Kontextmaschine

14th March 2021

Link reblogged from On Not Living in the End Times with 111 notes

A Tyranny without Tyrants? - American Affairs Journal →

antoine-roquentin:

It would take several hundred years to fully realize the ruling claim that Locke heralded in the late seventeenth century. Michael Sandel appropriately identifies James Conant as a main protagonist of this transformation in the United States. As president of Harvard Uni­versity from 1933 to 1953, Conant was instrumental in shifting what was still a relatively staid and aristocratic institution, with admission largely determined by one’s family lineage, to a “meritocratic” insti­tution based upon aptitude and achievement. Sandel relies on Nicho­las Lemann’s masterful treatment of this subject in his 2000 book, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, which de­scribes how Harvard and Princeton were at the heart of a genuine regime change, one that hinged especially on the creation of the Scho­lastic Aptitude Test.⁴ No longer would admission to these prestigious institutions rest on one’s lineage and a nod from the headmaster of Choate. Rather, an increasingly national (and later, international) search for the “best and the brightest” was unleashed, demoting any purported benefit from birth or inheritance in favor of raw ability. Hence the creation and application of an objective test of aptitude.

On the one hand, Conant was fiercely committed to overturning the good old boys’ network; on the other, his successful efforts to remake Harvard were born not of an egalitarian aspiration, but to replace what he saw as a mediocre ruling class with Jefferson’s “natu­ral aristocracy.” In particular, Conant anticipated what would be­come the pressing demand for people adept at processing and manip­ulating information—those Robert Reich would later call “symbolic-analysts.”⁵ Harvard and other elite institutions were well placed to fill the post–World War II demands for scientists, engineers, and, more generally, people capable of guiding an increasingly capitalist, scien­tific, and technological society. Sandel cites John W. Gardner, author of Excellence (1961), who forthrightly acknowledged that modern so­ciety demanded a fierce and merciless sorting of the capable from the incompetent: “As education becomes increasingly effective in pulling the bright youngster to the top,” writes Gardner, “it becomes an increasingly rugged sorting-out process for everyone concerned… . The schools are the golden avenue of opportunity for able youngsters; but by the same token they are the arena in which less capable young­sters discover their limitations.”⁶

These sentiments were broadly shared as America rose to world power and engaged in a prolonged military-industrial competition with the Soviet Union. But over the course of the next fifty years, as the economic and social order increasingly rewarded the “able” and abandoned any commitments to shoring up the conditions of the meritocratic losers, the noble claims of the “meritocracy” began to ring hollow. The material as well as psychological inequalities ines­capably arising from the new system undermined its legitimacy.

Sandel is especially adept in cataloguing the array of economic, social, and psychological pathologies of a society based upon rule by “merit.” His insight into the distance between the claims that justify meritocracy and its real-world implications is particularly striking. Whatever the benefits of meritocracy in demolishing the aristocracy of the ancien régime, meritocracy has produced in turn a pervasive system of inequality and resulting instability. Those who achieve suc­cess in the merciless competition of the “sorting machine” believe their achievement to be the consequence of their own striving and effort, while disdaining those who have failed to rise. Correspondingly, those who have not ascended in the meritocratic order are prone to internalize their failure even as they resent the status and advantages of the “meritorious.” The result is a politically destabilizing “toxic brew of hubris and resentment” (118).

Sandel is among the few thinkers who warn fellow elites that the very system that has afforded them prestige, material comfort, and the tools to survive, and even thrive, amid economic and social instability has given rise to pervasive political discontent and lies at the root of the recent populist backlash against elites. He notes that liberal and center-left political parties—once the champions of the working class—have become the home of the meritocrats, and hence the party of the new aristocracy. Liberal-left parties have developed a self-serving obliviousness to their complicity in creating the threat to their own position.

Sandel is well positioned to observe the contortions that the meritocratic Left undertakes to avoid confrontation with its historic but now abandoned commitment to egalitarianism. As one might expect, Sandel is especially insightful in dismantling the egalitarian veil that many Left academics have donned to assuage their bad conscience, even as they blithely participate in and benefit from the meritocracy. That veil comes in the form of an attraction to the philosophy of John Rawls. Rawls not only spent much of his career at Harvard, but he is a favorite philosopher of the Ivy League set, and for good reason. Rawls’s signature work, A Theory of Justice, boils down to a proposal for differential equality that at once keeps the meritocracy in place while potentially blunting its inevitable inequalities. Rawls proposed that “the difference principle” would ensure that the least successful would nevertheless benefit from the gains of the successful, through transfers managed by the state. Rawls offered a more sophisticated, government-mandated version of Kennedy and Reagan’s mantra (ultimately copying Locke) that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Sandel identifies two significant problems with Rawls’s effort to justify a form of meritocracy that would nevertheless promote the common good. First, he notes, meritocracy is not merely a system that affords wealth to the winners and poverty to the losers. While there is a good deal of correspondence to wealth and poverty, meri­tocracy—as the name suggests—inevitably also accords distinction and prestige upon some, shame and a sense of failure upon others. A relatively low-paid professor possesses more social esteem than the well-remunerated salesman. Credentials quickly become markers of social distinction, and Sandel presses the point that Rawls ultimately ignores and even dismisses the way these social markers can and will manifest themselves in forms of condescension, resentment, and resulting political pathology. Moreover, Sandel notes that it is the very impetus to afford material compensation for the losers that will likely fuel condescension. “Questions of honor and recognition can­not be neatly separated from questions of distributive jus­tice,” he writes. “This is especially true when it turns out that patronizing attitudes toward the disadvantaged are implicit in the case for com­pensating them.”

When put into practice, the Rawlsian version of the meritocratic system ultimately impacts how redistribution is carried out. If someone has fallen behind in the race of life through no fault of their own, then according to Rawls’s scheme, their material circumstances should be improved to the stipulated differential of the best-off. The rub, however, lies in determining who is disadvantaged “through no fault of their own.” Perhaps it’s easy to agree that the person who has experienced bad luck—someone born into poor circumstances, or afforded deficient education, or debilitated by disease or injury—deserves compensation according to “the difference principle.” But what of the graduate of Harvard who simply didn’t apply himself or herself and now seeks aid? What of the person who has gambled away savings or an inheritance? Bet one’s life savings on a cryptocurrency that went bust? What of the person suffering from lung cancer be­cause he was a two-pack-a-day smoker? Or what about someone, in the most egregious case, who refuses to move away from a dying, rust belt city out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to place, or even simple lack of gumption?

Sandel writes that, “as with other forms of liberalism, luck egal­itarian philosophy begins by rejecting merit and desert as the basis of justice but ends by reasserting meritocratic attitudes and norms with a vengeance” (148). The impetus to distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving losers becomes inevitable. One hears echoes of just this ethos in the judgment of James Stimson, professor emeritus of political science at the University of North Carolina, who de­scribed working-class populists in the following terms:

When we observe the behavior of those who live in distressed areas, we are not observing the effect of economic decline on the working class, we are observing a highly selected group of people who faced economic adversity and choose to stay at home and accept it when others sought and found opportunity elsewhere… . [Those who are economically successful are] ambitious and confident in their abilities. Those who are fearful, conservative, in the social sense, and lack ambition stay and accept decline… . I don’t see them as once proud workers, now dispossessed, but rather as people of limited ambition who might have sought better opportunity elsewhere and did not. I see their social problems more as explanations of why they didn’t seek out opportunity when they might have than as the result of lost employment.⁷

In short, the Raymond Dawson Distinguished Bicentennial Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina judges that the locals have gotten what they deserve. If only everyone had moved to the Research Triangle….

In the end, Sandel flinches: in spite of accusing the new ruling order of “tyranny,” he fails to locate any tyrants. This silence on the meri­tocracy’s self-deception, in what is otherwise a singularly powerful critique of the pathologies of meritocracy, is telling. Sandel is remark­ably incurious about whether meritocrats’ justifications of their moral eminence might in fact shroud the deeper “will to power” one would expect to find among tyrants.

For instance, Sandel evinces a lack of suspicion when listing a string of dubious actions by the meritocrats, concluding simply that they “have not governed very well”—not that they have governed with malevolence. He cites a string of failures from 1980 to the present, includ­ing “stagnant wages for most workers, inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the 1920s, the Iraq War, a nineteen-year, incon­clusive war in Afghanistan, financial deregulation, the financial crisis of 2008,” and so forth (29). In each instance, however, these were not “failures” if you were a member of the meritocracy. Almost to a person, the ruling class benefited from these crises, or at the very least, were not harmed by their consequences, even as they collectively diminished the prospects for flourishing among the meritocracy’s losers. Sandel regards these outcomes as failed policies of otherwise well-intentioned leaders, rather than identifying them as the expected outcomes of a ruling class’s efforts to maintain its position.

one thing i’ve mentioned before is that college educated americans are much more likely than those with a lower education to believe in racism (here expressed as “Genetic differences contribute to income inequality between black and white people”) and yet much less likely to openly say it, even in fairly private settings. the college educated understand that such speech would get them punished, despite 40% of them (in the study at least) agreeing with it. why would such punishment be doled out in the midst of a group for whom such ideas are clearly attractive? the answer is that such racism conflicts with the meritocratic ideology that predominates on college campuses, an attitude that the american state felt was necessary to inculcate in the future state managerial class in the 30s so as to better compete with rival great powers like the soviet union, germany, japan, and the uk, and to maintain a world-spanning empire.