The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

by Michael J. Sandel

In an unequal society, those who land on top want to believe their success is morally justified. In a meritocratic society, this means the winners must believe they have earned their success through their own talent and hard work.

even a fair meritocracy, one without cheating or bribery or special privileges for the wealthy, induces a mistaken impression—that we have made it on our own.

For the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility. And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good.

Like the triumph of Brexit in the United Kingdom, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was an angry verdict on decades of rising inequality and a version of globalization that benefits those at the top but leaves ordinary citizens feeling disempowered.

The hard reality is that Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations, and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties had no compelling answer.

Such thinking should begin with the recognition that these grievances are not only economic but also moral and cultural; they are not only about wages and jobs but also about social esteem.

Construing populist protest as either malevolent or misdirected absolves governing elites of responsibility for creating the conditions that have eroded the dignity of work and left many feeling disrespected and disempowered. The diminished economic and cultural status of working people in recent decades is not the result of inexorable forces; it is the result of the way mainstream political parties and elites have governed.

They do not see that the upheavals we are witnessing are a political response to a political failure of historic proportions.

At the heart of this failure is the way mainstream parties conceived and carried out the project of globalization over the past four decades. Two aspects of this project gave rise to the conditions that fuel populist protest. One is its technocratic way of conceiving the public good; the other is its meritocratic way of defining winners and losers.

The real political divide, they argued, was no longer left versus right but open versus closed. This implied that critics of outsourcing, free-trade agreements, and unrestricted capital flows were closed-minded rather than open-minded, tribal rather than global.

His moral voice muted, Obama placated rather than articulated the seething public anger toward Wall Street. Lingering anger over the bailout cast a shadow over the Obama presidency and ultimately fueled a mood of populist protest that reached across the political spectrum—on the left, the Occupy movement and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders; on the right, the Tea Party movement and the election of Trump.

In the United States, most of the nation’s income gains since the late 1970s have gone to the top 10 percent, while the bottom half received virtually none. In real terms, the median income for working-age men, about $36,000, is less than it was four decades ago. Today, the richest 1 percent of Americans make more than the bottom half combined.

But even this explosion of inequality is not the primary source of populist anger. Americans have long tolerated inequalities of income and wealth, believing that, whatever one’s starting point in life, it is possible to rise from rags to riches. This faith in the possibility of upward mobility is at the heart of the American dream.

But the rhetoric of rising now rings hollow. In today’s economy, it is not easy to rise. Americans born to poor parents tend to stay poor as adults. Of those born in the bottom fifth of the income scale, only about one in twenty will make it to the top fifth; most will not even rise to the middle class.5 It is easier to rise from poverty in Canada or Germany, Denmark, and other European countries than it is in the United States.

Seventy percent of Americans believe the poor can make it out of poverty on their own, while only 35 percent of Europeans think so.

But today, the countries with the highest mobility tend to be those with the greatest equality. The ability to rise, it seems, depends less on the spur of poverty than on access to education, health care, and other resources that equip people to succeed in the world of work.

today’s meritocracy has hardened into a hereditary aristocracy.

Two-thirds of the students at Harvard and Stanford come from the top fifth of the income scale. Despite generous financial aid policies, fewer than 4 percent of Ivy League students come from the bottom fifth. At Harvard and other Ivy League colleges, there are more students from families in the top 1 percent (income of more than $630,000 per year) than there are students from all the families in the bottom half of the income distribution combined.

Any serious response to the gap between rich and poor must reckon directly with inequalities of power and wealth, rather than rest content with the project of helping people scramble up a ladder whose rungs grow farther and farther apart.

Among the winners, it generates hubris; among the losers, humiliation and resentment. These moral sentiments are at the heart of the populist uprising against elites. More than a protest against immigrants and outsourcing, the populist complaint is about the tyranny of merit. And the complaint is justified.

Meritocratic hubris reflects the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. It is the smug conviction of those who land on top that they deserve their fate, and that those on the bottom deserve theirs, too. This attitude is the moral companion of technocratic politics.

A lively sense of the contingency of our lot conduces to a certain humility: “There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of fortune, go I.”

The politics of humiliation differs in this respect from the politics of injustice. Protest against injustice looks outward; it complains that the system is rigged, that the winners have cheated or manipulated their way to the top. Protest against humiliation is psychologically more freighted. It combines resentment of the winners with nagging self-doubt: perhaps the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor; maybe the losers are complicit in their misfortune after all.

Elites have so valorized a college degree—both as an avenue for advancement and as the basis for social esteem—that they have difficulty understanding the hubris a meritocracy can generate, and the harsh judgment it imposes on those who have not gone to college.

Liberating the United States from the supposed burdens of the climate change agreement was not really about jobs or about global warming. It was, in Trump’s political imagination, about averting humiliation. This resonated with Trump voters, even those who cared about climate change.

Aristotle rejected Plato’s philosopher-king, but he, too, argued that the meritorious should have the greatest influence in public affairs. For him the merit relevant to governing was not wealth or noble birth, but excellence in civic virtue and phronesis, the practical wisdom to reason well about the common good.

Thomas Jefferson favored a “natural aristocracy” based on “virtue and talents” rather than an “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth.” “That form of government is the best,” he wrote, which provides “for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government.”13

Over the past four decades, meritocratic elites have not governed very well. The elites who governed the United States from 1940 to 1980 were far more successful. They won World War II, helped rebuild Europe and Japan, strengthened the welfare state, dismantled segregation, and presided over four decades of economic growth that flowed to rich and poor alike. By contrast, the elites who have governed since have brought us four decades of 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, a decaying infrastructure, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a system of campaign finance and gerrymandered congressional districts that makes a mockery of democracy.

Such vacuums of public meaning are invariably filled by harsh, authoritarian forms of identity and belonging—whether in the form of religious fundamentalism or strident nationalism.

But it is one thing to hold people responsible for acting morally; it is something else to assume that we are, each of us, wholly responsible for our lot in life.

God confirms Job’s righteousness but chastises him for presuming to grasp the moral logic of God’s rule. This represents a radical departure from the theology of merit that informs Genesis and Exodus.5 In renouncing the idea that he presides over a cosmic meritocracy, God asserts his unbounded power and teaches Job a lesson in humility. Faith in God means accepting the grandeur and mystery of creation, not expecting God to dispense rewards and punishments based on what each person merits or deserves.

Theologically, it is difficult if not impossible to hold the following three views simultaneously—that God is just, that God is omnipotent, and that evil exists.7

For Augustine, attributing free will to humans denies the omnipotence of God and undermines the significance of his ultimate gift, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. If human beings are so self-sufficient that they can earn salvation on their own, through good works and performing sacraments, then the Incarnation becomes unnecessary. Humility in the face of God’s grace gives way to pride in one’s own efforts.

His broader point, following Augustine, was that salvation is wholly a matter of God’s grace and cannot be influenced by any effort to win God’s favor, whether through good works or the performance of rites. We can no more pray our way to heaven than buy our way in. For Luther, election is a gift that is entirely unearned. Seeking to improve our chances by taking communion or attending Mass or otherwise trying to persuade God of our merit is presumptuous to the point of blasphemy.11

The Calvinist doctrine of predestination created unbearable suspense. It is not hard to see why. If you believe that your place in the afterlife is more important than anything you care about in this world, you desperately want to know whether you are among the elect or the damned. But God does not announce this in advance. We cannot tell by observing people’s conduct who is chosen and who is damned. The elect are “God’s invisible Church.”

The point of such work is not to enjoy the wealth it produces but to glorify God. Working for the sake of lavish consumption would be a distraction from this end, a kind of corruption. Calvinism combined strenuous work with asceticism. Weber points out that this disciplined approach to work—working hard but consuming little—yields the accumulation of wealth that fuels capitalism. Even when the original religious motivations fall away, the Protestant ethic of work and asceticism provides the cultural basis for capitalist accumulation.

The Calvinist doctrine of predestination, combined with the idea that the elect must prove their election through work in a calling, leads to the notion that worldly success is a good indication of who is destined for salvation.

All Christians were called to work and to prove their faith in worldly activity. “By founding its ethic in the doctrine of predestination,” Calvinism substituted for “the spiritual aristocracy of monks outside of and above the world the spiritual aristocracy of the predestined saints of God within the world.”18

The Protestant work ethic, then, not only gives rise to the spirit of capitalism. It also promotes an ethic of self-help and of responsibility for one’s fate congenial to meritocratic ways of thinking. This ethic unleashes a torrent of anxious, energetic striving that generates great wealth but at the same time reveals the dark side of responsibility and self-making. The humility prompted by helplessness in the face of grace gives way to the hubris prompted by belief in one’s own merit.

It is tempting to attribute the triumph of mastery and merit to the secular bent of our time. As faith in God recedes, confidence in human agency gathers force; the more we conceive ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the less reason we have to feel indebted or grateful for our success.

“The fortunate [person] is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate,” Max Weber observed. “Beyond this, he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced that he ‘deserves’ it, and above all, that he deserves it in comparison with others. He wishes to be allowed the belief that the less fortunate also merely experience [their] due.”

Ecclesiastes: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

“A culture less intent on the individual’s responsibility to master destiny might be more capacious, more generous, more gracious.”

A keener awareness of the unpredictable character of fortune and fate “might encourage fortunate people to imagine their own misfortune and transcend the arrogance of the meritocratic myth—to acknowledge how fitfully and unpredictably people get what they deserve.”

Kate Bowler, a historian of the prosperity gospel, writes that its teaching is summarized in the phrase “I am blessed,” where the evidence of being blessed is being healthy and wealthy.

Time magazine poll found that nearly a third of American Christians agree that “if you give your money to God, God will bless you with more money,” and 61 percent believe that “God wants people to be prosperous.”39

As with all meritocratic ethics, its exalted conception of individual responsibility is gratifying when things go well but demoralizing, even punitive, when things go badly.

Morally and theologically, providentialism abroad and meritocracy at home stand or fall together.

In 1994, Clinton expressed optimism for the prospects of Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president, saying, “He believes in democracy. He’s on the right side of history.” Responding to democratic stirrings in the Muslim world, Obama, in his first inaugural address, issued a stern warning to tyrants and despots: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”