V. Sanil: What is called "Merit"?

In the second installment (the first one is here), Prof. V. Sanil (Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT-Delhi) explores the notion of 'merit'. He informs me that this article too was a result of e-mail discussions with his students and friends.

I am publishing it in full with Sanil's permission. Comments are welcome.

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What is called "Merit"?

Whenever my students bag plum jobs or win cricket matches or top in quiz contests I join in their celebration, by wishing and congratulating them, and on rare occasions, treating them to coffee or ice cream. They have won awards, accolades, recognition from all over the world. While feeling proud of my students and sharing their excitement and enthusiasm, I never realized that I was committing myself to the myth and metaphysics of “merit”. I thought they earned their victory through hard work, imagination and commitment. I did not know that the real secret behind their victory was something twitching within their brain called merit. I did not know that every time they passed a test or won a competition, they were expressing their inherent merit, which not only made them win now, but made them the default winners of all future competitions and tests.

Today, I find merit is a matter of contention in the ongoing debate on reservation. Some say merit and merit alone be the criterion for admission to any office. Not many have the audacity to claim, at least in public, that the upper castes are inherently meritorious. They claim that fact that the concentration of merit lies in the upper caste is a matter of chance. The opponents too accept that in the final count it is merit that matters. Their problem is with the concentration of merit within the upper caste. They hold that it is not a matter of chance but the work of systematic exclusion of lower castes over a long period in history, which has led to this concentration. Therefore, since the upper caste skew towards merit is a human creation, it should be undone by human intervention. Reservation is seen to be one such intervention. The sympathizers of this position want a level playing field before the merit game starts. Some radicals may hold that the contemporary standards of merit are based on upper-caste activities like engineering and medicine, and the purpose of the intervention should be to extend the scope of merit to include activities such as sweeping, shaving and tribal art. In sum, all agree that merit is what matters. The debate is about location and the criteria.

It is time we question this consensus on merit. Does merit matter in modern society and institutions? Is merit an adequate concept to understand creativity in modern practices? Does the rejection of merit as myth lead to inefficacy and the celebration of mediocrity? My answer to all questions is the same. No.

Let us begin with the most popular definition of merit. Merit refers to an innate ability to undertake and excel in certain activities, jobs etc. Merit is not a descriptive term. It is also evaluative. Merit demands or commands recognition and rewards. Had merit been a god-given or inborn ability, why should we reward the person who happens to posses it? We respect a person only if he has put in his own efforts to develop and cultivate his inborn abilities. Whether he is born with meritorious qualities or not, it is through his own efforts that he can become a legitimate owner of his merit and worthy of recognition and reward. Here we see merit more as a matter of nurture and less of nature.

Nurturing inborn abilities takes place in society. Hence social factors enter into our definition of merit. The conditions under which this nurturing takes place become crucial for the evaluation of merit. Merit becomes worthy of recognition only of it is nurtured under legitimate conditions. What do we mean by legitimate condition? It is one in which everyone has equal opportunity to develop their inherent abilities. We need a level playing field for cultivating our merit. It is in a society that values equal opportunity that merit becomes worthy of respect. This is where merit meets the claims of social justice. Some emphasize social justice and make it a necessary condition for the identification of merit. Some emphasize merit and claim that possessing and developing in born abilities have primacy over any consideration of the conditions under which such nurturing takes place. Non-interference in the way meritorious people exercise their merit itself is the only criterion for justice. This sets the ground for the merit vs social justice debate.

In my opinion, the best way to solve this merit vs justice issue is to dissolve or de-center the very idea of merit. The question of justice has to meet many challenges. Merit is not one among them. Merit is de-centered not by claims of justice but by the changing conditions of creativity.

There are some inherent difficulties in conceptualizing merit. If merit is an inherent ability then it must be an ability for something. According to this definition JEE selects those who have an ability for engineering. AIIMS entrance test tests your ability to pursue the medical profession. This move to define merit with reference to specific practices has some inherent problems. We can ascribe an ability to do something to a person only if that person is already involved in that activity. At least he should have an active and sincere interest in that activity. Ability for engineering means the ability to do good engineering. Such an ability is discernable only in someone who has a reasonably good idea about the rules, objectives and values governing the practice of engineering. It makes no sense to say that JEE tests the candidate’s ability to do engineering. We know that only a handful of them have any interest in engineering. The same must be true about the candidates selected in AIIMS too. Only a very few of the JEE winners want to take up hard core engineering jobs. Most of our students opt for IITs and AIIMS because they know that a degree from these institutions will ensure them a safe future. Had shoe- polishing or shaving ensured them money and security they would have opted for them. The same entrance tests would have measured their inherent ability to perform these tasks too! A few decades ago, no one could dream of associating merit with an activity such as “managing a hotel”!

One might argue that we can think of inherent abilities without necessarily relating them to any specific activity like engineering or medicine. These are abilities that are needed for excelling in any activity, whatsoever. Logical ability, analytical ability, ability to recognize patterns and memory could be candidates for such abilities. But what is analytical ability if it is shared by an engineer, doctor, artist, cobbler and a panwallah? It could only be something which is as general and universal as human rationality or human linguistic competence. Rationality and linguistic ability are species-level achievements. It makes no sense to see them as merits of individuals. We cannot measure the excellence of a mathematician by referring to some basic logical ability all human beings possess. We cannot understand the magic of a dancer by referring to the human ability to stand erect. So merit, if defined without reference to any specific activity, becomes empty and formal. It might still serve some descriptive function. But it cannot explain why we respect and admire the meritorious.

Some are ready to give some minimal content to merit. Logical ability could be made to mean the ability to crack typical logical puzzles. This tautology is well understood and put to practice by the JEE coaching institutes. They have figured out that JEE measures only the ability to crack JEE! If you practice solving a lot of typical JEE question papers and you can pick up the ability to crack their possible variations. This makes a travesty of the concept of merit.

Entrance tests do indicate some positive qualities. They can give us a good idea about qualities like motivation, preparedness for hard work and concentration, which are important for learning anything at all. However, these qualities do not yield precise quantitative grading. We can safely assume that those who make it to the first 40 percent of the JEE list rate very high on the above qualities. Even if you make the final list by taking a lottery from the first 40 percent, we would not miss out much on the “merit” count.

It is legitimate to specify certain prerequisites for any course. These prerequisites are pieces of knowledge and not abilities. The criteria for such prerequisites are negotiable according to the resources and capabilities of the institution. Some institutions make proficiency in English a prerequisite. Some may admit students ignoring this criterion and provide them with good language courses as part of the curriculum.

Let me summarize. If merit is defined in relation to the ability to perform specific practices it is clear that entrance tests do not measure it. If merit is defined in abstraction from concrete practices it eventually coincides with universal abilities which do not call for any special mention. The only option left is to trivialize the concept by defining it as the ability to solve typical entrance test questions. Hence merit is an incoherent and ill formed concept.

Merit is rendered redundant not through logical arguments but through concrete historical changes in the nature of creativity. Creative accomplishment in modern complex industrial societies cannot be understood in terms of the inherent abilities or merits of the agents. In a traditional society a carpenter’s son becomes a carpenter and a blacksmith’s son becomes a blacksmith. Birth was the entry ticket to a profession. Once you enter with this birth ticket you can strive for excellence. Here merit is not a criterion for entry into a practice. Once you enter through a non merit, hereditary list you can strive for merit within the ongoing conduct of the practice. We all know that modernity and industrialisation changed this birth-based entry. All professions were opened to all. However, it is very important to understand the exact nature of this change.

The idea of merit has its root in a popular misunderstanding of this change. According to this popular version industrialsation replaced the criterion of birth with that of merit. A carpenter’s son would have no privilege in getting a seat in a furniture factory. Instead anyone who has the merit can get admission according to his place in the merit list. But this is not what really happened. Industralisation did not change one set of admission criteria with another. Instead it did away with all criteria for admission! It made it possible that any Tom Dick and Harry could get into any job whatsoever!

This democratization and universalisation of the mode of entry is balanced on the other end by a rationalization of the nature of work. Specific professions like carpentry, smithy, etc lost their inner coherence and distinctive existence. Traditional skill-based production which followed community specific rules and aimed at specific products had to undergo scientific analysis and planning. Work is analyzed and fragmented into some basic elements which can be re-assembled for the production of diverse goods and services. Industrialized society gives us better furniture and better shoes not because those goods are made by a new set of carpenters and cobblers who are more meritorious and skilled than the traditional hereditary ones, but because industrialisation has deskilled the worker. Workers perform some basic and repetitive and anonymous tasks which are integrated at various levels to produce toothpaste on one assembly line and toilet cleaning liquid on another. Thus, industrialisation, through the democratization of entry and rationalisation of work has made merit doubly redundant. This change happened not only on the factory floor but in the design room and the surgery theatre too.

Those who still believe in the myth of merit misunderstand the radical nature of industrial capitalism. They still hold on to a feudal conception of the nature of work. They cannot digest the revolutionary move made by capitalism to open the gates to each and everyone. They think capitalism was all about not restricting jobs to sons and daughters and opening them up to those who have the real ability to perform those tasks. They do not realize that the fundamental contribution of capitalism was in throwing the whole baby of “entry criteria” of all kinds out along with the bath water. The leaders of Indian industry do not believe in the liberating power of capitalism. They too believe that if birth is no longer the criterion for giving someone a job then something else should be there to replace it. Intelligent capitalists do not fall into this trap. Prof. Rahul Varman who teaches management at IIT Kanpur writes about his experience in a campus interview. He asked an IT boss who came to IIT for campus selection about what he looks for in the candidates. He replied that he can select anyone who has seen a computer keyboard! This man must be one of the rare Indian bosses who understand and trust the liberating power of capitalism.

Some critics of capitalism have doubted its ability to accomplish the democratization of the workforce on the one end and the rationalization of work on the other. They claim that these two moves lead to a conflict, inhibiting the growth of capitalism and leading to its eventual overthrow. Whether you believe in this doomsday prediction or not, freeing entry to jobs from any consideration of inherent ability will remain an irreversible achievement of industrial capitalism.

Rejection of merit in no way implies denigration of creativity. In the complex and highly networked modern industrial world creativity no loner resides in any individual’s head. It can be located and celebrated only at certain nodal points in this network. Anything called merit ticking in your neurons is not the enabling condition for anyone to participate in creative acts. This impossibility locating individual creativity has a challenging parallel in taking responsibility for mistakes. Does it make sense to pin point the individual who is responsible for Bhopal gas tragedy or the challenger mishap? It does not. This is not because of any deficiency in our investigation process. Here responsibility is not fixed as a response to the question “have I done anything wrong?” Instead, even before separating the right and wrong everyone, depending upon his or her institutional proximity to the site of mishap, voluntarily participate in taking collective responsibility. The old inquisitional model has no place in either fixing responsibility or ascribing creativity.

If this is correct why should there be entrance tests and job interviews? They are there as purely elimination procedures. Anyone who has seen a keyboard is eligible for a job in the IT industry. But no industry can provide jobs to all those who have seen a keyboard. So you need to eliminate some. You need a fair means for elimination. An entrance test or interview is one such fair means. However, it makes no commitment on the presence of certain qualities in those who are selected and their absence in those who are eliminated. The fairness of means of selection can be judged in terms of some standards which are internal to the selection procedure. For example, the same level of question papers should be given to everyone. No one is allowed to cheat. Everyone gets the same duration to answer a question. These standards too do not find their justification in some positive quality called merit which those who are selected through these tests allegedly possess.

So both the existence of selection tests and the criteria for their fair conduct can be explained without making any reference to merit. In fact these standards of fairness are conceivable only in a society which has done away with assertions of exclusivity – be it of birth or caste or merit. Hence merit is an imaginary construct posited by those who happen to get through a fair elimination procedure to demarcate themselves from those who are eliminated. They fantasize that they posses some positive quality or substance which justifies their selection. They cannot afford to admit that the justification of selection lies purely in the fairness of the selection procedure.

Here you may ask: if merit is a myth why do not we do away with tests and interviews and select people by drawing lottery? Why not? On many occasions lottery is a fair elimination procedure. Between two equal contestants we often select the winner through taking a lot. Why does tossing a coin become more justified as a means of elimination than say a fist fight? The admissibility of lottery as a just elimination procedure testifies to the fact that the essence of tests is pure and fair elimination. It declares that fair tests do not need any justification in terms of the presence of a positive quality. Imagine someone who is declared as winner through a lottery begins to think that he possesses something positive which made him eligible for that victory. Those who defend merit commit this mistake. If you insist on attributing a positive quality to a winner of lottery, call it luck!

You might have read a popular joke circulated by anti reservationists on the imposition of quota in Indian cricket team. From where does this joke derive its pseudo convincing power? What makes it such a vicious example? Isn’t it strange that the arguments on quota in work place get their most vicious example from the domain sports? In fact only sports can provide a pro-merit example because sports is one of the few areas of modern society where work is not yet rationalized. In an industrial society sports commands such popularity because it is one of the few avenues where we can still make a spectacle of an irrational and playful expenditure of human energy. Sports is a huge money-making business, but, unlike cinema or gambling, it has not declared itself as such.

Sports is increasingly under pressure to rationalize and industrialise itself. However, this pressure it is still an external one and sports has no inner motivation or intelligence to internalize this impetus. Frauds like match fixing are symptoms of this half hearted and incomplete commercialization of sports. Industry achieved progress because it underwent rationalisation and freed itself from feudal notions like merit due to its own inner normative demands. De-meriting has come to sports from the external pressure of bookies and advertisers and is killing its inner spirit. A rigged match, if presented properly by the media, can be more exciting and entertaining to the spectators than a genuine one. This fantasy of merit reaches the height of its perversion in American WWF wrestling. There everything – the contest, actions and spectator response – are faked for the media. Merit of the winner too is faked. This fate awaits all sports. I can see only two escape routs for sports. Either it can redefine the “merit” of players in terms of complex and abstract statistics, which is totally abstracted away from the living criteria of sports lovers (eg. Cricket). Or, sports can turn itself into an entertaining media spectacle – all sports going virtual into computer games, is a move in this direction. However, both these ways demand that we give up the notion that sports has anything to do with the pure expression of the inner abilities of the players!

Art has succeeded where sports failed. Cinema is perhaps the first art form which declared itself to be an industry. This does not mean that cinema is purely a money making business. It only means that it has reorganized and rationalised its production process along the lines of industry. Modern art too has totally done away with any reference to the skill and talent of the artist. Aesthetic appreciation makes no reference to the skill of the artist. This is testified by the popular criticism of modern art. Faced with a painting of Picasso or Hussain, many of us feel that they could very well be drawn by a four-year old child! This popular sentiment is totally justified. What makes it a great art work need not have anything to do with the skill involved in making it. Modern art has dethroned the author. A great artist Marcel Duchamp once took a toilet commode from a sanitary ware shop and exhibited it as a sculpture in the MOMA, New York. Jackson Pollack splashed paint on the canvas. All these crazy acts were made possible and respectable by the fact that in modern art, the skill or intentions of the artist have no place of privilege.

Unlike the cricket players, artists do not have, and perhaps can never have, a data-base for rating. Art has done away with all such merit lists. This is surprising. Common sense tells you that art, more than science or industry, is about inborn abilities – to produce pleasant sounds, to draw perfect pictures, to execute graceful movement etc. However it is art which has broken away from such inborn abilities. Modern music is not judged in terms of the pleasing sounds. Modern painting has nothing do with perfect shapes. Modern poetry is not an arrangement of apt words and metaphors. Children with those inborn abilities can be objects of curiosity and fun. However, such abilities have no role beyond child play.

So industry, art and most other walks of human activity have undergone rationalization and have done away with any substantive notions of merit. However our elite educational institutions – IITs, IIMs and AIIMS still live by the rhetoric of merit. Today we are told that the great threat the IITs are facing is the dilution of merit reservation could cause. However had we asked an IIT student or faculty a few days before this reservation phobia they would have given you a totally different account of the crisis of higher education. Such account would have focused mainly on what happens to these meritorious kids after they enter these institutions. They would have talked about how the coaching institutions have made any genuine expression of creative talent impossible, how students, once they enter, manipulate the system, how the competitive grading has killed ingenuity and pleasures of learning, how the cynical awareness that whatever they learn here is useless has led them to skip classes and focus more on future competitive exams and jobs. All this cynicism and self-criticism have been suddenly replaced by a self valorization of merit.

It is traumatic to live with an exalted self description based on merit on the one hand, and a cynical self awareness that merit does not mean anything on the other. Attempts to manage this contradiction has created many perversions in the academic life of these institutions. Ragging is one of the most widely known perversions of this kind. Relating ragging and merit might look a bit far-fetched. However, it is not. Ragging is prevalent only in elite institutions where new comers are admitted with great emphasis on merit. As we all know, ragging the practice of seniors welcoming newcomers through rituals of gratuitous violence and humiliation. Such acts of humiliation exists mainly in elite professional colleges and only derivatively and as a media driven excess in other colleges. Why should the newcomers who have just proved their merit be subjected to humiliation? Anthropology teaches us that such initiation ceremonies are often aimed at establishing social solidarity. In the elite institutions social solidarity between students is established around the rhetoric of merit. But the senior students who have been in the system for some time know that merit is a myth and majority in the system are just average or mediocre and the testimony of entrance examination results meant nothing. This truth has to be communicated to the newcomers without weakening the shrillness of the rhetoric of merit which sustains them. Ragging is an obscene way of sharing this truth about the lie of merit. It is an obscene wink of the eye exchanged between the seniors and juniors indicating the best kept secret of campus life. The juniors are taught how to construct this vacuous substance called merit, which despite its emptiness, can be used to create a hierarchy between them and the majority outside who could not clear the entrance tests. However, through the violent gestures of domination the seniors reproduce this hierarchy within the campus – between juniors and seniors. Both these hierarchies – between juniors and those who failed in entrance exam and between seniors and juniors are equally dubious but they support and reinforce each other. No wonder the senior who rags you most becomes your closest ally.

(“Five Point Someone”, a novel written by an ex-IITian Chetan Bhagat gives a precise insight into the trauma culture of our elite institutions. This novel shows that the best way to remain sane, humane and untraumatisd in these institutions is to pursue mediocrity voluntarily. Be cool, study for your passion for the subject, ignore arrogant faculty, take up not-so eye catching but creative projects and remain an average five pointer!! )

Let me summarise my argument. Merit is logically incoherent and empirically false and pragmatically useless. It is a fantasy created by those win tests in the hope of distinguishing themselves from those who got eliminated. Entrance tests are fair elimination tests and they do not need to find legitimacy in any such fantasy construction like merit. The persistence of the rhetoric of merit in the self description of students leads to previsions like ragging in the academic life of elite institutions. So merit is illusory and dangerous. All domains of modern industrialized capitalist democratic societies have freed themselves from the myth of the merit.

Even those who are patient with me so far might want to pose a question here: If merit is a myth why do we conduct exams and give grades? Why do we congratulate winners? Why do we recognize the accomplishment of others and motivate them for more accomplishments? You are right. I too think that exams and grades have a positive role. We must recognize the contribution and efforts of others. We must congratulate winners and join their celebrations. I want to be proud of my students and motivate them for higher achievements. But I do not think that I need to believe in merit to do any of these.

When we congratulate someone we are recognizing him as an exemplary instance of humanity and human achievement. By joining the celebration we are affirming our solidarity with his aims, values and dreams. We own him up as the best among us and there by elevate ourselves. When I congratulate a student for cracking a tough question I am not showing my admiration for his fully developed neurons. Nor am I telling him that he has inherited better genes compared to others. All that I am doing is to lift him as an exemplary model for other students and for himself and also for me as a teacher to follow. I am telling myself that I should come up with a more challenging question next time. I am telling the class that we expect similar fetes from all of them. Sometimes a student might miss a big opportunity because he scored just one or two marks less than another one. Such instances make any sincere teacher embarrassed and sad about his own evaluation. Instead of defending the objectivity of merit he would normally admit the relativity of grading and try to console the loser that it is just bad luck that he lost this time and assure him that he is equally good and he would get a better opportunity next time. This is the human context of all meaningful evolution. Teaching involves testing. However it should be motivating and inclusive and not eliminative and segregating.

In traditional societies, achievers recognized and celebrated by ascribing their success to god’s grace. To congratulate someone means to wish more and more of such grace to befall him. We can preserve something from this even if we remove its religious and deterministic aspects. This gives the winner his due but at the same time recognize the non-localizability and contingency of victory. In our secular societies celebration of achievement should be an occasion for affirming human solidarity, diversity and creativity. An incoherent and obsolete concept like merit cannot measure up to this challenge.

Exposing the concept of merit in no away implies that everything is hunky dory with the prevalent concept of social justice. The concept of justice has many challenges to meet. All that I tried to argue is that merit is not one among those challenges. It does not merit any serious attention. However, I do not believe the most impressive emancipatory struggles of our time are struggles for social justice. I doubt if justice can capture their ethical and experimental core. We can get into these issues about justice only after we free ourselves from dubious notions like merit.