A claim we have disputed here recently: meritocracy makes those at the top into particularly insufferable assholes. Sayeth a tenured Harvard professor:
Meritocracies also produce morally unattractive attitudes among those who make it to the top. The more we believe that our success is our own doing, the less likely we are to feel indebted to, and therefore obligated to, our fellow citizens. The relentless emphasis on rising and striving encourages the winners to inhale too deeply of their success, and to look down on those who lack meritocratic credentials. These attitudes accompanied the market-driven globalization of the last 40 years. Those who reaped the bounty of outsourcing, free-trade agreements, new technologies and the deregulation of finance came to believe that they had done it all on their own, that their winnings were therefore their due. Meritocratic hubris and the resentment it provokes are at the heart of the populist backlash against elites.
Agnes Callard put the claim up for debate on Twitter and got this response from a tenured Yale professor:
I know you are heterodox, but "those who *reach* the top are quite generous and philanthropic" - my god. This sounds like you are trying to praise some wealthy donors.
A remarkable self-own. The idea that the only winners of the meritocracy would be anyone but me, the poor, humble, unstintingly benevolent Ivy League Professor, is an amazing form of the very hubris these people are ostensibly crusading against, the hubris of total obliviousness.
Given then that the social order which encourages competition for places at the top is corrupt and corrupting (but not corrupting of me!), we must consider a "reconfiguration" of that order, which "requires deliberating as democratic citizens about what constitutes a contribution to the common good, and how such contributions should be rewarded — without assuming that markets can decide these questions on their own." This open-ended deliberation will have us asking,
"For example, should we consider a federal wage subsidy to ensure that workers can earn enough to support thriving families, neighborhoods and communities? Should we bolster the dignity of work by shifting the burden of taxation from payroll taxes to taxes on financial transactions, wealth and carbon? Should we reconsider our current policy of taxing income from labor at a higher rate than capital gains? Should we encourage the domestic manufacture of certain goods — beginning with surgical masks, medical gear and pharmaceuticals — rather than promoting outsourcing to low-wage countries?"
Although Sandel is a democrat and thus necessarily committed to the common good of open democratic deliberation on all of these questions, it does strike me that he has already answered them all in the affirmative, on behalf of the common good, of course. No elitism about that though, just common sense.
Look, it's possible that the anti-meritocratic and anti-competitive posture of so much of the enlightened academy is really grounded in academics' own experience of the rottenness of their paths to success, their skepticism that the system that produced them is producing good leaders for our regime, and their conviction that therefore, they are necessarily part of the problem. But given these kinds of arguments, it's not a very plausible conclusion. When you read stuff like this, the conclusion that the elites now turning against meritocracy are just people who've gotten theirs and now want to pull up the ladder behind them so that they don't have to face any further competition is much more plausible.
That's an accusation of bad faith, of course, and I don't think Sandel or even that Yale dude are really arguing in bad faith. They don't seem to see, or want to see, that the meritocracy implicates them, and that dismantling it means dismantling their own careers and positions. Somehow, this final conclusion has to be avoidable, maybe by the very act of taking a stand against the meritocracy now, so that when the dismantling goes down, they will be personally spared for their precocious right-thinking. That's arguing in confusion and contradiction rather than bad faith, but the result is just the same.