In my previous blog post, I commented on a talk by Michael Sandel based on his book The Tyranny of Merit. I have now read the book itself. In the most insightful and (to me) novel parts he links the question of merit to a deeper discussion of justice, emphasizing that even talents (and presumably personal drives) are a result of luck, both as to inborn abilities and family position in the world. In other chapters, he also emphasizes that the students who are admitted into highly-rated colleges tend to view that success as due to nothing but their own achievements. He also repeatedly refers to the parallel that those who fail to do well in school and don’t get into college are likewise likely to accept that failure as their own fault.
Sandel goes into considerable detail about the misshaping of the young people who succeed in being admitted into the most selective colleges, but offers much less detail about the degree of anger (at the so-called elite) and its causes among the non-college educated. He also fails to note that some of this anger has a much longer history than the twentieth-century rise of meritocracy could account for: for instance, the town vs. gown battles that go back to the middle ages. In a certain sense, meritocracy itself has a long history, not through exams—except in the Chinese Confucian tradition—but more through the unusual, often self-identified leader, philosopher, interpreter of religion and the like. The biblical David, Socrates, Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and undoubtedly many thousands of others—along with probably hundreds of thousands of others, now completely unknown, “rose above their station,” which in many cases they themselves would have said was because they were singled out by God. They mostly didn’t have to impress admissions committees, submit a GPA or do well on some standardized test. And though they stood out, they didn’t necessarily “succeed” in a financial sense. But many or perhaps all of them did encounter resentment.
The way Sandel describes meritocracy fails to offer a good explanation of the level of resentments that led to Donald Trump’s rise. Blaming oneself for failure is not the key, though that does indeed happen. It partially explains—as Sandel dwells on—the rise in suicides and drug overdoses among the white working class in recent years. But resentment and self-blame are basically mutually distinct. If I blame myself for crossing against the light, say, I would be less resentful of a driver who almost hit me (and vice versa).
If I come to feel that the instigators and agents of the meritocratic system were unfair to begin with, and perhaps even had it in for me and my ilk from the word go, obviously resentment would be a far more likely reaction than self-blame. If I come to feel that the relatively small number of my school class who excelled somehow did so unfairly—and there are many possible reasons to adopt such feelings—again resentment can outweigh self-blame. If I come to feel that I am constantly being belittled, ignored, and denied my real worth by the establishment that relies on credentials like college graduation, again resentment will dominate—especially if resentment is promoted on social media or other forms of mass communication.
The Resentment of the “Un-educated”
This resentment focuses not just on a one-time failure on a key test that plays out continually in life, but rather a constantly renewed and often obviously misplaced lack of attention to a very large number of people and to their actual capacities and achievements. When even minor managers, for instance, are chosen from among college grads—no matter how mediocre—rather than from among highly-skilled, seasoned workers, how can it not feel like a snub that plays out daily? What makes that feel even worse is that management decisions that ignore available good advice challenge the very viability of the workplaces they affect, most directly threatening the ignored workers’ very way of life.
Sandel focuses mostly on very top schools. Most college graduates obviously do not come from elite institutions, don’t have particularly outstanding records, and quite possibly haven’t taken very many courses that are relevant to the work that is needed in most jobs available to them. Yet they are far too often the only candidates that lazy HR departments or the equivalent are willing to consider. This is perhaps the worst failure of meritocracy; it’s a very poor sieve of actual merit. (Interestingly, as NPR reported recently, a few companies including IBM have stated to realize they ought not to ignore the non-college educated in hiring for some jobs they previously had limited in that lazy way. They still represent a tiny minority, but one can hope it will grow.)
Further, the majority of rural or small-town workers or residents are far more likely to encounter the less-adept students from the less-selective colleges with the least real understanding of the world than they are the highly proficient—if, often still narrow — specialists who congregate in large cities or university environments.
Consider the now widely used epithet, “lib-tard.” Quite possibly, for many users of this loaded term, it partially comes from actual experience. They have likely encountered one or several “meritocrats” coming to perform some service that no one in town has the right credentials for—and yet the outsiders just don’t “get” aspects of the local customs or requirements that people who have long lived there have no trouble with.
Even if the outsider has learning and science and the like on their side in terms of objecting to some traditional way of doing something, the traditionalists can deny that standpoint on the basis that it is what they’ve always done, and in some light it has worked. “Book-learning” has long been reviled, after all. Educationists and meritocrats can be seen as in a broad plot against both what is taken as common sense and the sometimes actual wisdom of ordinary people.
Many years ago, as a first-year Stanford graduate student, I found myself in the common situation of starting as a teaching assistant with just an hour’s training as to how to teach. The widespread assumption was—and I think still is—that if you understand something well enough to pass a test you can teach it successfully. Even for students at a good college this notion of how to teach them may prove wildly insufficient. For those who for whatever reason didn’t excel at schooling or didn’t like school ever, perhaps starting in first grade, it is quite unlikely that even a well-qualified expert can do a good job of explaining why some new outlook or practice is needed. The attempt can easily turn into an insult.
Delving Further Into Resentment
Let us delve further into resentment. For most of us, at times, chagrin, anger, and the strength of (possibly distorted) memories combine to produce it. Once aroused, it tends to last, and while it does it influences how we perceive almost everything. If new experiences seem of a pattern with older ones, resentment can sharpen on subtleties that appear to wound repeatedly. For four-year-olds, quite often any sort of attention directed to any peer can feel unfair, even if it’s because of some gift or talent or virtue the other innocently reveals.
Perhaps for the majority, meritocracy in practice provides numerous channels that shape and hone and strengthen such resentments through years of attention and recognition not coming one’s way sufficiently.
One starts school, and the teacher from day one can represent the meritocracy in action—the outsider who calls into question not only what one knows and has so far achieved but the knowledge and expertise of one’s family and what one knows of one’s community that has been so solidly assumed to be right until now. A child will normally identify with even a dysfunctional or abusive early environment, not to mention a perfectly loving but somehow ignorant one. Any fellow students singled out for praise or preferment, however subtly, can be resented too.
As such patterns repeat and repeat, year after year, what prevents resentment from growing? Possibly a sufficiently loving home and friends, great indifference to the official scholastic system of rewards, or a strengthening focus on interests outside school would overpower that. Or else a nearly saintly personality.
Also, the different resentments as life goes on don’t necessarily cohere; one can simply have many resentments, each with its own object. On any given day, other emotions might win out against such particularized resentments, leaving them in the back of the mind. But then something can come along that makes all or most of the resentments suddenly unite against: “the elite;” “the Democrats;” “the liberals;” “the lib-tards;” the government; “the outsiders;” or whatever experts seem to be offering the strongest challenges to anything one cherishes. Or the sum of resentments can crystallize against those one used to be able to feel superior to but that liberals and such seem to want to treat better—anyone of a “race” other than white; foreigners, especially those from countries one once could look down on; the disabled; the sexually different, or perhaps just women as a group.
It should go without saying that mostly the members of groups that suffer from revitalized but long-standing prejudices have not benefitted at all from meritocracy. The myth of it emphasizes—as Sandel makes clear enough—that being downtrodden is one’s own fault. But it is true that those who have benefitted from meritocracy have more likely learned of injustice to racial minorities and other such groups than of any mistreatment or ignoring of white workers. And those racial injustices on the whole are of course actually greater than what many white workers feel entitled to resent. (And minority resentments are real too.)
Any Solutions???
Like many books pointing out a problem—or rather a set of interconnected problems—Sandel’s is somewhat light on possible solutions. He spends perhaps too much of the book emphasizing that Democratic Presidents have supported meritocracy over and over, while ignoring the plight of those who are not considered “meritorious”—i.e., didn’t enter or at least didn’t graduate from college.
Certain concepts and terms he accepts as basically justified without enough analysis, such as the value of “hard work” and “the real economy” as if these in themselves were not problematic. (He contrasts the “real economy” with the financial sector, and I tend to agree that the financial sector doesn’t do anything good for most people; but does the so-called real economy? To take a random example, does breeding and showing Lhasa Apso dogs increase the common good? Or being a professional tournament golfer? Or making fancy jewelry? Or selling expensive watches? Or creating advertisements? Is the whole process of constantly encouraging new desires and then meeting them what the common good requires? I think in fact that all that Sandel could say is that people have different wants and working to fill them is somehow positive, but in reality he would not strongly defend many of these examples.
Perhaps a more important failing is his tacit acceptance of the common notion that “success” means financial success, such as a good income. Indeed, the repeated “wisdom” is that a good college degree is important because it will yield (on average of course) a much higher income than a high school diploma alone will offer. The idea that education would deepen one’s understandings in more profound ways is entirely left out of that now commonsense idea.
As a Harvard student about 60 years ago, I was always amused by the words over one of the gates of Harvard Yard: “Enter to Grow in Wisdom.” I even satirically adopted the phrase to welcome whoever knocked on my door in Kirkland House. One friend made an equally jocular sign to be seen when leaving my room: “Depart to Decline in Wisdom.” The actual sign on the inside of the Yard gate I was quoting was quite different: “Depart to Serve Your Country and Mankind.” The two mottos on the gate said nothing about success; nothing about income; indeed, nothing even about knowledge or technical skills. That sense of education is pretty much gone, at least in political or policy circles. Difficult as it is to imagine how to do it, I suspect that seriously restoring such ideas to the forefront would help heal the chasm that is now tearing western-type societies apart.
While I suspect that many who have adopted the resentful tone of true Trump followers can never be assuaged , if we ever want to pull the nation partly together again, we need to disown a great deal of the notions that make up and support current meritocracy. I hope to discuss more of how to do that in a later post.
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