all the same, many people take this view. At one time, not all that long ago, equality of opportunity wasn’t universally endorsed. It is of recent provenance, a feature of the modern era. The early instances of the demand for equality of opportunity included calls to make “careers open to talents.” That simply means that of‹ces and positions should go to those who are competent to hold them and that if there are competing candidates, the of‹ces should go to the most competent people. That someone should have to make that demand sounds baf›ing to us—What, we might ask, would the alternative be? But alternatives abounded. The two most common alternatives were the aristocratic inheritance and the sale of of‹ces and positions. We now know that the obvious virtue of the meritocratic principle over the nepotistic and economic principles prevailed, at least theoretically . It wasn’t an easy victory, and the dif‹culties didn’t result only from recalcitrance, corruption, and venal sel‹shness. The people clamoring for careers open to talents immediately recognized the dif‹culties in the concept, and many of those dif‹culties are complications in the general concept of equality of opportunity. One of them—the one this chapter addresses—is the question of the creation of talent. In the ‹rst instance, to make competence a job requirement 25 at all is a great improvement over a situation in which Freiherr von Adlerkreutz’s imbecile nephew Karl Heinz gets to be the undersecretary of mine administration just because of who he is, but people soon come to realize that talents themselves are partly social: they depend on background conditions that either have or have not fostered those talents. Or, put in another way, once it is obvious that Karl Heinz should not be the undersecretary, people begin wondering about how best to foster the talents in general that make someone good at the job. This points to the larger complication that equality of opportunity is very sensitive to: equality at what point? If Joe has a Harvard MBA and Jack dropped out of high school, it may be entirely fair, on a careers -open-to-talents basis, that Joe is hired at McKinsey Consulting and Jack isn’t. But if Jack dropped out because he had to take care of his family while Joe enjoyed the bene‹ts of his billionaire parents’ wealth, we might wonder whether they were equal in terms of other opportunities and whether equality of opportunity really existed. Most people in the eighteenth century—and quite a bit later, for that matter—weren’t terribly exercised about this further complication. After all, almost anyone other than the imbecile Karl Heinz was an improvement . But people in the eighteenth century were not entirely blind to this issue, either. It cropped up as a question of education: how to provide the necessary talents not only for the existing set of of‹ces and positions but for the increasing number of increasingly complex of‹ces and positions. The even broader autonomy problem that I identi‹ed in the introduction arose in this context, too: the talk of talents and merit only makes sense against a background picture in which suf‹ciently many people enjoy some kind of civic independence in which they are the authors of their choices. There is a difference between “careers open to talents” and “careers assigned to talents ”: the former allows for the possibility that you should also want the job you are competent to do, while the latter allows for someone —Plato or the East German state, for example—to engineer everything from above. But that very difference also reminds us of a common paternalistic desire even many of us moderns have, against our better judgment, to interfere in people’s lives for their own good and ours: “Son, it’s great that you want to be a rock star, but your math skills just point more toward accounting than heavy metal.” 26 ::: The Playing Fields of Eton [3.137.164...

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