Part I of this series looked at the original, pejorative meaning of the term “meritocracy” and the criticism directed at it by the term’s coiner, the English Baron Young of Dartington. What he meant by “meritocracy” might have been better labeled “sapientocracy”, rule by individuals of high natural intelligence. Part II examined the more recent, broader attack on a somewhat different notion of “meritocracy”. Progressive anti-meritocrats reject merit itself. It is unfair, they contend, to reward people for being “better on the merits” than others, because those merits ultimately derive from external circumstances, most notably the genes, upbringing and education passed on by successful fathers and mothers to their offspring. Worse yet, when preference is given to merit, competition ensues, blighting the lives of the competitors.
In this part, I wish to examine more closely one aspect of the progressive complaint. Once again, the anti-meritocratic spokesman is Daniel Markovits of Yale Law School, who has summarized his case in an interview with the keen teens of the web site Vox. As noted in the previous installment, Professor Markovits believes that parents who “spend enormous sums of money . . . on educating their children, on getting their children into prestigious kindergartens and high schools, on coaches and tutors and music teachers”, with the result that their kids “do better on the merits”, are morally indistinguishable from participants in the Varsity Blues scandal, where actors and hedge fund managers circumvented merit through outright bribery.
Professor Markovits doesn’t deny that the beneficiaries of a top-flight education possess the qualities that top-tier colleges are looking for. Why, then, is admitting them over applicants with fewer of those qualities unfair? Usually, we think that unfairness means evaluating people on the basis of irrelevant criteria. It is unfair for a teacher to give A’s to student brown nosers who don’t understand the material. It is unfair for an executive to promote his incompetent nephew. It is unfair for a movie producer to give leading roles to women who sleep with him.
Meritocracy, in the sense that progressives denounce, is the practice of refusing to take irrelevant factors into account. (That leaves much room to argue about what is, in fact, irrelevant and who should answer that question, but those are matters for another time.) From a utilitarian point of view, it’s hard to argue with giving preference to merit. As we saw in Part II, however, critics like Professor Markovits reject the utilitarian argument. They believe that society would be better off without the inordinate level of competition that meritocracy engenders. If one accepts that premise, one is left simply with the moral question: If it is not useful to prefer merit, is it nonetheless the morally superior option?
The instinctive response is that rewarding merit is right, indeed a tautology. The progressive counterargument can be found in Professor Markovits’s equation of education with bribery. The student whose superlative preparation for college has been arranged and paid for by his parents has, from the progressive point of view, done no more than the one whose father paid off the college admissions department. The “merit” belongs in each case not to the student but to his forebears, and their “merit” isn’t relevant to determining whether their children should be admitted to college.
That argument crucially assumes that the qualities instilled by the first student’s preparation don’t truly belong to him. It isn’t surprising that progressives would make that assumption. It underlies the common progressive idea that criminals aren’t responsible for their actions, because social conditions beyond their control formed their characters.
Ultimately, that line of argument denies that human beings exist as moral actors. We are the puppets of heredity and environment, who ridiculously believe that we (and others) are responsible for our own actions. The upshot is what C. S. Lewis described as “the abolition of man”.
Whether human do or do not have moral autonomy is not a question that is amenable to rational dispute, because it is an axiom rather than an inference. If we are puppets whose moral ideas are pulled by strings, our philosophical ideas are pulled in the same way. Presenting a finely crafted argument that those ideas are wrong is as futile as debating with an automobile that won’t start. Debate and persuasion are possible only among those who believe that other people are not puppets.
In arguments about “meritocracy”, as well as in many other spheres, the crucial cleavage today is between those who would and those who would not abolish man. We might want to think for a moment about what an abolitionist victory would mean. If reason is an illusion, the monsters that arise while it sleeps will be real – and vicious.
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