An Animated Michael Sandel Explains How Meritocracy Degrades Our Democracy

Imag­ine if gov­ern­ments and insti­tu­tions took their pol­i­cy direc­tives straight from George Orwell’s 1984 or Jonathan Swift’s “A Mod­est Pro­pos­al.” We might veer dis­tress­ing­ly close to many a lit­er­ary dystopia in these times, with duck­s­peak tak­ing over all the dis­course. But some lines—bans on think­ing or non-pro­cre­ative sex, or seri­ous­ly propos­ing to eat babies—have not yet been crossed.

When it comes, how­ev­er, to meritocracy—a term that orig­i­nat­ed in a 1958 satir­i­cal dystopi­an nov­el by British soci­ol­o­gist Michael Young—it can seem as if the polit­i­cal class had tak­en fic­tion as man­i­festo. Young him­self wrote in 2001, “much that was pre­dict­ed has already come about. It is high­ly unlike­ly the prime min­is­ter has read the book, but he has caught on to the word with­out real­iz­ing the dan­gers of what he is advo­cat­ing.”

In Young’s his­tor­i­cal analy­sis, what began as an alleged­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic impulse, a means of break­ing up hered­i­tary castes, became itself a way to solid­i­fy and entrench a rul­ing hier­ar­chy. “The new class has the means at hand,” wrote Young, “and large­ly under its con­trol, by which it repro­duces itself.” (Wealthy peo­ple brib­ing their chil­dren’s way into elite insti­tu­tions comes to mind.) Equal oppor­tu­ni­ty for those who work hard and play by the rules doesn’t actu­al­ly obtain in the real world, mer­i­toc­ra­cy’s crit­ics demonstrate—prominent among them the man who coined the term “mer­i­toc­ra­cy.”

One prob­lem, as Harvard’s Michael Sandel frames it in the short RSA ani­mat­ed video above, is an ancient one, char­ac­ter­ized by a very ancient word. “Mer­i­to­crat­ic hubris,” he says, “the ten­den­cy of win­ners to inhale too deeply of their suc­cess,” caus­es them to “for­get the luck and good for­tune that helped them on their way.” Acci­dents of birth are ignored in a hyper-indi­vid­u­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy that insists on nar­cis­sis­tic notions of self-made peo­ple and a just world (for them).

“The smug con­vic­tion that those on the top deserve their fate” comes with its inevitable corollary—“those on the bot­tom deserve theirs too,” no mat­ter the his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stances beyond their con­trol, and no mat­ter how hard they might work or how tal­ent­ed they may be. Mer­i­toc­ra­cy obvi­ates the idea, Sandel says, that “there but for the grace of God or acci­dents of for­tune go I,” which pro­mot­ed a healthy degree of humil­i­ty and an accep­tance of life’s con­tin­gency.

Sandel sees mer­i­to­crat­ic atti­tudes as cor­ro­sive to democ­ra­cy, describ­ing their effects in his upcom­ing book The Tyran­ny of Mer­it. Yale Law Pro­fes­sor Daniel Markovits, anoth­er ivy league aca­d­e­m­ic and heir to Michael Young’s cri­tique, has also just released a book (The Mer­i­toc­ra­cy Trap) decry­ing mer­i­toc­ra­cy. He describes the sys­tem as a “trap” in which “upward mobil­i­ty has become a fan­ta­sy, and the embat­tled mid­dle class­es are now more like­ly to sink into the work­ing poor than to rise into the pro­fes­sion­al elite.”

Markovitz, who holds two degrees from Yale and a doc­tor­ate from Oxford, admits at The Atlantic that most of his stu­dents “unnerv­ing­ly resem­ble my younger self: They are, over­whelm­ing­ly, prod­ucts of pro­fes­sion­al par­ents and high-class uni­ver­si­ties.” Once an advo­cate of the idea of mer­i­toc­ra­cy as a demo­c­ra­t­ic force, he now argues that its promis­es “exclude every­one out­side of a nar­row elite…. Hard­work­ing out­siders no longer enjoy gen­uine oppor­tu­ni­ty.”

Accord­ing to Michael Young, meritocracy’s tire­less first crit­ic and the­o­rist (he adapt­ed his satire from his 1955 dis­ser­ta­tion), “those judged to have mer­it of a par­tic­u­lar kind,” whether they tru­ly have it or not, always had the poten­tial, as he wrote in The Guardian, to “hard­en into a new social class with­out room in it for oth­ers.” A class that fur­ther dis­pos­sessed and dis­em­pow­ered those viewed as losers in the end­less rounds of com­pe­ti­tion for social worth.

Young died in 2002. We can only imag­ine what he would have made of the expo­nen­tial extremes of inequal­i­ty in 2019. A utopi­an social­ist and tire­less edu­ca­tor, he also became an MP in the House of Lords and a baron in 1978. Per­haps his new posi­tion gave him fur­ther van­tage to see how “with the com­ing of the mer­i­toc­ra­cy, the now lead­er­less mass­es were par­tial­ly dis­fran­chised; a time has gone by, more and more of them have been dis­en­gaged, and dis­af­fect­ed to the extent of not even both­er­ing to vote. They no longer have their own peo­ple to rep­re­sent them.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michael Sandel on the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Pod­cast Talks About the Lim­its of a Free Mar­ket Soci­ety

Michael Sandel’s Famous Har­vard Course on Jus­tice Launch­es as a MOOC on Tues­day

Free: Lis­ten to John Rawls’ Course on “Mod­ern Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy” (Record­ed at Har­vard, 1984)

Piketty’s Cap­i­tal in a Nut­shell

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness