Merit and its Limits
How a quick visit to a top boarding school in the country made me rethink Merit
This week I spoke at one of the top boarding schools in the country. Taft School in Watertown Connecticut is ranked number 14 in the nation and it was a real delight to deliver a presentation on the Theory of Enchantment to the 600 students that attend. I also really enjoyed speaking with faculty and staff before and after my keynote; it was thrilling to grapple with them over some of the big existential questions of the day concerning polarization, bigotry, and what the true aim of an education should be.
My presentation was on the psychology of racism and why it’s a phenomenon that affects us so powerfully as a species, and so persistently.
The TL:DR of Theory of Enchantment could be summed up in a few bullet points:
Humans perceive darkness as evil. This is because we fear the unknown (and “the unknown” is just another word for “darkness”).
Fear, once left to fester, becomes hatred. So we hate darkness (or the unknown) both in ourselves and each other. This is where racism stems from. (Think of the word, “nigger”. It derives from the word “negate” meaning “to deny.” We fear darkness so much that we deny its existence within our own being and project it outward onto others who are physically darker than us. )
Supremacy is an overcompensation for our fear. We fear the darkness in ourselves and believe our fears make us worthless. Then we overcompensate for our fears by claiming to be better than other people. Practically speaking, this means that when we can’t handle our feelings of worthlessness, we cope by looking down on other people and seeing them as worthless instead. Historically, we have done this to physically darker peoples or, whomever we perceive as “the other.” This “other” is always relative. For example, we did this to Africans for centuries through the Atlantic slave trade and we also did this to Italians in late 1800s America.
The only reason why the concepts of “black” and “white” races exist is because
humans turned skin color into symbols of “good” and “bad” in order to cope with their own fears. We are unconsciously still walking around with these symbols today.
The only way to heal this is to learn how to get in right relationship with our darkness by bringing harmony between our darkness and our light through a Jungian, Yin/Yang discipline. This is the aim of the Theory of Enchantment; and this means recognizing there is always a little bit of darkness in light and a little bit of light in darkness. The two depend upon each other in order to exist.
This is the true meaning of integration and it requires daily practice; The outcome is a re-consecration of one’s self and one’s relationship to the world. To integrate or harmonize the known and unknown parts of ourselves so that we can be in balance is what I call “Enchantment.”
Integration requires giving up the aim of “perfection” and replacing it with one of wholeness, a concept that is foreign to our deeply Protestant ways of knowing.
“You shall therefore be perfect, as your Father, Who is in Heaven, is perfect.”
Thus reads the English translation of the King James Bible, which is by far the most influential book on our collective psyche. And yet, as a teacher of philosophy at Taft told me after my talk, the original Aramaic translation of the text of Matthew 5:48 reads more accurately as “therefore, become who you are,” or “therefore, become your inner, unique, distinct design that only you can become.”
The difference in those translations is the difference between Night and Day.
As many of the teachers and staff members at Taft informed me, their institution, like many other boarding schools, has several aims, one of which includes helping its students get into top tier universities in. Such a feat almost inevitably leads to a culture of perfectionism.
Presumably, the more sports a student plays, the more A’s they get on their report card, the more they can prove themselves rigorously by balancing as many academic endeavors they can possibly get with as many after-school extra curriculum activities on their resume, the more likely they’ll get into Columbia or Harvard. But this pursuit of “excellence” comes with a price.
Teenagers who have been taught that their very worth and life trajectory hinges upon them getting into the best universities might be a recipe for long-term anxiety. Think about it. In the sort of high stakes environment where competing for a number of limited slots to get into a top tier school is the name of the game, God forbid an 11th grader get a B on her report card. If she doesn’t get in to her top choice for college, her world could fall to pieces. She must prove her worth. After all, this is what she has been taught all her life. If she finds out her friend is applying to seven colleges, it’s maybe best for her to apply to twenty-seven, because its all a numbers game anyhow.
All of this can lead to panic attacks on the level of Riley in Inside Out 2.
And all of this is just another version of fear of the unknown.
Now, I’m not saying that we need to get rid of grades or anything drastic like that. There should be benchmarks and standards of excellence and achievement in place to have some measure of success. But we also need not create a culture where students’ self worth is reduced to their academic achievement.
As I stated in my talk, a person’s worthiness is innate and inexorable. It is not a question, not a hypothesis to be proven, not a problem to be solved. It exists in and of itself. So while its good to encourage students to work hard and achieve, that must be balanced with an appreciation and edification for the whole student — and the wholeness of the student.
I’ve heard folks I know and love say that having a merit-based approach is the antidote to the excesses of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). But the opposite may also be true: It may be that having such a fixation on merit can give rise to a generation and a culture obsessed with DEI.
Just as DEI sometimes reduces people’s innate worth to their skin color, certain versions of merit reduce people’s innate worth to the number of straight A’s, extra-curricular activities, and a hyper focus on college admissions that comes at the cost of the simple joys of being a teenager. The underlying principle is the same.
How many generations has this mentality affected till now? Who can say for sure?
But its ironic that obsession with merit has sometimes produced a prize only the hyper-anxious can achieve — something, in other words, that only a person who is terrified of the dark can attain.
It’s ironic, but also terrifying.
Chloé Valdary, educator and founder of Theory of Enchantment, is on a mission to address the shortcomings of traditional DEI approaches and foster genuine human connection to build healthy and effective teams and workplaces. You can check out her online course here.