Spinning around the M-Word

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (2020) by celebrity
professor Michael J. Sandel presents weighty arguments for wholesale improvements of
American society. Though the title is misleading (see below), this is a smart, insightful
book. The author provides fact-based diagnoses of the growing inequality between our
highly educated leadership and professional castes and the hoi polloi left behind by
neoliberal globalization: a “diploma divide” as he terms it. Like other pundits and
academic critics, he delves into the causes and ramifications of decreased socioeconomic
mobility: the dominance of market values, oligarch capitalism, and modern finance
behemoths, and the sketchy, untoward ways selective colleges and universities have now
become consolidators of credentialed privilege for young adults busy becoming hoopjumping,
rule-following, rat-racing, networking, morally compromised entrepreneurs. We
are not led by a Talented Tenth; as Sandel puts it, “today’s meritocracy has hardened into
a hereditary aristocracy” (24). He’s especially sharp when it comes to providing historical
and cultural context for this situation, with lucid treatment of the Protestant work ethic,
concepts of fairness, contemporary political antagonisms, and “the American Dream.”
(As Sandel discusses in his conclusion, the writer James Truslow Adams, who coined the
phrase “the American dream” in 1931, considered the open-access Library of Congress
the material symbol of egalitarian democracy.) In addition, Sandel deftly exposes the
hubris and condescension of coastal elites and the effects of their attitudes on the
commonweal overall. He also offers trenchant critical analyses of the limits of
technocracy and the undemocratic rule of technocrats, with illustrative soundbites from
Robert F. Kennedy, President Barack Obama, and the like. As Sandel points out, we now
prize “smart” iGadgets more than smart people. To make things better, he proposes
moderate, incremental measures both tangible and philosophical to restore “the dignity of
work” (such as for those essential workers persevering with stoic determination during
the current pandemic), and a concomitant fairer income distribution. The fixes he
advocates would help sustain a healthy democratic and communitarian society in which
things that were actually beneficial were supported. It would be one that fairly
recompensed frontline healthcare providers or those who labor to grow fresh food and
bring it to our stores every day rather than lavishing inordinate sums on, say, social media
influencers or profiteering hedge fund arbitragers, part of the problem of rewards in a
consumerist economy.

Sandel, in fine, has written a serious, informative, thoughtful polemic aimed both
at addressing real issues straining the body politic and floating ways to make the
American experiment with representative government and the liberal, Enlightenment-era
tenets of its foundation work much better for all citizens: “contributive justice.” Yet he
shies away from the radical implications of his own progressive ideas. It seems,
apparently, that the holder of an endowed professorship at America’s oldest, richest,
second most prestigious university just can’t fathom his set, those at the very top, facing
revolutionary people’s tribunals, pitchforks and torches, reeducation camps, retributive
frontier score-settling, or otherwise being held, you know, accountable for their myriad
failures. (This erudite, intellectual tome, moreover, full of statistics and citations, will
presumably reach almost none of the beleaguered folk he most seeks to help.)

My biggest issue, however, is that this otherwise solid book is emphatically not
on merit per se. The understanding that some individuals are simply born with more
innate talent and drive, which the just state would do well to nourish and put to good use,
goes back to the classification of people in terms of medals in Plato’s Republic (in the
traditions of Western Civilization). That idea is mentioned only briefly in passing (77).
Sandel’s interesting and engaging contribution to legitimate political debate would then
better be described as an interrogation of the kinds of problems that result when we
operate under a façade of merit, rather than an honest grappling with the difficult,
controversial, uncomfortable questions that implementation of a system rewarding true
excellence in any given field would bring. It does, though, help make sense of cascading
catastrophes and fiascos wrought in recent decades by the government and the financial
sector, across educational institutions, and in other arenas that stem from a status quo in
which privilege, rather than skillfulness or aptitude, is favored. To paraphrase Cicero,
we’re now living in a fetid cesspool of a republic—more Hunger Games than City on the
Hill. A better title, then, would have been something like “The Sinking Ship of State: The
Post-Merit Turn in America Today.”

For a depiction of a utopia based on ability, you’d be best served by turning to the
realm of speculative fiction, e.g. the Thessaly trilogy imagineered by Jo Walton. It
consists of The Just City (2014), The Philosopher Kings (2015), and Necessity (2016).
Thessaly depicts city-states founded and ruled according to such legitimate neoplatonic
qualifications. It is, in myriad senses, golden.

Further Reading