The realization that life isn’t as fair as democracy obliges us to pretend it is ought to cool populist passions rather than intensifying them.
The realization that life isn't as fair as democracy obliges us to pretend it is ought to cool populist passions rather than intensifying them.
T here are not many contemporary phenomena that have one-word explanations, and even fewer that have one-word explanations that are not “gravity” or “whiskey.” But if you want a one-word explanation for the ugly, stupid, vicious populism that has overtaken our politics, try this one: meritocracy.
It should not surprise us that the people at the top believe very strongly in meritocracy. The well-off already enjoy the best of everything, and the feeling of virtue is one more exclusive pleasure for elite consumption. It is not enough to settle into a nice first-class seat and enjoy a glass of champagne — for the most exquisite satisfaction, one must also feel that one deserves it.
The believers in meritocracy are in many cases very serious about the –ocracy part. They believe that they are entitled to rule, and they intend to act in the interests of the less-able classes whether the less-able classes like it or not. Their resentment by the intellectual proletariat is the radar screen upon which this can be most easily observed. Those on the populist left rail against billionaires and oligarchy, as though they’d be somehow better off if Jeff Bezos were worse off, and they are permanently committed to the belief that the ultra-rich are somehow putting one over on everybody else. Those on the populist right, in turn, seethe at elite institutions and, especially, at elite experts and credentialed expertise, most recently in the matter of epidemic control.
An institutional title and a high seat and a doctoral dissertation and years of scholarship do not entitle one to rule — but, in our age of celebrity and media magnification, the right to advise and to be listened to is very close to the power to rule per se. That doesn’t make celebrities into scientists — it makes scientists into celebrities, vulnerable to all the temptations that come with that status. The conflation of voice and power is the source of the attraction of cancel-culture mob politics: Social media have extended the opportunity for petty cruelty to people who do not have real power, and it is easy for them to mistake petty cruelty for real power.
It takes a nation of millions to . . . slightly inconvenience Dave Chappelle.
They would do worse if they could, but they usually can’t, and so they are very angry on both sides of the aisle.
In fact, the populist Left and the populist Right tell more or less the same story, rehearsing more or less the same complaints: Big business, especially multinational business, is against them, as are big money, big media, and big institutions of most kinds. Each side believes that it is the plucky representative of We the People, set upon from all directions by the vampires of profit, globalization, and capital. Each sides believes it lost a critical presidential election because of hostile actors in Silicon Valley and shadowy forces in the federal bureaucracy, assisted by a malevolent media.
This leaves the people who occupy the top tier of the meritocracy defensive. The top people at Facebook and Twitter want to believe that these platforms are a force for good in the world, because they want to believe that they are a force for good in the world. Embedded in their moral thinking is the assumption that it is good for the world for them to occupy the places they occupy, that their lives and their careers are not only economically valuable but morally necessary — that such merit as exists in the social order is their merit.
What if there is no meritocracy?
Without relitigating arguments that have been made at great length by Charles Murray and others, there is good reason to believe that socioeconomic status is very strongly correlated with IQ, or with a relatively small set of generally interrelated mental qualities that are in large part hereditary, that are not evenly distributed, and that are not easily acquired when they can be acquired at all. Murray wrote of a “cognitive elite” before the world “elite” had become so thoroughly a term of abuse. It is useful to think of the underlying relationship less as a system of perfect gradations than as a floor and a ceiling. With certain obvious exceptions, a relatively high IQ (or an unusually generous dollop of whatever it is that IQ measures) is an entry requirement for elite universities, other elite institutions, elite occupations, and, to some extent, elite tastes and elite interests. If you don’t meet the cognitive minimum, you are forever on the wrong side of the velvet rope.
We call this situation “meritocracy” only because the elite class defined mainly by relatively high IQ prefers to believe that the shared group of unearned advantages enjoyed by its members are merit, whereas the unearned advantages of (for example) people born to wealthy families are not merit but privilege. Rule by people with inherited wealth or social standing is “oligarchy” or “aristocracy,” while rule by people with inherited intelligence is “meritocracy.” This “meritocracy” is a good deal less liberal and egalitarian than old-fashioned financial oligarchy, inasmuch as one may acquire money. Money is part of the meritocratic deal, but money alone does not get you into the club.
The science here is complicated, and so are the social questions. Intelligence is not the same as cultivation or training, and those matter, too. But if there is no more merit to possessing a certain minimum of raw intelligence than there is to being tall — if neither is an achievement but simply the result of happy biological accident — then that should change a great many of our assumptions and beliefs. In a globalized economy, there are very, very high relative returns that accrue to certain kinds of intelligence, or to intelligence that can be applied in certain ways. And while there are plenty of high-IQ people who are slackers or losers, who ruin their lives with addiction or indolence or madness, these people have in some real sense an opportunity to participate in a kind of economic, intellectual, and social life that is simply out of reach to people with middling IQs.
You have to have an opportunity to waste that opportunity.
We tell children that with enough hard work and dedication, they can be anything they want to be. And it probably is important that we tell them this, even if the real story is more complicated than that. There are very, very few, if any, people who could, with the proper effort and training, do what Simone Biles does. For everybody else walking the earth, it doesn’t matter how hard they work or how bad they want it — they don’t have what it takes and can’t get what it takes. It isn’t for sale. There’s a reason we call such capabilities “gifts.” Some gifts put you on an Olympics podium, but some just put you into the top quintile.
The complicating fact is that in the world in which we live, higher-end intellectual work really is more economically and socially valuable than manual labor or post-puritan bourgeois dedication. Showing up at work every day sober and shaved in a well-pressed white shirt can only get you so far. The practitioners of those bourgeois virtues are coming to understand that much of the best that the world has to offer is closed off to them through no fault of their own, and they are not happy about it. The angriest contemporary populism comes from the middle classes, not from the poor, who are used to being disappointed.
It is easier to spot a naked emperor if he isn’t your emperor. So the hollowness of our “meritocracy” is easiest to see in the case of people we are not ordinarily inclined to sympathize with or admire. One need not take a conspiratorial view of economic or political affairs to see that people who have certain gifts rise to positions of influence where they use those gifts to create or entrench systems and institutions in which they and other bearers of the same gifts enjoy status, wealth, and privilege. Those who identify themselves as the enemies of “elites” have no real positive agenda, and they never will, because there isn’t one to be had. All they can do is try to acquire enough power to hurt, hobble, or humiliate the people they envy.
If people with relatively high IQs are only giraffes with necks that are slightly longer than the herd average, that does not confer on them any moral status, but they still are going to outperform and outcompete the rest on many metrics that are in our time very important — and not just important to other similarly endowed people but important to everybody: The average human being today owes much of his standard of living, which is radically higher than that of his grandparents, to the work of a relatively narrow class of entrepreneurs, technologists, social innovators, and scientists. People rage against “elitism” by posting on Facebook, which sprung up from the humid culture of the Harvard dormitory.
This isn’t an Atlas Shrugged point, because relatively little of the work at issue was done by Randian heroes, lonely individualists working in obscurity. It was work done by a class of people, often in institutions, committees, and bureaucracies. It was corporate rather than heroic. The people who did it did it because they could, because they enjoyed it, and because they mostly got paid pretty well for it. That is still the case today, and it will be the case tomorrow. Amazon and Tesla and Apple were not the products of average minds. Neither was the Declaration of Independence. We enjoy the fruit of the labor of the cognitive elite. But we don’t have to make idols of them.
At the same time, we don’t have to ask Joe Rogan what we should do about COVID or climate change. Bob on Facebook need not be consulted about that which is beyond his ken. Meritocracy has its myths, and democracy has its fair share as well. We shouldn’t have to pretend that everybody’s input is equally valuable — it isn’t. But democracy requires us to pretend that we think it is — that everybody deserves to have an equal say in government, that everybody has thoughts worth a respectful hearing, that maybe from some cosmic point of view ditch water really is as good as champagne. We have one-man/one-vote democracy not because people are fundamentally the same but because they are fundamentally different, and their interests vary along with their abilities. Equality under the law is a principle that describes our relationship to the state, not our relationships to one another in a free society, where many different kinds of hierarchies and elites emerge naturally and inevitably. A mature and healthy society would recognize this as beneficial and necessary, but we are Americans, and we do not have that kind of society. We are looking for a fight.
It is interesting to me that the populists believe they have a meaningful indictment in: “They think they’re better than us!” Some people surely do think that — okay, Sunshine, what’s next? What questions does that raise, and what kind of answers should such questions be given? What will you do? Demonstrate the wretchedness of the elites by gargling iodine and own the libs by needlessly dying of COVID? Dream up some new pronouns, and see if that does it for you? It won’t; there is no pronoun that will do the trick, because there are no magic words.
Facebook-style politics is really, at heart, a hobby, only very vaguely connected to real citizenship, and I can’t help but think that those captivated by it would be happier building model trains or collecting stamps. Politics cannot give them what they want. Nothing can.
We have angry populism mainly because factors such as technology and trade have laid bare a certain fundamental unfairness in our social life. We have less control than we had thought — and less than we want. But if our lives are a little more narrowly bounded than the optimists of the 19th and 20th centuries had thought, understanding that situation should make us less proud and more charitable. It should make us more sensitive to the practical limitations of bootstraps politics, even as we continue to acknowledge the necessity of private effort and individual responsibility. It should also point us toward other sources of meaning and scales of value that cannot be measured in dollars or social-media followers, toward the understanding that there is more goodness and more dignity in being a good father or a good neighbor than there is in being a Kardashian even if there is less money in it. Understanding our limitations should make us mindful of the Power that exceeds all limitations.
But I somehow doubt that it will.