Privilege is often talked about as though it were a sin in itself. But the word “privilege” brings together several overlapping but quite different things: advantage, achievement, inherited opportunity, social distinction and the abuse of power.
A useful starting point in discussing privilege is the old grammar school. Originally intended to give academically able children from modest backgrounds access to opportunity, grammar schools came to replicate the familiar cycle: merit produced advantage, and that advantage could be passed on as privilege.
This does not mean that the grammar-school system was without serious weaknesses. Many grammar schools, though by no means all, were single-sex, separating boys and girls at a particularly formative stage of social development. Academic concentration could therefore be earned at the price of a narrower social education, with all-boys and all-girls environments sometimes exaggerating the less attractive habits of each.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the principal political objection was increasingly directed at selection itself. Grammar schools came to be regarded as bastions of privilege, concentrating exceptional educational opportunities among those who passed the selection process while disqualifying many others from access to them. Comprehensive education was by then no novelty. There was a recognisably indigenous British line of development stretching back into the pre-war period, although British reformers were certainly aware of parallel developments in the United States. The decisive political impetus came with Labour’s Circular 10/65 in 1965, which asked local education authorities to prepare plans for reorganising secondary education on comprehensive lines. In much of the country, selective education was consequently replaced by the comprehensive system.
There was an understandable moral impulse behind this move, but there is also something suspect in the thinking which motivated it. The existence of inequality was too readily taken as evidence of injustice. Yet inequality is not in itself proof that anyone has been unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged, and fairness does not necessarily require that everyone should end up with the same amount. Inequality is a fact to be explained, not a verdict of injustice.
The difficulty is that equality is easily confused with uniformity. Once difference itself comes to be regarded as suspect, the temptation is to treat every unequal outcome as something requiring correction rather than explanation. Yet justice may require us to distinguish between disadvantage caused by circumstance and difference arising from the unequal development of natural capacities.
If six plants are grown under broadly similar conditions and two thrive while the others do less well, we would not normally conclude that fairness requires the two strongest to be cut back. We would ask instead what accounts for the difference: soil, light, water, chance, or differences in the plants themselves.
But difference is not merely something to be explained or accommodated. It is also one of the conditions of civilisation itself. Societies advance because people possess different abilities, temperaments and forms of imagination, and because some are able to develop particular gifts further than others.
The social problem is therefore not how to abolish difference, but how civilisation should live with the differences nature has given us.
Isaiah’s vision of the good society (Isaiah 65:21–23) is one of security, sufficiency and peace: people build houses and inhabit them, enjoy the fruits of their labour and live without fear. Coming from a world marked by war, dispossession and social upheaval, the longing is entirely understandable. Yet as a complete vision of human flourishing it is curiously static. Peace is desirable, but peace alone is not enough. Human beings also need challenge, discovery, creation and the possibility of becoming more than they are. A society in which everyone was secure, fed and untroubled, but in which little called forth invention, ambition or imagination, might be enviable for a time and intolerably dull thereafter. A Newton or a Bach requires more than mere sufficiency; so do most of us.
Personal fulfilment need not mean fame or social ascent for all. Human possibility is always greater than human fulfilment. Some gifts are recognised and cultivated, some only partly developed, and countless others disappear unnoticed. Communities in the past had their musicians, craftsmen, storytellers and natural observers, many of whom may have lived contentedly without ever discovering how far their abilities might have carried them. There is something almost built into existence about this waste of possibility. Of all the seeds scattered on the wind, only a few fall on fertile ground and grow to fruitful maturity.
The proper aim is therefore not to flatten difference, but to allow ability, where it becomes apparent, room to develop.
Equality need not mean sameness or levelling down. It means recognising an equal claim to the opportunity to develop whatever potential each person possesses, without any promise of equal outcomes. Differences in ability may be very great, but superiority in ability does not imply superiority of human worth. Much of privilege, however, begins as an accident de naissance: the unchosen circumstances of family, wealth, education, language and connection into which one happens to be born. We give people their chance, accept what follows, and recognise the contingency that runs through every human life. We are all candles in the wind.
The moral danger begins when differences in money and influence become assumptions about personal superiority. Economic difference can become social distance, and social distance can result in arrogance and contempt.
That is the real poison.
Privilege without responsibility becomes entitlement; power without responsibility becomes abuse; freedom without responsibility becomes licence.
Privilege ought instead to imply responsibility.
