Meritocracy and Its Discontents
Michael Sandel, Kathryn Paige Harden, Heidegger
You rarely read a book critiquing merit or meritocracy by someone without an advanced degree. Two recent works criticizing the concept of meritocracy come to mind: Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit and Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery.
This isn’t to say the arguments don’t have merit—but I find myself reading these kinds of arguments as being more about their authors than about the world.
Sandel admits as much. His critique of meritocracy is not just that it’s bad for the “losers” but also that it’s bad for the “winners,” since it distorts their (our) sense of self and warps their (our) character.
Still, would we be reading Sandel if he weren’t a distinguished Harvard Professor? Would Harden’s work be taken seriously if it didn’t have the imprimatur of the New York Times and the New Yorker?
Adorno calls the idea of writing from within a distorted or captured subject-position “immanent critique.” His own attempt at this in Minima Moralia is subtitled “Reflections from a Damaged Life.” (I once tried my hand at the form of immanent critique in the ironic form of a fake autobiography here.)
There is something noble—even martyrological—about the attempt to document the ways in which one is deformed by a system, without aspiring to escape it. But it’s also a melancholic position, because it accepts a kind of performative hypocrisy as its precondition.
Who reads these books critiquing meritocracy? For the most part, those who went to college and have disposable income. Or in Harden’s terms, those who won the “genetic lottery.” I think we should be self-critical and self-aware, but at what point does consuming these books simply amount to a ritual of expiation through acknowledgment of guilt?
Heidegger’s critique of meritocracy is more spiritual than practical. He asks us to consider that merit is not the be all and end all of our life projects. “Full of merit yet poetically man dwells on this earth.” While life outcomes are unequally distributed, the capacity for poetic dwelling remains accessible to all. Implicit in this romantic view is a certain apology for unequal life outcomes, but also a spiritual egalitarianism that ties the dignity of people to something poetic rather than achievement-based. For example, we are all equal by virtue of being finite, mortal, vulnerable, caring beings. We are all equal before the specter of Ecclesiastes: “All is vanity.”
Perhaps this Heideggerian approach is naive at best. I agree with the general complaint that meritocracy enables a “cult of smart” (Freddie de Boer) to the detriment of finding dignity in a range of human forms. But I don’t think the corrective to the “cult of smart” can be addressed by raising taxes on Elon Musk or letting more people into Harvard or disbanding math tracking or giving everyone UBI. (Of course, I’m biased, having risen through the ranks of a system that values academic achievement). I could be wrong and I am not a policy expert, but my own intuition leads me to the conclusion that egalitarian values cannot be achieved through the primary or exclusive pursuit of material equity (equal outcomes).
I believe a religious or existential turn toward old fashioned values like humility and kindness will do more to close the gap between the haves and have nots than the utilitarian framework of redistribution.
Sandel and Harden are right that ensuring greater equality of opportunity for the worst off does not address the deeper problem of fundamental inequality between people. For example, some people really are “unskilled,” or worse, damaged; and no amount of training or connections will help much. Surely, we should care about “the least of these,” too. Focusing only on helping those who can, if only they had the chance, misses all those who cannot, no matter what. I am sympathetic to this challenge. And I agree that separating ourselves from these folks is a kind of hubris that denies our own inherent weakness and contingency.
But the morality of how we relate to “the least of these”—in my view—is a challenge for how to live and interact more than it is an abstract challenge for how to distribute resources. (It can also be an abstract economic policy problem, too).
The book on meritocracy that I would be most excited for is not the one written by political philosophers and behavior geneticists, but the one written by a virtue ethicist or saint or chaplain. Given that we live in a society governed mostly by the ideal of competitive meritocracy, how should we live? What do we owe the cashier at the DMV who incorrectly types in our information, over and over again, not out of malice, but out of Kafka-esque incompetence?