What's Become of the Common Good?
The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel (2020)
The idea—call it meritocracy—is intuitive enough. All else being equal, he who is best at what he does ought to be recognised for it. Let the most qualified person do his thing, let him keep all which he earns by the sweat of his brow, for he deserves it. Put aside for now if such a society of truly equal opportunity could ever exist. Even if we lived in one, argues Michael Sandel, it would not necessarily be a fair or just society.
It can be empowering to believe that success is a function of personal ability. We might feel encouraged to develop and apply our talents, confident we shall get what we deserve. Contrast this with a society of natural rank, where someone born into a particular caste or class can never really break out of it. A meritocracy permits and even encourages the most capable people to rise to the top. Seen in that light, it is also a way for a society to allocate prestige, wealth, and honour to its citizens.
In truth, personal effort is but one factor in a successful life. A successful person has to take the opportunities presented to him. He has to have opportunities to take. He needs direction from trusted authority figures—good parents, teachers, and mentors. Finally, he needs the luck of being born into a society that recognises and values what he does, and is willing to pay him for it.
Perhaps the most strident advocate for meritocracy in America was James Conant. President of Harvard from 1933 until 1953, he was troubled by the emergence of a hereditary Protestant upper-class situated around New England. He wanted to break it up via a system of educational merit. To that end, he promoted the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to evaluate student potential, rather than the recall of specific facts and figures. By tapping into the latent talents of all Americans, he envisioned university as a place where the best minds of a generation would come to acquire the skills necessary to administer a technological society.
It became higher education’s purpose to rake the “geniuses” from the “rubbish.” One sees the elitism laid bare in these words. Meritocracy was not founded on the idea that all people are equal. To the contrary, it accepted that some were better than others, and should be elevated to positions of influence and power on that basis. If talent were broadly dispersed throughout the general population, some would rise each generation and others fall, the two movements preventing the hereditary concentration of wealth and power.
Did Conant’s vision of meritocracy work? Since the 1970s, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has grown a hundred-fold: a CEO’s pay was 30 times that of his workers in 1970, while now it is over 300 times. And while the Ivy League is more diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity, the poor are less likely than ever to get a foot in the door. Meritocratic sorting turned university admissions into a kind of competition. The successful, aware of what was needed to win the race, were better positioned to maximise the educational and professional outcomes of their children, consolidating and passing on their privilege.
Those who don’t go to university, meanwhile, face diminished prospects, even outright contempt. In a particularly intriguing chapter entitled Credentialism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, Sandel draws on various studies in Europe and America which illustrate how the demographic most likely to be viewed in a negative light is the poorly educated. By moralising success and failure, meritocracy produced a sneering condescension among the highly-educated towards the lowly-educated: if everyone had the theoretical opportunity to succeed, not making it was a valid indictment on one’s intelligence, worth, and character. The corollary of the idea that winners deserve their success must be that losers deserve their failure.
From their structured childhoods and high-powered educations, the children of society’s most wealthy and influential glide comfortably into the halls of power. Their preferred form of governance is a benevolent, omnipotent technocracy that makes decisions on everyone’s behalf. Those from poor or uneducated backgrounds are now almost totally excluded from political representation, and discouraged from social, political, or collective action on their own behalf.
Ideas aren’t just true because they describe how the world works. In assenting to an idea, we begin to act upon its assumptions and implications. Meritocracy connects success with private talent and initiative. In doing so, it downplays luck and serendipity, the good fortune of having been born in these comfortable circumstances here rather than the abject poverty over there. The man who believes himself to be entirely self-made owes nothing to the society which enabled him to flourish. This is how meritocracy erodes the common good. It replaces a “thick” conception of the individual—man as the sum of his interpersonal relations—with a “thin” one—what Iris Murdoch described elsewhere as “the movement of an overtly choosing will.”
Though this book contains no explicit definition of the common good, we might interpolate one from this quote by Robert F. Kennedy, made during his 1968 run for President:
Fellowship, community, shared patriotism—these essential values of our civilization do not come from just buying and consuming goods together. [They come instead from] dignified employment at decent pay, the kind of employment that lets a man say to his family, to his country, and most important, to himself, “I helped build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures.” (212)
What’s being offered here is somewhat different from the usual equality of opportunity or outcome. It is focused less on the exact allocation of wealth and ability than the broad parity in competence and authority across all levels of society. Were America to acknowledge and respect that, then everyone would have a role to play in its “great public ventures”, understood in the broadest sense possible. The idea is not strictly egalitarian, but it is radically democratic in its call for mass participation. Sandel, contrasting it with distributive justice, calls it contributive justice; his student, Yascha Mounk, calls it “inclusive patriotism”.
Beneath contributive justice is a scepticism towards the market’s assignation of value to jobs and activities. Jobs can be poorly compensated relative to their overall societal importance:
The true value of our contribution cannot be measured by the wage we receive, for wages depend… on contingencies of supply and demand. The value of our contribution depends instead on the moral and civic importance of the ends our efforts serve. This involves an independent moral judgement that the labor market, however efficient, cannot provide. (209)
The gap between what a job pays, and what it actually contributes to society, was nowhere more apparent than during the Covid pandemic. As white-collar professionals transitioned into working from home, others, such as supermarket and maintenance workers, nurses, warehouse labourers, and delivery drivers, had to continue working. Despite receiving generally lower wages than white-collar workers, they had to put themselves at a higher risk of catching Covid, just so everyone else could have the goods and services necessary to stay comfortable.
That a society-in-hibernation could not function without certain key workers to keep the lights on should convince us that these jobs have a value beyond their pay. But what is it exactly that confers civic importance and psychological self-satisfaction upon some kinds of work, but not others? We could approach this question from many angles, but the Tyranny of Merit never touches upon it. This is a problem. Calls to recognise the dignity of work and the common good are appealing enough, but with no exploration of what dignified work in pursuit of the common good looks like, the substantive premises of this book feel curiously irrelevant to real-life. And though Sandel argues against using money as the common denominator of value, his solutions end up being a new set of financial nudges and incentives: wage subsidies and wealth and consumption taxes.
I think this book is too concerned with education and too concerned with the Ivy League. Sandel is a professor of philosophy at Harvard. He has seen meritocracy’s crony underbelly. While this positions him to give a meaningful critique of universities and their admissions systems, his focus on the best people in the best roles give his words an unreal insularity. How does the common good look for us middlebrows not currently locked away in the ivory tower, or who were never invited in the first place? What does a successful life look like, if it is not simply bought with a lot of money? And how are we to recognise and pursue the common good if we cannot even assert its definitive norms and values?