“Meritocracy.” Until recently, I had barely seen that word in print. I’d never heard it in conversation. Now I see and hear it all the time. It’s the word of spontaneous choice for libertarians, conservatives, and the not-yet-extinct species of liberals who believe that people should be judged not by their gender or ethnicity but by what Martin Luther King called “the content of their character.” To the friends of meritocracy, it’s an environment governed by talents, virtues, education, equality of assessment, one’s just deserts — as opposed to affirmative action, DEI, equality of outcomes. But what does “the content of their character” really mean? What does “merit” really mean?
They can mean a lot of things — intelligence, training, moral values, plain old guts, and several other ingredients that can be mixed in a recipe for making the kind of men and women one would like to know or employ. But note that none of these things is necessarily related to the others. One can be a miserable coward and still be the world’s greatest expert on nuclear power. One can be a liar and a thief and still be a championship chess player. It is very possible that someone who became the president of a university because of race and gender preferences used in her behalf had vastly greater skills in some other field than any white guy you’ve ever known. And only a murderous fool would hire an airplane pilot because he had excellent social skills and a high moral character.
In truth, “merit” and “character” are aggregates of qualities that cannot be aggregated. They can be identified, individually, but who is appointed to judge whether they are present in you or me, or how many are present, or whether the effects of one of them may destroy the effects of the others? In a free society, the answer to the “who is to judge” question is — the individuals who have need of some particularly meritorious skill or diligence. If I am looking for a person with professional competence as a plumber, I may find an embodiment of that rare and valuable set of skills, and reward it, without any regard to the plumber’s other merits. If I am looking for a partner in life, I will try to identify a wide range of intellectual merits and valuable traits of character, but I probably won’t be preoccupied by skills in plumbing, engineering, salesmanship, “leadership,” or the use of a divining rod. This is the reality of merit and its appreciation; this is the normal course of assessment among people who are not crazy.
One can be a miserable coward and still be the world’s greatest expert on nuclear power. One can be a liar and a thief and still be a championship chess player.
The idea of “meritocracy” arises only when the question becomes what class of people is meritorious enough to be placed in power. Because that’s what “meritocracy” means. The “cracy” on the end of the word means “power” or “government” (Greek kratos), as in “democracy,” the power of the people, or “aristocracy,” the power of an hereditary elite. The suffix designates a class of rulers. In this way of thinking, when some podunk town hires a white person as city manager rather than a black person, because the white person is better at explaining the budget, what the town is really doing is recognizing his membership in a higher social class, a class of people who are so good and smart that they naturally deserve to preside and decide. A Harvard degree, however irrelevant it might be to the job, would be a virtual guarantee of employment. So would being “the smartest guy in the room,” or being the recipient of “countless professional rewards and honors” from fellow members of the meritocracy.
If this is the way things work — and they very often do — God help us.
I spent an enjoyable four decades as a professor and the head of a large university program. It never occurred to me that I was part of a meritocracy — nor should it have, for fear of my corruption by class feeling. I was hired because I knew something about intellectual history, could make it accessible to students, and wasn’t a total fool about managing and sticking up for my program. If my other “merits” — or, God forbid, my race or sexuality — had resulted in my being appointed to manage some other program, I would have made a fool of myself. I might have had good intentions, but I would not have known what I was doing. Literally would not have known.
The biggest fools I have seen in academic life have been people who see themselves as members of a meritorious class, which because of its vague and unsubstantiated virtues is empowered to run the world, and is bitterly disappointed and angry when it is not allowed to do so. Having swallowed the glib idea that “knowledge is power,” they demand the power they believe is rightfully theirs. This behavior is notable not only among academics but also among such monuments of merit as actors, “faith leaders,” and people possessed of inherited fortunes — meritocrats all. At least they can claim the merit of good intentions, and shouldn’t that beautiful form of merit be empowered?
The “merit” results from membership in a self-perpetuating class, determined by the value it always finds in itself. Once you’re in, you’re in, and you can smirk or sneer at everyone else.
Today, regrettably, the self-identified meritocracy has little actual reason for disappointment. It is running the world, or at any rate the political, academic, religious, and media parts of it. No white, male, heterosexual person who pushes DEI, affirmative action, woke, or any of the rest imagines that he himself could fail to survive a test by “merit.” Quite the contrary. The patronizing social ideas of this class are regarded, prima facie, as supremely meritorious. So far as I can understand them, the practices of DEI and “affirmative action” are devoted primarily to advancing people not because they are black or female but because of their ideological merit. This is why conservative, libertarian, and free-thinking “minorities” are never advantaged by these programs of advantage, and this is why white, heterosexual men are routinely advantaged. As I have repeatedly been told in conference, Mr. White Hetman should be given the job because he “supports the diversity goals.”
The specific goals and ideas vary dramatically over the years, but that’s all right; the “merit” results from membership in a self-perpetuating class, determined by the value it always finds in itself. Once you’re in, you’re in, and you can smirk or sneer at everyone else. In the humanities and social sciences, with which I am best acquainted, “merit” is largely institutional. Spread a hundred academic books and papers across a table, some of them produced by faculty at elite institutions, some by faculty at non-elite institutions, and some by people who have never been admitted even to those doors. Strip off the institutional tags; strip off all indications of the authors’ ethnicity and gender. It is inconceivable to me that anyone could, by reading these works, separate the products of the elite from the products of the working (or wannabe working) class, simply on the basis of intellectual quality. The difference is that the folks employed by the League of the Elite can be confident that their stuff will be pronounced meritorious, every time, merely by reason of their institutional affiliation, which is often, let me tell you, an accident of the search committee.
From the suffix “-cracy” comes the intolerable smugness that dominates public life in America. And it costs everyone money — lots of money. Do you know how much the heads of “major” colleges and universities make? It starts at a million a year, plus perks and payouts at retirement. No one would do those jobs for a penny less, right? Well, no . . . so here’s where the policy of “fairness” breaks down, and the politics of rewarding the caste takes over. The salaries and perks, the license not just to speak but to conduct perpetual moral lectures about any cause that marks your membership in the caste, begin with the assumption that you are uniquely qualified, on your merits, to earn a million or two a year, and to boss thousands of people around.
Yes, people of intellectual merit can be just that inebriated, just that dumb, and just that grasping, whenever their caste is granted power.
Essential to a free society is the idea that even when power is given for a good purpose, it is usually a subsidy to bad ones. Kids need parents, and parents need some kind of power, but that power is always a temptation. We should have no illusions about its tendency to misuse. How much more dangerous is the power given to a caste, even to a caste originating in real intellectual accomplishment! To the extent that experts are given power, they cease to be experts and become ignorant meddlers in other people’s lives. There are real scientific experts in this world, but it was real experts as well as quacks and phonies who went blotto with power during the covid affair. Yes, people of intellectual merit can be just that inebriated, just that dumb, and just that grasping, whenever their caste is granted power.
My advice to everyone who values fairness and freedom is to show that you do value them — and not just in actions, but in words. Don’t just walk the walk — talk the talk. Judge people’s qualifications — their “merits,” if you will — without respect to such irrelevancies as race and gender. But don’t claim that you’re acting on behalf of “meritocracy.” And if you hear other people claiming that our country was “built on meritocracy,” and isn’t it terrible that “the idea of meritocracy” is now being sullied or ignored, don’t sit there and nod your head. Tell them they’d better watch their language.
