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People have a double standard about double standards. One standard is that we shouldn’t have them – we should hold everyone to the same standard. The other is that we should adjust our standards depending on who we’re dealing with, for example, being more tactful with the elderly than we with our buddies, being more generous and accommodating to people struggling through life than we are to people cruising through life, being patient when walking behind someone in a wheelchair but not behind some young person spaced out on their cell phone.
Fair’s fair but there are two basic definitions of fairness, holding people to universal or customized standards, granting credit without regard to context or with context taken into consideration, measuring merit-based strictly on performance vs. measuring merit based on some combination of performance and effort, cutting slack to those who are trying hard even if they’re not succeeding.
Sometimes it’s obvious which standard to hold. In med school, you don’t cut students slack just because they’re trying hard. If you did, you’d be graduating incompetent doctors which is dangerous. No, you hold all students to the same high standard regardless of how much they’re trying.
But in child rearing, you do cut slack. You’re not going to insist that a disabled child run as fast as others. That would be cruel. You make allowances for learning disabilities.
We might aspire to grant all people equal rights and equal opportunity but what then, to do about the obvious fact that we are born differently-abled? We’re stuck with an inescapable tension: Should we make allowances for the less-abled or should we impose strict quality control? There will always be confusion about whether to apply a universal or customized standard.
Imagine a parent who has just enough money to send one of their two children to summer camp. One child is an advanced student. The parent could send her to a camp for exceptional students. The other child is learning disabled. The parent could send her to a special ed program. What’s the right choice? That’s a hard decision.
Now imagine you’re the boss of a sales force and you have to let go of one of your two salespeople. One is charismatic and effortlessly productive, not trying hard yet exceeding quotas reliably. The other is uncharismatic, making way more effort, arriving early, staying late, cold-calling patiently – really, really trying.
You might be tempted to take context into account. But business is business, so you’d probably let the hard-working, less-productive salesperson go. You won’t feel good about it but business measures merit by performance.
Nature is strictly business too. A lion isn’t going to cut a gazelle slack because it’s making a fine effort. The sunlight isn’t going to thread its way around the big trees to get to some struggling shaded plant because it deserves a leg up. Nature cuts no slack.
It’s a human thing, this slack-cutting to those who make more effort. It requires our unique human capacity for empathy, born of our ability to read people made possible by language, our ability to assess context and imagine ourselves in other people’s shoes, to guess, for example, how hard someone is trying. We don’t think of the lion as cruel for eating the least among its prey. But we wince a little when firing the harder worker for being the lesser performer even if business is business.
The tension between single and double standards is expressed in political ideology too. The right promotes strict common performance standards. You either make it or you don’t. If you don’t make it, that’s on you. Society owes you nothing. The right espouses an ideology akin to the parent sending the prodigy to summer camp, not the disabled child. After all, if the point of society is to advance, don’t be dragged down by the laggards. Leave them behind if you must. Reward the high performers.
The left espouses more empathy than that. Carry everyone along or you’re not really advancing society. Invest more in those who are making an effort. Hold different standards. Allocate according to effort, not that they’re easy to know who’s trying and who isn’t. You will misread people. There will be welfare cheats who pretend that they have it harder than they do. Still, accommodating based on effort is worth the effort. That’s what the left espouses.
Of course, what an ideology espouses and what people do are two different things. The right is perfectly happy to cut slack to some underperformers. It makes allowances, for example, when the right-wing reverend Franklin Graham argue that we should give Trump a “bogey” (a golfing forgiveness) for having sex with a porn star because that’s the Christian thing to do. Likewise, the left measures by strict performance sometimes too. To combat climate change, everyone should pay the same amount for the fossil fuels they use.
Christ is interesting on the double standard question too. He’s revered for help the least among us but he also held some pretty exacting standards. That he was omni-tolerant is a myth. He sure didn’t tolerate that fig tree or the money-lenders. Jesus’ standard was revolutionary perhaps, but it was still universal, the way all people should live if they want to graduate to the heavenly elite.
We’d like the world to be fair and square. It’s way simpler than trying to gauge people’s effort and needs, the way of the world before people gained the power to feel each other’s needs and guess each other’s effort.
And then there’s always personal bias tipping us toward a double standard about double standards. We embrace a single standard when we’re winning by that standard. When we’re losing by that standard, we wish the world would cut us some slack. At the extreme, you get people who cry foul whenever they start to lose. If you’re way ahead but start to fall behind, you might suddenly discover a preference for helping the underperformers. We can hate the burden of supporting the safety net until we’re in free fall and hope it catches us.
Life is easiest when you can espouse a single standard when you really want a double standard biased in our favor. Let the best performer win, and it damned well better be me – that double standard on double standards is a pretty strong subjective bias.
Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Big Short has a wonderful new podcast on this topic called “Against the rules.” It’s about the tension between advocates and judges, players and referees. The podcast’s theme is a quote from Lewis’s 7-year-old son:
“Don’t pick sides unless it’s mine.”
