Michael Sandel: Meritocracy, Credentials and the Rage that Brought Us Trump and the Proud Boys

On the left, less viciously, we have elite universities that have become engines for the production of inequality. All that woke posturing is the professoriate’s attempt to mask the fact that they work at finishing schools where more students often come from the top 1 percent of earners than from the bottom 60 percent. Their graduates flock to insular neighborhoods in and around New York, D.C., San Francisco and a few other cities, have little contact with the rest of America and make everybody else feel scorned and invisible.

--David Brooks

 Reading Michael Sandel's "The Tyranny of Merit" a glimmer of insight peaked through the fog of the last four years.

Sandel, a "rock star" professor of philosophy at Harvard in the department of government and politics wrestles with the idea of what is a just society and how the idea of a meritocracy and all that goes with that, actually translates into injustice and justifies the vast inequalities we are now seeing in the United States with the top 400 families owning more wealth than the bottom 80% of the country.

How, in other words, can we justify so few owning so much and why should the government, in the interest of the common good, the greatest good for the greatest number not simply seize a sizable part of that wealth and redistribute it to the rest of the population--as it in fact always had done since 1913, when the 16th amendment, creating the income tax was passed?

Sandel exhaustively documents instances in which American politicians, including President Obama and President Clinton exhort the nation to create mechanisms which more than allow, but promulgate opportunity for every citizen to "rise" to the highest level to which their talents and their desires and motivation can bring them.

This sort of talk has been the "liberal" response to conservatives who say that welfare rewards lazy people who do not want to work, who want to freeload off a system which pays them to stay home and watch TV.

Sandel cannot help but explore the different arguments from the different philosophers, going back to Aristotle, and to tease out anything useful if you want to argue with Republicans or your neighbors today can be tedious, but if you've watched his youtube lectures at Harvard, it can be fun.

Basically, he says the idea that any American has pulled himself up by his bootstraps or should have is an exercise in self deception, in the sense that we all function in a very complex and connected system. There are some folks who have no bootstraps to pull and others who were born, if not on third base, at least on second and think they have hit a triple.

In fact that meme is one of the few useful ripostes to the "I did it on my own" braggadocio thing.

The idea that merit should be the guiding light to award glittering prizes gets a thorough scrubbing, beginning with the idea that talent is not a thing which a person actually achieves by trying. Michael Phelps had to work very hard to win his Olympic gold medals in swimming, but he has flippers for hands and feet and he is very tall and his "talent" which was necessary if not sufficient for success was not the result of his trying harder, but from the stuff he got genetically. As far as swimming goes, he got superior genes and exploited that for gain. But he never could have profited from that were it not for a huge commercial enterprise, the Olympics Inc, which provided venues, advertising, TV coverage, opportunities for endorsements, sponsorships. He did nothing to build any of that; he simply was able to exploit what others built for him.

Then there is the idea that people are rewarded for their value to society, that their labors simply have monetary value and should be reward whether or not they are virtuous people; they have something to sell in the environment which rewards it and so they deserve their wealth because they've provided what was valued. Walter White in "Breaking Bad" realizes he gets paid very little for being a good high school science teacher but he can make the world's best methamphetamine and so he does that to sell on the marketplace, which values his product because laws making it illegal make it scarce and valuable. 

Does Walter White "deserve" his wealth? Well, in one sense he does. But because it's been declared illegal, he is undeserving.

Does the hedge fund manager "deserve" his worth?

Terry Rodgers

Doctors, who have been put through a grinder of competition for scarce medical school spots work very hard to get into school and then work hard to get internships, fellowships, to do be trained to be expert surgeons and physicians. Surely, they "deserve" their financial rewards (which are getting more and more diminished.) But, then again, most of them started on second base in the competition to get into medical school in the first place. 

Lawyers who get paid $300,000 a year do work long hours. Do they "deserve" that wealth? They work no harder or longer than electricians, plumbers or HVAC repairmen.

Oh, we are told but the competition to get into top law schools is more difficult than for electrician school. But why should that matter, if 10 years after training is done both electrician and lawyer and doctor work equally hard?

Why should an accountant get paid more than a plumber?

And why should Jeff Bezos, who did not invent the internet and who does not deliver any packages get to keep the money the American financial and economic system keeps creating for him?

The problem with meritocracy is the myths built into it.

Oh, he was a Rhodes scholar. Oh, he got into Harvard Law. She got into Harvard medical school. She won a Nobel prize.  All of them worked very hard and got rewarded, but that does not mean they should be able to keep every cent they make.

Playing by the rules. Well, who made the rules?

Income tax rates during the Eisenhower Republican years were 90%. Our country was not "socialistic."  Did most Americans think our government was "re distributing" wealth?

Why do Americans who have good health care on their union plans not want the same for other Americans? Well, I don't mind if everyone gets as good coverage as me, but I don't want to lose mine.  Why do you think the government is determined to make your coverage worse? Why does the Dane trust his government when the American does not?

Well, look at Denmark--and Norway, Sweden and Finland. Until recently these were all white countries each with its own distinctive language spoken by only about 6 million people each. They are more like large family groups than multiracial, multiethnic America. 

Sandel insists we should see ourselves, as Americans, as a community. Fact is, when we were at war, in the Second World War, we came close to that. We were all in it together. But not even in the Civil War was that true. Surely, not since. Those who went off and fough, "for their countries" were "suckers" as Mr. Trump reminds us; Sonny Corleone's sentiments exactly.

We justify our disregard for our neighbors in moralistic terms: Well, I work harder. I deserve it more. 

The winners in America have hubris: they are proud and they think they were both chosen and favored; they worked hard to deserve whatever they've got. The losers are humilitated. If they are losers, it's because they deserve to be losers because they are not bright enough or driven enough. 

When England had more clearly defined and rigid classes, the poor or middle class lad who could not rise into the upper classes know his fate was no fault of his own. He was simply stuck in his place of birth. No shame in that.

But with meritocracy, there is always shame enough to burden all classes below the 1%.

With Apologies to Sam, Toby & Will: Joe's Inaugural Address

 Mr. Chief Justice, Madam Speaker, Senators, Congressfolk, My fellow Countrymen:

This is a day, as Roosevelt said, of national consecration. 

We face today a stricken nation. Our distress owes to two phenomena, one natural and one of our own making.

The natural cause is a virus. Not a virus made by man. It arose in no science fiction laboratory in China, but was carried in bats and overflowed into mankind, the fault neither of the bat nor of man.

The second phenomenon was of our own making, or of the invention of disturbed or confused or fearful minds: The evasion of hard, cold reality and cowardly retreat into fantasy, a flight to the land of make believe and conspiracy and darkness.

We have found that we can live in worlds of our own imagination for only so long until reality intrudes and asserts itself. In the past this reality has come in the form of war, military attack or, as in this case, of epidemic disease. Once reality arrives, our need for real action, for science, for cooperation, and for, yes, for government to light the black night of error and mendacity becomes clear.

Our descent into the mad world of dismantling our government left us ill prepared to face reality. The libertarian view that we do not need government, that government is not the solution but the problem always crashes on the hard boulders of public health, public defense or economic disaster. 

My predecessor in this office did not invent the idea that government is necessarily bad, that we should shrink government to a size where we can drown it in a bathtub, but efforts to destroy the departments of government responsible for data collection, (the Department of Commerce,) to destroy the department responsible for science, (the Department of Agriculture,) to destroy the Center for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the National institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education, all vital to our safety and prosperity as a nation, have made matters much worse than they had to be.

If I read the results of this election clearly, what I am being asked to do is to restore these vital agencies to their full power.

Our distress comes from no failure of ourselves. And our distress did not begin with the pandemic.

Our distress arose because we lost faith in each other, and we lost faith in the fairness of the American way.  Too many people in too many counties came to believe they had been dealt a loser's hand, systematically, and the deck was stacked against them.  What they have come to believe is meritocracy is a fraud. They were constantly reminded if they worked hard, played by the rules, they would be rewarded, but they found themselves on the losing end and they were shamed into believing it was their own fault.

They were sold that canard that the value of their jobs could be measured in dollars. They watched as American companies moved their jobs to nations where workers were valued only as pieces of machinery. The false god of material wealth as the standard of success walked hand in hand with false god of an aristocracy of elite colleges as the defining prize of entry into the upper classes. 

We have learned in this pandemic who really are the "essential workers." Nurses, grocery store workers, sanitation workers, hospital attendants, electricians, HVAC workers, plumbers, mechanics, information technology geeks, construction workers must be in place and thriving before the doctor, lawyer, professor, stock broker or businessman can even begin to work.

We need first to restore science, government and organization to our society, and only then can we get our population vaccinated, our children back to school and our factories and restaurants open. Only then, can we begin to travel, to fly, to reconnect.

Once we have accomplished this, our economy and our long nightmare of isolation and paralysis will recede. 

When that happens, we can take stock. We can look at reality and real facts, not "alternative facts" in the face and we can know, once again that children really did die at Sandy Hook, that a policeman's knee really did kill a defenseless Black man and that the reaction to this, while it ultimately was marred and besmirched by violence, was understandable.

And once the dark curtain of pestilence has been lifted, we must not forget how it was dropped in the first place. We must not forget that every state has, between it's gleaming and energetic metropolises, too much decaying and disintegrating rural space, too long out of sight and out of mind.  We must turn our Rust Belt back into a thriving heartland. 

We must turn our energies and our money toward vitalizing our rural areas as we once decided to embark on rural electrification. We must bring the farmland and the "empty spaces" into the heart of our national life. We can no longer be content to ignore or denigrate "fly over country" or to dismiss the poor Southern states as lost causes, or characterize the Mountain West as white nationalist country. There are millions who live in these places who, though outnumbered, voted for change, voted for progress.

We do not face a financial crisis from a corrupt banking system; we do not face a Great Depression with origins in a  degenerate economic order and colonialism. Our challenge, in fact, has already been met by the most innovative and successful scientific triumph since the polio vaccine. 

We can and we will charge ahead, distribute the vaccine, maintaining our masks and our distance for only as long as is necessary and then we can emerge from the dark into that sunny plain of honesty, of mutual respect and of, finally, unity, so that we can once again speak of the "United" States of America with real belief and not irony. 

We can be that country which has time and again come together, as people from different places, rural and city, wealthy and poor, North and South, East and West, coastal and inland, realize we are all Americans, so much more like each other than different from each other and we can know in the words of that old song, 

"We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun,

We'll put it together and we'll get it undone,

We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun,

When the world is much brighter."

Thank you and God bless the UNITED States of America.