Against Merit (I think)

[Perhaps today's post is the product of my belief that given my skill-set, I have manged to over-achieve in my professional career.--ES]

I used to embrace an article of faith that all hiring and appointments should be based on defeasible and broadly construed meritocratic principles that may be bent for some other important principles (overcoming past discrimination, ensuring diversity for various reasons, etc.) I still think this would improve the actual societies we live in. But recently I have come to wonder if an ideal society that is fully meritocratic (a so-called meritocracy) would be worth having.

Before I get to my concern let me offer four, important qualifications: first, a meritocracy is compatible with some (even considerable) chance if, for example, it is also a market based society. (As even Hayek and Frank Knight taught, market outcomes always involve some chance.) Second, by raising concerns about merit, I do not mean to advocate for nepotism or for willful incompetence in the actual world. I am here exploring a feature of far-off, counter-factual ideal theory. While I am unfamiliar with a political theory that is fully grounded in embrace of merit, lots of theories appeal to meritocratic principles along the way (see Rawls here).* Third, here I am ignoring the debates over the many flawed proxies for merit (IQ, race, religion, gender, etc.) that rightly cause concern among many people of good will over the very idea of objective merit. (I am stipulating for the sake of argument that merit can be established and that the criteria/proxies are multi-dimensional, context sensitive, and sensible, etc.) Fourth, meritocratic decision procedures or rules that settle athletic or sports competitions are fine.** So, I do not object to a boxing referee saying 'may the best man win' (unless, perhaps, we should urge the referee to use 'person' instead of 'man').

But while fair play and our sense of fairness are important commitments in support of justice, we should not confuse the way we envision an ideal society with the norms that regulate a boxing match. I think the analogy between a boxing match and a meritocracy is not accidental. We care about meritocratic principles in zero-sum contexts: that is, in circumstances where there are winners and losers. Obviously, we do not always describe patterns of merited outcome in terms of wins/losses (or rankings), but it is a fairly common temptation to do so.

In a meritocratic situation, other people's advancement would be entirely fair and one's (relative or absolute) disadvantage fair, too. But would an entire meritocratic society be worth having, that is, flourishing, happy, content, inspiring, and politically stable? I have started to question this. While undoubtedly there are more psychologically galling things in life -- Nietzsche famously called attention to being the object of pity --, it is surely very annoying to be told that one deserved to lose. It is worse, I think, if one is told repeatedly and frequently by a whole society's morality and shared commitments (I hesitate to call it 'ideology') that the systematic pattern of outcomes in which one always end up on the losing side is morally just and due to your cognitive, physical, psychological, aesthetic (etc.) flaws, especially, perhaps, if it all seems true.

Thus, I worry that a meritocracy does not generate widespread contentment, but rather widespread frustration and anger (if not self-loathing). If that's right (big if--it turns on one's moral and empirical psychology), then a meritocracy, even if fair, would not be worth having as such. Maybe the bad-making features of meritocracy can be contained or eliminated, but perhaps we should be cautious when we rely on appeals to merit when we are thinking of structures of ideal society or ideal principles to live by. 

 

 

*This post was prompted by reflection on a recent discussion I had with Holly Lawford-Smith over her very interesting paper on the ethical demands of privilege. I should also thank Martin Van Hees for helping me think about the issues. (Neither should be blamed for my mistakes!)

**Perhaps they are also fine for areas of life where the difference between life and death turns on detectable differences in skill.

Comments

[Eric Enlow]

I also wonder whether meritocracies, when they truly convince new members of a society that they are chosen without any grace, have a difficult time generating loyalty to the society. Loyalty, in the sense I mean it, arises from gratitude and gratitude from a feeling that someone has been gracious, not giving only one's due.

This is not necessarily true in generally non-meritocratic contexts. Some meritocratic societies, if most others have declared to be anti-meritocratic, may generate loyalty for being meritocratic because there is a strong sense that it was gracious to be meritocratic. But one meritocracy among many equally meritocratic meritocracies generates no such gratitude for judging on the basis of merit. An honest judge among man corrupt ones is thanked for an impartial verdict, but among many impartial judges, an impartial verdict is received without feeling. It is felt to be simply one's due, as it is.

Meritocracies might fix this by considering loyalty a part of merit. That is, for example, they might consider themselves not only as being devoted to whatever function which the society has chosen but also to being a society, i.e. dependent on its members loyalty for its social existence. For example, a scientific-research society might consider its hires not only with reference to the merit of being an able researcher but also with reference to which researchers will continue the society by giving more than they are given.

If they do not do this, meritocracies also face the problem of discouraging loyalty. Loyal members of the society, persons who have gracious feelings to the society itself and not just capacity with respect to its function grow deeply discouraged when they are passed over in favor of someone with less loyalty and more talent. This is particularly true when the society has accepted the loyalty of a potential member, accepted some sacrifice, and then forwards another who has not displayed loyalty because they forward the function of the society.

My own sense of the evolution of most modern institutions is that they adopt a mode of purportedly rational decision-making that falsely ignores the truly rational consideration of the social bonds of the society and concentrates exclusively on the non-social function to which the society aims. A push to meritocracy is often led by a faction that wishes to ignore the sacrifices and loyalty of another faction, to leverage their superiority in forwarding the extrinsic goals of an institution to feast off the loyalty-based investments that others have made. This often leads to a brief flash of promoting the goals of the society, while the endowment of social loyalty is eaten away. When that is gone, the new "technically meritocratic" but disloyal faction is unwilling loyally to sacrifice and the long-term goals of the group die off completely. Thus, a truly rational decision about how to promote a social project must consider not only merit with respect to the extrinsic project but also merit with respect to maintaining the society itself, even at some cost to the extrinsic goal.

[Schliesser, Eric]

Eric, thank you for these fascinating comments. Yes, I agree that meritocratic values may generate some tension(s) with loyalty (although the absence of meritocratic values may do so, too.) I think you may underestimate the degree to which a push for meritocratic values springs from our noblest impulses -- you see it as more opportunistic, I fear, than I do --, but I agree with your sense that there are ways in which meritocratic values may undermine the loyalty to the group and that this may not always be a good thing. This is, indeed, one way to cash out my hunch that political stability and meritocracy may be in tension in a way that I had not quite reflected on.

[Eric Enlow]

No, I basically agree with you about the nobility of the goal. I expressed myself too broadly.

There is something to be said, too, about institutions that rightly are primarily based on loyalty, e.g., the family, versus others that are more properly meritocratic.

Traditional East Asian societies are very interesting in this regard with their cultural emphases on developing both very strong bonds of family loyalty and very strong civil systems purged of such loyalties in civil administration. The classical Chinese examination system, I have read, was vastly influential in developing ideas of meritocracy in the West. The missionaries coming back in the sixteenth or seventeenth century (?) reported on the anti-aristocratic, anti-familial, merit based opportunities for all, from the richest to the poorest, to attain high office by passing rigorous examinations open to all. This in turn inspired proposals for adopting similar systems in the West.

It may be one of the most influential of Europe's greatest cultural imports from the "East" aside from gunpowder.

[Pieter Bonte]

The qualms you voice here are very similar to the ones that prompted Michael Dunlop Young to coin the phrase 'meritocracy' to begin with, and he phrased the country as satire, as a belief system that ultimately leads into a dystopia where the ruling class actually _is_ objectively better and functionally more deserving of their high societal positions, having made their way up without any social privilege whatsoever, strictly because of their greater talent and capacity. The elites are thereby freed from any sense of undeservedness, and the lower classes are thereby stripped of any sense of injustice. They are equally stripped of any kind of excuses. They can no longer appeal to circumstances keeping them down: meritocracy forces them to openly face up to the fact that they are functionally inferior. This causes such smugness in the elites and such shame in the marginalised that a violent insurrection ensues, and the utopia of pure and perfected meritocracy gets torn asunder.

The key blind spot, which Dunlop could have stated more clearly, is that the very notion of 'meritocracy' serves as sheepskin for the actual wolf ethic that lies underneath it, which is what I've called _talentocracy_. The wrongheaded belief that constitutional luck can somehow justify pride and a sense of merit.

As Jefferson wrote to Adams, the core idea of the 'land of equal opportunity' that is America is not at all to overcome aristocracy. No, it is to _purify_ and rationalise aristocracy, an aristocracy that has widened up to the happenstance of the natural lottery and the possibility that specimens of superior stock may also be found among the huddled, unwashed masses. Schooling all equally and counteracting excessive disparities in family wealth was to serve the goal of creating a nation in which "the true, natural aristocracy" can rise unhindered to their highest ranks, commanding awe and respect from the less-endowed mediocre masses because their superiority will have stood the test of the competition of all against all.

[Schliesser, Eric]

Thank you, Peter. On Facebook, several commentators (Liam Kofi Bright, Lisa Maria Herzog) also noted that my qualms echo Young's original satire (which I plan to read soon). I am grateful, too, for you pointing me back to Jefferson's correspondence with Adams.
Where have you written about 'talentocracy?' I should say I am a bit skeptical of the effectiveness of the focus on luck, which, as I note in the original post, is undoubtedly a real phenomenon, in order to combat the ideology of merit.