The Tyranny of Merit review – What’s Become of the Common Good?
Tucked away in hallowed reading rooms, beneath paintings of esteemed alumni and wealthy donors, academics have been hard at work diagnosing what has gone wrong with liberalism. Almost all have identified the same bad humours – rampant markets, decaying institutions, a loss of moral fibre – but few have found the issue to lie in liberalism’s founding philosophy.
Michael J. Sandel, Harvard professor in political philosophy, has. “What if the real problem with meritocracy”, he writes in The Tyranny of Merit, “is not that we have failed to achieve it but that the ideal is flawed?”
In this provocative synthesis, Sandel argues that our pursuit of merit, as measured by academic achievement and financial success, is critical to understanding the political cataclysms of 2016 and the corrosion of our public life. Declining social mobility has created a new “meritocratic” aristocracy which dominates our top universities and reproduces its success in the economy through privilege and connexion. “More than a protest against immigrants and outsourcing, the populist complaint is about the tyranny of merit. And the complaint is justified.”
So far, so populist. Sandel’s compassion for the “losers” of the meritocratic order is refreshing. As politicians from Reagan to Obama talked about “rising”, wages among the middle class were stagnating, opportunities for social advancement outside the increasingly throttled education system were drying up, and the meritocratic project became a joke. Sandel points out that up to 94% of parliamentary representatives in Western Europe have university degrees, more reminiscent of nineteenth-century bourgeois democracy than of an open and classless society. Boris Johnson’s cabinet is two-thirds privately educated, and nearly half went to Oxbridge (are we only now facing the consequences?). Academic and financial success no longer feel attached to moral worth.
Sandel is strong on how our institutions and policies over the past forty years have made a mockery of the meritocratic project, from the flawed logic of SAT scores to the rise of “credentialism” which has undermined meritocratic education – “the soul-killing, resume-stuffing” regime that supposedly produces sensitive civic-minded elites. Rather, for Sandel, credentialism reflects and reproduces a deep personal insecurity, meritocratic hubris and corrosive attitude to social solidarity which reflects the decline in meaningful, dignified alternatives to the three-year degree.
Sandel’s more original provocative insight, however, comes from his understanding of the psychology of merit. Sandel is best known for his celebrated Harvard course on “Justice”. In Plato’s Republic, the foundation text for any discussion of justice, Plato suggests that the justice in the city can only be achieved through justice in the soul. The alignment of self and society re-emerges in discussions of justice time and again, from Gandhi to Fukuyama. Sandel shows that the idea of merit – that our fortunes are determined by our talents and hard-work – is as much a description of our self-perception as of the society we want to build. Sandel draws heavily on political rhetoric, raising one example – Reagan’s claim that “America is great because America is good” – to show how ideas of individual decency and moral will are embedded in the Western psyche, informing even foreign policy.
Sandel’s point here is that meritocracy corrodes the relationship between self and society by placing an unrealistic burden on individual responsibility. “The meritocratic argument is not mainly a sociological claim about the efficacy of effort” but “a moral claim about human agency and freedom” integral to the mythology of the self. But this mythology does not align well with reality. The temptation of the rich to claim moral superiority is one “we must constantly resist.” In politics, the liberal left’s claim of “progress” is implicitly moralistic, while decades of supposedly “value-free” technocratic governance, ignoring the opposition of social subordinates, reveals the moral monopoly of social elites to claims to the common good. And in our digitalised world, the constant arbitration of pride and envy – playing out on our social media feeds – is a daily reminder of the “tyranny of merit” which judges us according to our achievements.
Armed with the idea that meritocracy blinds us to the contingencies surrounding our successes and failures, Sandel thus sees meritocracy itself as an illusion which poisons our relationship with ourselves and each other. “Among those who land on top”, it engenders “a debilitating perfectionism, and a meritocratic hubris that struggles to conceal a fragile self-esteem”; at the bottom, “it imposes a demoralizing, even humiliating sense of failure.”
Trump’s victory could partly be attributed to his ability to tap into this humiliation. In abandoning the progressive rhetoric of aspiration and ambition, Trump allowed his followers to celebrate in their sub-par status. They were Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” and they liked it.
What, then, do we do with “merit”? Rather than try to perfect it, Sandel argues that we should move away from it. Certainly, we can start by measuring it better. The dignity of work should not be tied only to its financial reward. This is where the neoliberals went badly wrong, though Sandel points out that Friedrich Hayek – champion of free markets – did not want to link economic value with moral worth. Sandel suggests efforts to de-financialise the economy, including taxes on the increasingly detached machinations of financial analysts involved in high-frequency trading and the production of complex but socially unproductive financial instruments. It is a suggestion that may come across heavy-handed but Sandel is right to point out the discrepancy in social prestige and moral worth attributed to teachers and traders. The injustice of this was made clear in 2008, when bankers were bailed out at the expense of everyone else.
Above all, Sandel promotes the idea of a new social contract rooted in the “common good”. I am reminded here of the Beveridge Report’s “Five Giants”, the social ills which in the 1940s would be vanquished by the new welfare state. Sandel calls for a “broad equality of condition” in which all can engage in a “diffused culture of learning” supported by the return of a genuinely public space – not the moronic inferno of the internet. “The meritocratic conviction that people deserve whatever riches the market bestows on their talents makes solidarity an almost impossible project.” To Beveridge’s material ills, Sandel could add a sixth, psychological one – “dignity” – rooted in work and community.
What does this mean in practice? Sandel argues that, after an initial sorting phase, entrance to elite universities should be randomised among the most able applicants. This “treats merit as a threshold qualification, not an ideal to be maximised,” and removes the incentives toward credentialism which have corrupted the admissions system. The policy would recognise the arbitrariness involved in access to elite education, consoling the losers and checking the hubris of the winners.
This must be accompanied with the revival of alternate routes to social esteem. England has just started teaching T-levels – a new technical qualification designed to compete with A-levels. Is it the beginning of a revival of non-academic routes to excellence, which have been so impoverished in Britain?
The Tyranny of Merit follows the recent work of Daniel Kahneman and Malcolm Gladwell in revealing how the idea of the rational, sovereign individual is both a psychological and a sociological fallacy. Sandel takes this to its logical conclusion – we must directly criticise the founding myth of our society if we are to foster our communities again. Some of it sounds like simple consolation for the losers. But Sandel taps into something very real and damaging. On both sides of politics, meritocracy is being rejected – substituted by crass anti-elitism and postmodern group identities. I do not believe Sandel wants these alternatives to replace liberalism’s basic faith in the individual.
But individualism has arguably become its own form of dogma and must be reconnected to the community which actualises it. Ultimately “a lively sense of the contingency of our lot can inspire a certain humility,” and “points beyond the tyranny of merit toward a less rancorous, more generous public life.”