In his excellent book, The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel, a Harvard professor of political philosophy, refers to another book, now out of print, published in 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young. It was called The Rise of the Meritocracy, and took the form of a dystopia.
Writing as if he were a historian looking back from the year 2033, he [Young] described with uncanny clarity the moral logic of the meritocratic society that was beginning to unfold in the postwar Britain of his day. Without defending the class-bound order that was passing, Young suggested that its moral arbitrariness and manifest unfairness at least had this desirable effect: It tempered the self-regard of the upper class and prevented the working class from viewing its subordinate status as personal failure.
As Young’s imaginary historian writes:
Now that people are classified by ability, the gap between the classes has inevitably become wider. The upper classes are… no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism. Today the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement. They deserve to belong to a superior class. They know too that not only are they of higher calibre to start with, but that a first-class education has been built upon their native gifts.
‘Not only did Young anticipate the meritocratic hubris of elites;’ writes Sandel, ‘he glimpsed their affinity for technocratic expertise, their tendency to look down on those who lack their lustrous credentials.’ He quotes Young again (still writing as if a historian in 2033) who suggests that ‘some members of the meritocracy… have become so impressed with their own importance as to lose sympathy with the people whom they govern’. Some of them, indeed, are ‘so tactless that even people of low calibre have been quite unnecessarily offended’. Here Sandel references Hillary Clinton’s famous —and extraordinarily politically inept— remark about half of Trump supporters being ‘a basket of deplorables’. I saw the same kind of contempt over and over again coming from remain voters in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. Indeed I felt so disgusted by it, as a remain voter myself, that I wished I’d voted leave.
As Sandel notes, in Young’s dystopia, ‘resentment against elites was compounded by the self-doubt that a meritocracy inflicts on those who fail to rise’, for, as Young’s historian wrote, ‘Today all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance.’ Sandel goes on:
Young predicted that this toxic brew of hubris and resentment would fuel a political backlash. He concluded his dystopian tale by predicting that, in 2034, the less-educated classes would rise up in a populist revolt against the meritocratic elites. In 2016, as Britain voted for Brexit and America for Trump, that revolt arrived eighteen years ahead of schedule.
Meritocracy as the new ‘social justice’
The obvious objection to this analysis would be that we don’t live in a meritocracy. Sandel doesn’t deny this, though. His point is that, in America, Britain and elsewhere, a meritocracy is seen as the just, fair society towards which we should be striving. Politicians supposedly on the left now speak of ‘equality of opportunity’ as the goal, rather than the ‘equality of outcome’ that was implied, for instance, by Marx’s formula, ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. Whether they are Obama, Blair, the Clintons, ‘politicians of the center-left and center-right claim that their policies will enable all citizens… to compete on equal terms and to rise as far as their efforts and talents will take them.’ (In the case of America, this is also a major component of the ‘American Dream’: a supposedly classless society where everyone has a chance of success.) ‘When people complain about meritocracy,’ Sandel writes, ‘the complaint is usually not about the ideal but about the failure to live up to it’.
But what if the problem runs deeper? What if the failure of meritocracy is not that we have failed to achieve it but that the ideal is flawed? What if the rhetoric of rising no longer inspires, not simply because social mobility has stalled but… because helping people scramble up the ladder in a competitive meritocracy is a hollow political project that reflects an impoverished conception of citizenship and freedom?
Quite. Apart from anything else, why would the meritocratic ideal seem reasonable or fair to the large number of people who do not possess any particularly marketable talent?
What matters for a meritocracy is that everyone has an equal chance to climb the ladder of success; it has nothing to say about how far apart the rungs on the ladder should be. The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality.
And in fact, as Sandel notes, those rungs have been growing steadily further apart. Rises in GDP for many years have reflected rises in income at the upper end of the scale, but not the bottom:
The age of globalization brought vast inequalities and stagnant wages for the working class. In the U.S., the richest 10 percent captured most of the gains, and the bottom half received virtually none. Liberal and progressive parties of the 1990s and 2000s did not address this inequality directly, by seeking structural reform of the economy. Instead they embraced market-driven globalization and addressed the uneven benefits it bestowed by seeking a fuller equality of opportunity.
But Sandel’s concern is not just with economic injustice but with the message that meritocratic rhetoric gives out both to those at the top (you deserve success because you are intellectually superior) and those at the bottom (you deserve failure because you’re not worth much), the shame that this causes for those at the bottom, and the arrogance it encourages in those further up. This is the arrogance of remain voters sneering at ‘gammons’ and ‘Quitlers’ and of Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ comment —which, if I’d been an American voter hovering between Trump and Clinton, would not exactly have encouraged me to vote for Clinton.
This shame on one side and arrogance on the other is corrosive to democracy because it reduces solidarity between people doing different kinds of work and creates what Sandel terms ‘credentialism’: prejudice against the uneducated and uncredentialed, a prejudice which many people who would be horrified by racism, sexism or homophobia, seem quite happy to express.
Technocracy
One feature of meritocratic hubris is that those who feel they have risen on the basis of their talents are prone to think that they know best and that anyone lower down the social scale who disagrees with them is simply wrong, their views not merely different but based on bad information and poor reasoning. I saw this often around the Brexit referendum, when many remainers seemed to take the position that no reasonable person in possession of the facts could possibly disagree with them. Many remainers, indeed, argued that the general public wasn’t sufficiently qualified even to vote on the issue (which raises the question of what they are qualified to vote on, given that all elections involve evaluating alternative approaches to highly complex issues). Sandel dismisses this ‘idea that we should all agree on the facts, as a pre-political baseline, and then proceed to debate our opinions and convictions’ calling it ‘a technocratic conceit’ and notes that ‘Political debate is often about how to identify and characterize the facts relevant to the controversy in question.’
For instance, presented with incontrovertible evidence that free trade and open borders have increased GDP, a worker whose share of GDP has steadily declined would not be unreasonable if she thought this particular fact was not the salient one. And this is the situation for a lot of people.
The market-driven version of globalization brought growing inequality. It also devalued national identities and allegiances. As goods and capital flowed freely across national borders, those who stood astride the global economy valorized cosmopolitan identities as a progressive, enlightened attitude compared to the narrow, tribal ways of protectionism, tribalism, and conflict. The real political divide, they argued, was no longer left versus right but open versus closed.
And this is at time when ‘the median income for working-age men… is less than it was four decades ago’ and most ‘income gains since the late 1970s have gone to the top 10%.’ But maybe uneducated people should just do as they’re told by those who know better and have admirably progressive views?
