In a review in The New Yorker in 2019 of two books on the wrongs and rights of meritocracy (especially the wrongs, needless to say), Louis Menand defines the word handily: ‘The term “meritocracy” was invented in the nineteen-fifties with a satirical intent that has now mostly been lost. “Merit” was originally defined as “I.Q. plus effort,” but it has evolved to stand for a somewhat ineffable combination of cognitive abilities, extracurricular talents, and socially valuable personal qualities, like leadership and civic-mindedness.’
The word meritocracy appears to have been with us forever, but it came into existence rather late, and the satirical intent of the word has largely disappeared indeed. In recent years, hundreds if not thousands of articles and books have been written about the failures of meritocracy, its perverse side effects, and the dangers of continued belief in meritocracy as a means to a better society. I can testify that I was unable to detect any attempt at humor or satire in the articles and books that I have read about this subject. It seems that Nietzschean laughter, the ability to be redeemed by a certain laughter, is not highly appreciated, perhaps out of fear to be misunderstood. It’s unclear if it was ever really appreciated except for by an initiated few.
When we talk about meritocracy, sooner or later, and more often sooner, we talk about money. Money is serious business, and when we talk about money we are not supposed to laugh.
One author, Daniel Markovits, a Professor of Law at Yale University, in his book The Meritocracy Trap (2019) suggests that most ills in American society stem from the fact that the country lives under the yoke of meritocracy and its structural failings. It’s not so much that meritocracy is a system that derailed, but that we built and have believed in a system that could only derail. This assertion reminded me of a discussion about communism a couple of decades ago. Should we solely blame Stalin for the mass killings in the Soviet Union, or was it the communist ideology itself that sooner or later would inevitably produce concentration camps and a police state?
Sometime between the nineteen-fifties and today something changed. Our expectations of achieving a just society and our vision of this society have been heavily influenced by the civil rights revolution. Every revolution, including the civil rights revolution, produces a counterrevolution, and many aspects of the culture wars that today are being fought in the US (and to a lesser degree also in Europe) cannot be understood without a solid understanding of the civil rights revolution of the fifties and sixties.
Despite some serious and some less serious attempts at counterrevolution, many beliefs and ideas that were avant-garde 60 or 70 years ago have become mainstream. To name just one example, the acceptance of gay marriage.
But avant-garde opinions that became mainstream have fanned the flames of the culture wars. In every country in the world, there are people who are extremely unhappy with changes they feel are being forced upon them. This is especially true for the US, where religion has a more prominent status than in Europe. Religion often, though not always, plays a central role in this unhappiness, although contempt for many aspects of modernity can be found in various groups and subcultures.
Modernity is an extremely vague term, which descended upon us in the late eighteenth century, and the term modernity is here to stay. Despite the quick rise and slow fall of postmodernism in the last decades of the 20th century, we are still surrounded by modernity. I would say that the making of the middle class and middle-class culture in the nineteenth century has a central place in this thing called modernity. How can we talk about meritocracy without talking about the middle class and middle-class culture?
Counterculture, one of middle class culture’s strategies to deal with its discontents, is not something that is by definition progressive or a strategy that belongs to groups and individuals who could be labeled leftists.
There exists nowadays a nostalgic counterculture that is not only unhappy with the legalization of abortion but also with the main tenet of meritocracy: the belief that everybody should be able to join the competition. Quite a few people will dislike the use of the word ‘competition’ in this context, if only because outcomes in any competition can be undesirable. But if we go back to what meritocracy is, a society where merit (roughly IQ plus effort) is rewarded, where merit should play a decisive role, we must conclude that meritocracy has never been an attempt to restrain competition. There exists a gray zone between social Darwinism and the belief that unconditional solidarity and equality can be forced upon mankind. And most people most of the time operate in this gray zone.
The idea that the competition should be open to all, according to meritocratic rule, even today makes some people feel extremely uncomfortable. The debate about migration, which is at the center of most European debates since 2001, is in essence a debate about meritocracy, about the question of who can join the competition and who can not. Condescending remarks about migrants—that they will be dependent on social security forever, or worse, will turn out to be an enemy of the society they very much wanted to join—are in my opinion merely a different way of saying: we don’t want our children to compete with your children in school, we don’t want to compete with you for housing, work, or social security. Stay where you are, engage in your local competition, and leave us alone.
If you examine certain stereotypes about Italian immigrants in late 19th century America, you will see that they are remarkably similar to European stereotypes of contemporary migrants from Africa and the Middle East. There are always other newcomers to fear, but fear itself is always present. Behind all these prejudices there is the old suspicion that one’s own IQ and effort might not be good enough to secure a good standard of life. In other words, we are talking about middle-class fear. (I don’t use the word middle class condescendingly; we are all lower or higher middle class. Especially in Western Europe, the working class has mostly disappeared and the fact that aristocracy started to fade away more than two hundred years ago made the rise of the bourgeoisie and therefore meritocracy possible.)
Once upon a time, meritocracy looked like a giant step forward to a better society. It appeared to put an end to determinism; the location of your cradle was not necessarily a strong predictor of your future life.
The ugly truth is that if effort and intelligence are rewarded, in whatever way that intelligence is measured, there will still be winners and losers—or, if you detest the word loser, winners and not-so-much-winners, winners and not-winners, winners and those who gave up or were given up by others. Not too long ago, then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke of ‘deplorables’ – we know who she had in mind.
Let’s return to the civil rights revolution that took place about sixty years ago. On the one hand we see a somewhat religious, deepening nostalgia, an unwillingness to accept that culture and society are constantly changing and that you cannot live in a past that is partly imaginary. On the other hand it is unavoidable that when avant-garde opinions become mainstream, a new avant-garde will develop, with stronger demands and different, perhaps more severe criticism of society. A revolution will never end because its goals have been accomplished. Instead, it will fade out, or the counterrevolution will undo its spirit, and there is the old saying that every revolution eats its own children, which is often the case.
In the summer of 2021, Nicholas Lemann wrote an article in The New Yorker with the telling headline: Can affirmative action survive? In this article he discussed the famous unanimous declaration of the Supreme Court of the United States, in 1954, that legally segregated schools are unconstitutional.
Culture and society are changing constantly, but as Faulkner said, the past is extremely stubborn. We could go back to the French revolution or probably even further in time to explore the different meanings of the notion of equality. The United States Constitution, which was written around the same time that King Louis XVI and his wife, Queen Marie-Antoinette, were beheaded in France, states that certain truths are self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed with ‘certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’
It took two hundred years and many festering wounds to make it self-evident as well that quite a few things separate the theory of equality from bringing that theory into practice. The state had a role to play in removing obstacles, so that all citizens could pursue their happiness without being held back by different sorts of haplessness, not in the last place discrimination and what is now called institutional racism.
From the very beginning of the civil rights revolution, education was at the center of the fight, in particular elite education—in other words, universities. Who was allowed to go to which university? This was and still is an existential question. Education became the road to a better quality of life, first and foremost in an economic sense.
After all, as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat put it, at the universities ‘a ruling class is being shaped.’ And because universities (some universities more than others) tend to produce the ruling class, ‘diversity’ becomes an important issue. If the ruling class consists of just one segment of society, how can we expect this class to take into consideration the interest of the entire population?
We have reached the conclusion that in order to rule effectively, the ruling class must be viewed by large parts of the population as representative of the overall population. The same is true for certain institutions. For example, it can be dangerous to exclude important groups in a population from the army. One of the things that has contributed to making Afghanistan a failed state in the last two decades is that an important ethnic group, the Pashtun, have been immensely underrepresented in the Afghan National Army.
In the Netherlands, we can hear echoes of this debate: both the far-left and the far-right have complained that parliament poorly reflects the overall population, because MPs with a university degree (the edified elite) are overrepresented.
If you accept that universities produce the ruling class – and if you don’t accept this, what is the alternative? – this argument is slightly absurd. You could complain, and many do, that the ruling class consists mainly of white men. You could desire to dismantle the patriarchy, and many do. But to complain that your ruling class is overeducated is a bit like complaining that your dentist is not self-taught, but went to school solely in order to gain your trust, so that you would be willing to open your mouth in the dentist chair and let him do whatever he thinks is needed.
Society cannot function without trust as the default mode; where distrust becomes the default mode, something starts to eat away at the pillars of society. One of the more destructive side effects of 9/11 was exactly the rise of distrust in Western societies.
Of course, you need a license to set up a dentist practice; without such a license you would break the law. In one of my early novels, the main character starts working as a dentist without ever having gone to dental school. I was inspired, as is often the case, by certain real life events. Some twenty years ago, in southern Manhattan, a plumber (if I recall correctly) moonlighted as a dentist. After he had practiced this side job for a few years, a patient was injured by his dental actions and decided to sue him. The dentist ended up in prison. The scary part of this story is that it took so long for the fake dentist to get caught.
No license is needed to enter the world of politics, and that is a good thing. The public space—and the world of politics is a public space—should be open to everybody.
An important characteristic of a true democracy is not only that all or most of the adult citizens can vote, but also that all or most of the adult citizens can run for office.
Politics may be a profession (it probably is a business as well), but it should be a profession that is open to anyone. The fact that many American presidents went to elite universities and most MPs in the Netherlands have a university or college degree shows that there is a fundamental difference between the ruling class and mushrooms, which anyone can pick at will in the woods in the Fall. The ruling class is produced in certain places and at certain institutions. Which is not to say that by attending to a university, or even by attending an elite university, you automatically become a member of the ruling class. However, a university education drastically increases your chances to join the ruling class.
If we want to have a diverse ruling class, we should have more diversity at universities—that’s the underlying idea. But as Douthat rightly pointed out: ‘Elite institutions, by their very nature, are not a mass-opportunity system.’
If we want to expand opportunity for the masses, it’s doubtful whether we can achieve this goal by trying to get more and more people to get a university education. It’s not very healthy that in some families and in some circles not going to university is seen as a failure. I’m also not sure if the proper way to motivate elementary school children is to tell them that the less education they achieve, the less money they will make in their adult life.
It’s important to keep in mind that the basic argument to go to university is a purely economical one. Knowledge is talked about and produced in school as an investment: learn this now, and in ten years from now your annual income will be two thousand euros higher. If you want to live a decent middle-class life, if you want your children to play in their own garden, go to university. But as I mentioned before, even in societies where the demand for unskilled work or work that doesn’t require higher education is low we cannot expect that most or all children will get a university or college education. And I’m skeptical that most unskilled work will be done by robots—imagine them doing the jobs of nurses, waiters or manicurists. For the foreseeable future, the service industry is going to rely on human resources, and not on robotic resources.
Yes, researchers have found that the predictor of where children will end up in our educational system, how high they will climb in the tree, is to look at the degrees (or lack thereof) of their parents. In other words, social mobility is not what we want it to be, and this creates a class of people that appears to be more aristocratic than we would like it to be.
This problem is however not the true problem of meritocracy; there are ways to address it, for example by delaying when a child’s level of education is determined.
Diversity and equal opportunity are not necessarily the same thing. If in a certain society the majority of dentists are Asian or Jewish, whereas only a small part of the population is Asian or Jewish, this should not be regarded as a problem. I don’t believe that we should strive to achieve certain quotas for particular population groups at universities, within professions, or at companies.
We cannot and should not expect every subculture, ever segment of society to be a true mirror of that society. More generally, we should not put too much faith in how we divide mankind; our subdivisions are by nature arbitrary.
The fact that racism exists does not imply that the standards of racists should be taken more seriously than is absolutely necessary. And although we may all be middle class citizens, in one way or another, that doesn’t mean that we live in classless society. Even if we manage to create a perfect balance of diversity in our societies, we won’t have a classless society.
In the Netherlands, the myth of a classless society is so much part of the national DNA that people don’t like to talk about class. The avoidance of the topic of class also finds its origin in the pillarized society that the Netherlands used to be, before the power of the churches and old ideologies started to fade away. Religion and certain political beliefs created well-defined categories in Dutch society; everyone belonged to one of the many pillars. This provided people with their group identity and gave the Dutch permission to believe that class was something from the past.
But the past is haunting us, and the less time we spend studying the past, the more we will probably be haunted by it.
In Western democracies, the rise of nostalgic counterculture, often labeled ‘populism’, can be traced to a sentiment that goes back to the nineteenth century and to the beginning of the nation states in Europe. Large parts of the European population believed that the state was not acting in their best interests. They didn’t feel represented by the state, and the two supranational totalitarian movements of the twentieth century that grew out of developments in the nineteenth century (the creation of a working class, the rise of the bourgeoisie, the end of nobility) were a response to these sentiments. The wish to replace the old elite with a new one is nothing new, but you still end up with an elite. Of course, this doesn’t mean that there are never good reasons for replacing old elites.
In the last two decades we have witnessed here in the Netherlands, in the US and in many other countries the production and the politicization of the sentiment that the old elite is corrupt, incapable of making wise decisions, and that despite all their pious sentiments they are only interested in themselves and their personal bank accounts. More or less the same things were once said about the old aristocracy and, if we go back in time a little further, about the upper echelons of the Catholic Church. Protestantism could come into existence because the church was seen as corrupt and vulgar, a place for sinners, not for saints.
The attack against the old elite are often organized by men or women who themselves are part of the elite. Whether it’s Mr. Baudet here in the Netherlands, or Mr. Trump in the US. Nothing is more dangerous than a spiteful intellectual, and although it’s not easy to think of Mr. Trump as an intellectual, it’s clear that people can feel resentment if the class they want to enter or belong to doesn’t take them completely seriously despite their wealth and power. In other words, if a certain class has other values besides money and real estate, it’s difficult to buy your way into that class. It’s for good reasons that sociologists speak of intellectual capital, cultural capital, et cetera.
Whether you like the political parties and their leaders who want to drain the swamp (or whatever words they use to signal that they are willing to end the status quo with unconventional means) is less important here. What is important is that we can agree that the production of the ruling class is not going well. And the willingness to challenge the ruling class has increased after 2001.
Following the shock of two world wars the resulting desire was to avoid experiments that might end with bloodshed. This has changed. In many regions of the world, trust in institutions is at a low point and there seems to be little fear for unconventional experiments.
The civil rights revolution was less about using all possible means to end the status quo and to get rid of the elite as it was about implementing certain changes within existing power structures. In places where the revolution turned out extremely violent, as with the Red Army Faction in Germany, it quickly lost most of its popular support.
One of the leaders who is currently leaving the political stage and who is applauded for being an exceptional leader is Angela Merkel, who herself could be considered to be an outsider. How exceptional her career has been was emphasized recently in an article in the German weekly Die Zeit, in which Merkel without any sense of irony was celebrated as a good person. Most often, we want our leaders to be ruthless, we want them to be father figures who are there to protect us, to comfort us, especially in times of crisis. Whether the exception that is Angela Merkel implies that all problems would be solved if only we cast more votes for women, is questionable. I’d like to remind everyone that there will be a presidential election in France in 2022, and that Marine Le Pen is on the ballot. But Merkel is a good example that the ruling class is not impenetrable.
Of course, the ruling class does not only consist of the people we can vote for and who are highly visible in society; there is a case to be made that true power is invisible and discreet. But democracy is a highly symbolic process, and it’s unavoidable that we find ourselves focused on the visible part of the ruling class; the visible part of the political process.
Democracy may in theory be an open market of ideas. In reality, it’s more like a market of conscious and subconscious desires and longings—not in the last place a deeply rooted desire for powerful and protective parent figures.
These days, discussions about the ruling class usually consist of pejorative remarks, or discussions focused on particular people. Herman Tjeenk Willink, an elderly statesman in the Netherlands, recently remarked that vehement discussions about the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, who has been in office since 2010, are not helpful, because he is the product of a culture, not a person who has shaped that culture.
Rather than continuing to dream about a society without any hierarchies, we may be better advised to have a discussion about how we can produce a better ruling class. A side effect of avoiding this discussion is that there is no serious discussion about the legitimization of the ruling class.
Once upon a time, the king and queen were more or less the continuation of God with other means; just like the pope, they were not in need of any legitimization. Nowadays, we need other, less magical means to legitimize our ruling class. Ross Douthat discusses three ways in which this legitimization can be achieved. First of all, intergenerational continuity, which we nowadays consider unjust; we strive to minimize the degree to which privileges are inherited. Second, representation, which is the foundation of democracy: the people vote. (That political parties and the electorate tend to favor more highly educated politicians should once again not surprise us.) Third, aptitude, which brings us back to IQ plus effort.
The disappearance of the old aristocracy and the monarchies in nineteenth century Europe, combined with technological and industrial inventions, changed Europe and the rest of the world and brought a new class into existence. A class that had its own God: work. A class that was willing to worship labor as an idol. A class that wanted to hang on to the dream that if sufficient effort and talent was provided, everything was possible. Needless to say, there is not a single middle class, neither in the nineteenth century nor today, but all the different middle classes had something in common: the belief in work and its rewards—and in later days, also the belief in leisure.
Mass education, which truly started more than one hundred years ago, was above all simply an economic necessity. The need for skilled laborers was growing.
The invention of all the various middle classes meant that the image of man changed. No longer was man created by God in his own image, man was supposed to create himself; man turned out to be something that we now call a human resource. Man was his own field, his own factory, his own apple tree, and he should live long enough to bear enough fruit; no need to waste expensive human resources, especially when birth rates are low—as they currently are across all of Europe.
The French revolution may have been focused on the destruction of the old aristocracy and the age-old idea that all that certain people had to do to be an excellent human being was to be born. However, even if meritocracy works well, it will always result in the creation of a new aristocracy.
This was pointed out by the British sociologist and Baron of Dartington Michael Young (1915-2002) who in his slightly satirical book The rise of the meritocracy not only coined the word ‘meritocracy’ (for which unfortunately he was not given due credit in Louis Menand’s article) but who also provided quite a few objections against meritocracy that are still valid today.
Young wrote: ‘Being a member of the “lucky sperm club” confers no moral rights to advantage.’
In this day and age, we would be well advised to talk about ‘the lucky sperm and egg club’, but that’s a minor detail.
All the current-day talk about diversity, which as I have argued is to a certain degree necessary, is also a strategy to avoid the most painful questions.
Replacing one ruling class with another is not always morally just or helpful. What to do with members of the less lucky sperm and egg club, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, sexual preference and gender?
I don’t believe that we can or should predict the future of human beings based on their genetic material. The fact that the future is open, is not pre-determined, enables us to be free and therefore moral beings. The fact that life is by and large a casino is not only a tragedy, it also liberates us. And a person’s environment plays an important role as well; we are not completely helpless victims of our own genes and those of others. Also, the question of whether you belong to the lucky sperm club is context dependent. You need different qualities and abilities to succeed at a university than to survive as an inmate in a concentration camp. Likewise, flexibility and the willingness to adjust are often but not always helpful predispositions.
I don’t have an easy solution at hand, my aim today was to identify and examine a problem. I would argue that more respect for the less lucky ones and adopting a less patronizing attitude toward other people might help.
Less welfare state is not the solution, but more welfare state is not always better. The conviction that the state can correct all misery caused by the casino of life is a painful and dangerous illusion. At best, the state can help to avoid the most cruel instances of misery. But it’s important to remember that all states, some more than others, have caused misery and have crushed citizens and non-citizens alike.
My father used to say that people who are considered stupid and dumb also have a story to tell and its worth listening to them.
This may provide a good starting point.
But to get started, we must realize that education itself is not only a solution. It’s inherently part of the problem as well, because education also creates inequality. It rewards members of the lucky sperm and egg club, and as Michael Young pointed out sixty years ago, there is no moral ground for these rewards.
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Dit boek is wellicht nog interessant ihkv het TU/e project:
"In Oude en nieuwe ongelijkheid verhaalt Kees Vuyk over goede intenties en slechte uitkomsten. De belofte van gelijke kansen gaat steeds holler klinken. Wat heb je aan gelijke kansen als je weet dat je niet in staat bent en nooit in staat zult zijn om ze te benutten, en je kinderen evenmin? Vuyk laat zien dat er, ondanks alle goede bedoelingen, in onze egalitaire samenleving een nieuwe vorm van ongelijkheid is ontstaan. Hij toont wat deze nieuwe ongelijkheid behelst, hoe ze is ontstaan en exploreert mogelijke oplossingen. Hoe bestrijden we ongelijkheid wél?"