The News: The Mysteries of the Post-Meritocracy

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

At this point, the critique of meritocracy is sufficiently established and mainstream that even people who believe in meritocracy or who administer procedures that have meritocratic precepts embedded inside of them have generally learned to keep quiet about it.

The basic points of the critique are:

1. Existing hierarchies in every line of business or activity that you can imagine are very clearly not meritocratic, many decades after meritocracy supposedly became the guiding principle of hierarchy: the people at the top, the people on the way up, are by no means the best, the most capable, the brightest, the most imaginative, the most talented. Or even the most driven or ambitious. Instead, they are often conferred advantages by social status and privilege that precedes their entry into a specific hierarchical arena. Sometimes narrowly and specifically the advantages of family connections, sometimes more generally the advantages of general class background or membership in a privileged social category.

2. That even when prior privileges and status do not determine outcomes in workplace and social hierarchies, dumb luck often plays a role, e.g., meritocratic tests are often applied inconsistently or ignored in evaluating someone seeking to move up in the world. Merit is a promotional narrative conferred after the fact on luck to make it seem deserving.

3. Equally, once people achieve a particular place in the hierarchy, they are no longer held accountable to the meritocratic tests supposedly used to measure their fitness for that place. You can only fail up in many hierarchies once you have ascended far enough. Drive a promising company into the ground with erratic, grandiose and undisciplined behavior? Don’t worry! A few years later, you’ll be offered more millions by venture capitalists to start a new company.

4. That “tournament economies” where hierarchies have been built to dizzying heights that culminate in a sharp point at the top, such that only a handful of people reach those heights and the enormous financial and reputational awards they allow, are artificially constructed and maintained by the people on the top and those people whose livelihood depends on keeping the few at the top in their position. In reality, the distribution of accomplished talent and deep potential in almost any field of work or endeavor is far broader and could be organized in a much flatter and more equitable way in almost any field.

5. That the other implication of meritocracy is morally ugly, namely, that people who have been unlucky, who are stuck in structural poverty, who have mismatched their talents with a field of work because they had no opportunity to do otherwise, or are simply just basically decent, good, ordinary people with no specific skill that is valued in a particular labor market deserve to live under financially and socially precarious circumstances. All of that was bad enough under conditions where there was a broader middle-class and not as much extreme inequality. Under present conditions, where precarious circumstances afflict the vast majority of people in even the wealthiest liberal societies, the moral ugliness of meritocracy becomes something even more grotesque and intolerable.

I could go on, but I think the point is made. This critique of meritocracy is on some level identical to a wider critique of inequality and capitalism, but there is something about the bland rhetoric of conventionalized meritocracy as it appeared in the last quarter of the 20th Century that normalized doctrines whose previous manifestations were more obviously repulsive, say in the case of Social Darwinism. More people were for a long time comfortable with the premises of meritocratic social organization, across a wider span of institutions and situations.

All of that said, I’m about to say something that runs in the face of this critique, which is that for all that meritocracy is both a lie and a moral catastrophe, it may be better than a status quo where all the hierarchies remain intact but we are not even really pretending to have meritocratic training or standards any longer because it’s just too embarrassing to act as if we have done so.

I feel almost as if we are at that point, where legitimacy in some hierarchies no longer depends in any sense on presenting a record of accomplishment, a set of prior qualifications or capabilities, or a demonstration of competency. Indeed, in some contexts and by some standards of evaluation, brandishing those credentials is taken as disqualifying on some level, as a mark of class identification (which they factually often are) rather than ability to do the job.

Americans are unfortunately all too familiar with this shift in terms of national and regional political power in the last two decades, where meritocratic self-presentations have become increasingly a marker of the Democratic Party. Republicans who might be entitled to meritocratic narratives—DeSantis, Cruz and many others have Ivy League educations—increasingly omit or ignore those credentials in describing the reasons why they should have political power.

This is not fully true of the current leadership of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, but Boris Johnson paved a road in his political and professional life that is very similar and many of his colleagues have followed.

One result in both the US and UK context is that it’s increasingly hard to tell the difference between someone who has meritocratic credentials that they’re refusing to push forward—to the point of taking actions that are actively incompetent and out-of-step with the basic advice of experts simply to emphasize a distance from conventional meritocratic views—and someone who is ontologically an incompetent bottom-feeding scumbag who would never have been trusted with any position of high responsibility in any previous government or organization.

The thing about meritocracy, even as an ideology that covered over so many unfair and unjustifiable outcomes, was that it provided a way to talk about leaders or prominent people who plainly didn’t belong in the position of responsibility they were in and didn’t deserve the rewards that came with that position. Was that elitist? Did it also lead to snobbery against outsiders, arrivistes, and so on, while protecting establishment figures who were less qualified and less capable than the newcomers? Yes, absolutely. But at least the language of capability, qualification, competence, training, and talent were available as a judgment when leaders or celebrities or prominent people did something absolutely stupid. You could talk about the Peter Principle, someone promoted above their abilities. When someone was in over their head, you could trace how and when that happened, right down to the moment when they moved from a role they could handle to one they couldn’t.

More importantly, the language of merit and its accompanying conceptual apparatus—credentials, past performance, distinctive skills or talents—provided useful explanations about why leaders or prominent people might be doing what they were doing. You could look at a successful artist and tie them coherently to their training, to their mentors, to their patterns of association, to their institutional support, to interesting techniques or novel themes that seemed to come from the artist as an individual. You could look at a political leader and foreground them in a lineage, a faction, a series of issues, an ideology, a distinctive skill set, a particular triumph over a challenging circumstance.

I look at Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng right now and I think to myself, “I have no idea what they think they’re doing.” Truss’ past provides no real clues other than apparent opportunism. It provides no evidence of any merit in any sense, but also not of motivation. It seems Truss is cosplaying at being Thatcher but not in a way that indicates any real understanding of Thatcher as a leader or of the historical moment of her leadership. It’s tempting to just think “this is one more attempt to smash the piggy bank of British society and grab all the coins inside for distribution to the ultra-rich”, but it doesn’t even feel that intentional. It doesn’t feel that you can say, “Here is a person who is in over her head” because that’s her entire party. Arguably it’s most of the British political classes generally, Nicola Sturgeon and a meaningful subset of SNP and Labour leaders exempted.

It’s a fair amount of prominent business leaders, civic leaders, religious leaders, celebrities of various kinds, etc. on both sides of the Atlantic. We’ve gone from looking at people whose prominence gives the lie to meritocracy to giant collective globs of people whose comprehensive lack of merit makes us realize we are operating under completely different rules for the achievement of power, influence and wealth altogether. And that transition leaves us much less able to say, “This is why that prominent person is doing what they’re doing” and much less certain that such a person even knows or cares that what they’re doing is catastrophically ill-advised. Sometimes that might in fact be the only reason to do whatever that is: to be catastrophically ill-advised is taken by some segment of the public to be virtuous in its own right.

Image credit: "Liz Truss First Aston Martin DBX Export to US" by UK Prime Minister is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.