Immanuel Kant on late Kryptonite society, ants and private education

In the film Man of Steel, Superman gets a crash course on the history of Krypton from a computerised projection of his late father, Jor-El. Our hero learns that, before the planet went kaput, Krypton's social system was based on individuals being artificially bred in a “Genesis Chamber”. Superman’s father went on to explain that each Kryptonite child was thus “designed to fill a predetermined role in our society. As a worker, a warrior, a leader, and so on."

This brought to mind life in an ant colony, the quintessential example of diversification of labour based on birth rather than choice. A worker ant can never learn to become a soldier or vice versa, just like soldiers can never become a queen. Likewise, individuals on Krypton had to accept that their life choices were decided before they were born. As in an ant colony, a life on Superman’s home planet was not a chance to see, learn, experience, choose and do, rather, it was a role to fulfil, irrespective of personal preference.

A Kryptonite Genesis Chamber

Superman's parents, however, refused to accept this state of affairs. His father, Jor-El, and mother, Lara, believed that something precious had been lost through the adoption of population controls and the Genesis Chamber, namely, the "elements of choice, of chance… of a child dreaming of becoming something other than what society intended for them… of a child aspiring to something greater." By objecting to predetermination, in other words, Superman's biological parents were proponents of equality of opportunity.

This dichotomy of social predetermination on the one side, as exemplified by late Kryptonite society, and individual freedom on the other, as typified by the views of Superman’s parents, made me think of Immanuel Kant’s modestly titled work "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective". 

Species specific skills

In this short but profound essay, the big brain from Königsberg argues that each type of plant and animal has a species specific skill or skillset that provides it a purpose and guides its actions. Kant thought that this biological USP is evident in the way every individual within one species behaves in the same way. So the goal of a tree, for example, is to reach toward the sun. For gazelles it is to stay alive by outrunning predators. For monarch butterflies it is to migrate, while sharks use their sense of smell to hunt and their and sharp teeth to eat, and so on. Animals just do what comes naturally to them – or, in modern parlance, animals do what gives them an evolutionary advantage. 

We human beings, however, are born into this world with few such inbuilt skills. We are weak and we break easily. We have no armour, no sharp teeth, no claws to keep us safe from predators or to help us hunt for food. We lack fancy skills like echolocation or magnetic field positioning to guide us around our surroundings. However, Kant was of the view that Nature, in her infinite wisdom, had decreed that we human beings must learn to create all of these things for ourselves – and for that she gave us a unique faculty among Earth’s life forms: Reason.

Diversification and progress through Reason

As a species, our innate advantage is learning through reasoning. Individuals within other species instinctively exploit their heritable traits – claws, speed, camouflage, and so on – to stay alive and multiply, whereas human beings alone, Kant thought, develop a huge variety of different skills and purposes for our lives. One man becomes a Formula One driver, while another a carpenter, another a plumber, another a lawyer – the possibilities are limited only by our population.

Moreover, Kant argues that Reason "does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another. Therefore a single man would have to live excessively long in order to learn to make full use of all his natural capacities." It is thus only through generations that humanity’s abilities fully develop, and only when the last human being has passed away will Nature have witnessed all of our capacities unfold.

In this Kantian view, whether to find one’s purpose in music, dentistry, car engines, computers, teaching, painting, nursing, or so on… that is the question for human beings. And this responsibility each of us must carry alone. To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, humans are thrown into the world and we are therefore condemned to be free and responsible for everything we do.

So, in societal terms, Kant's vision for humanity is diametrically opposed to late Kryptonite society. The former is founded on freedom and responsibility, while the latter, like an ant colony, is based on predetermined roles that dictate each individual's choices and chances. 

Where, then, on such a spectrum of individual choice on one side and a rigid cast system on the other would our Western society fit in? Or, rather, on which side of the spectrum do we want our societies to be based upon?

Private schools prevent equality of opportunity

Although there is a growing and worrying trend in the West for designer babies, thankfully at least our species hasn't started using Genetic Chambers yet. But I would like to focus on a more immediate social phenomenon, namely, decreased social mobility resulting from a lack of equality of opportunity – because the more structural it becomes the more we move toward segregated societies like those of ants and… well, Kryptonites. 

The institution of private fee-paying schools in the UK and the US provides a good example of a structure that actively stratifies society by undermining, or perhaps even preventing equality of opportunity. It does so by segregating individuals into certain groups that, to a high degree, determine their outcomes. For group A – whose parents can cough up the fees – private education broadens the horizons and improves the prospects of their offspring. For group B – whose parents are unable to afford such fees – the quality of education that they can access is markedly lower, as a result of which the child’s opportunities are far narrower. 

Although the predetermination that results from your parent’s income bracket is obviously not as stark or rigid as that in an ant colony, the fact that there are two tiers of education that depend on your family’s wealth rather than your ability places our society at least a few steps in the direction of a predetermined cast system. And as much as those working in private schools might disagree, one type of education for the rich and another for the poor and middle classes reinforces a state of affairs where a portion of the population is fast tracked toward success, while the other sections are forced to work far, far harder for a chance to achieve the same levels of success. 

Indeed, a recent study found that, in the UK, just 7% of members of the public attended a private school. Nonetheless, alumni from private education counted for 71% of senior judges, 62% of senior officers in the armed forces, 55% of permanent secretaries in Whitehall, 53% of senior diplomats, 50% of members of the House of Lords, 44% of people on the Sunday Times Rich List, 43% of newspaper columnists, 36% of cabinet ministers, 33% of MPs, 26% of BBC executives and 22% of shadow cabinet ministers. 

I find it difficult to believe that these people are somehow innately smarter or more capable than their state school peers – and it is surely more reasonable to think that it was their superior education that made them better qualified for such high powered positions.

Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect competition, where everybody could set off into their lives from the exact same starting point, except perhaps in economics or in the minds of Utopian idealists. Some families have accumulated more wealth due to their own initiative and hard work, through competing and winning. There is nothing wrong with that nor is there anything unjust about inequality that is the result of merit.

Competition brings out the best in us

In Kant's view it is actually Nature's way and a positive thing to work hard toward having a better lot than the Joneses because such competition is the engine that propels humanity's drive toward progress. Without competition, he argues, “all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped.” It is this natural inclination toward competition that compels us to strive for a higher vantage point, even when we are standing on the shoulders of giants. 

That said, unfettered competition can over time cause inequalities that were initially based on merit to turn into structural fault lines that begin to predetermine societal position, wealth and/or opportunity. In the words of the economist du jour, Thomas Piketty, when "the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based." 

Indeed, it is easy to see how an Establishment can arise only to then pull up the ladder from underneath them. Those at the top will strive to stay there. As Kant puts it, man being a reasonable being “wishes to have a law which limits the freedom of all, [but] his selfish animal impulses tempt him, where possible, to exempt himself from them."

Ants must accept that their biology causes distinct casts within a colony, but, for human beings, the only thing required for the abolition of socially unjust structures is willpower; and the only thing preventing it is vested interests. One can argue that a status quo with two-tiered education is just the way it is, that the rich will never give up their private education, their golden ticket to an (economically) easier life. But we should not bow down and accept the status quo. History has seen far greater shifts toward justice and equality than it would be to ensure every child gets the same level of education, an equal start in life. (And you only need to look as far as Finland to see that this can be achieved without compromising the standard of education.)

Moving in the right direction

William Wilberforce,
proponent of equality

An example would be the abolition of slavery. It must have been unthinkable to the majority of early 19th century Britain that slavery, an institution so fundamental to their economy, could be prohibited. And it must have taken an awful lot of energy and perseverance for William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect's revolutionary idea of ending slavery to gain traction and then become a reality, first in the British Empire and gradually thereafter around the world.

But their work paid off and society became a fairer place. Their campaigning caused humanity to take a giant leap toward  individual freedom and the more equitable end of the spectrum between predetermination and choice. Granted, we may still be landing from this jump today because the echoes of institutional racism can still hinder equality of opportunity when it comes to minorities, but at least we are moving in the right direction.

Jor-El, defender of equality of opportunity

Just as Superman's parents had the right idea and as William Wilberforce and Rosa Parks and countless others who championed the rights of the oppressed, we should not just accept the world as it is. We should never forget that all social structures, whether patriarchy or feudalism or slavery or capitalism or  private education are, after all, arbitrary and result from historical choices and flukes, rather than from some in-built human necessity to organise ourselves in a certain way. 


Equality of opportunity, the least worst system

Although Kant was the first to admit that "from such crooked wood as man is made of, nothing perfectly straight can be built", we should nonetheless strive toward improving our social systems and the structures that underpin them.

We have an opportunity today to continue the work of past champions of individual rights by abolishing private education and instead awarding each child the same, high standard of education. In so doing, we would be giving every human being an equal chance to find and unlock their full potential. On this, I think Superman’s parents would agree with the big brain from Königsberg.

Previous shifts in social structures toward a more just system – universal suffrage, banning slavery, state education, public health care, to name but a few glorious examples – give hope that, finally, “after many reformative revolutions, a universal cosmopolitan condition, which Nature has as her ultimate purpose [for humankind], will come into being as the womb wherein all the original capacities of the human race can develop."