Michael Sandel’s Critique of Merit is an Indictment of the Free Society
How Elitist “Social” Democracy Actually Generates Populist Backlash Against Democracy In General
“I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty at Harvard University” —William F Buckley Jr.
I subscribed recently to Glenn Loury’s substack. His criticisms of the racial justice movement as a black economist, have piqued my interest. So I was a little concerned to see he had Michael Sandel on his podcast, “The Glenn Show,” Sandel whose critique of western meritocracy, Mr Loury mistakenly considers, might have merit.
Michael Sandel’s critique of western meritocracy is a thinly veiled indictment of market capitalism, however; and his argument is patently fallacious. As an economist, and moreover as an individualist, Loury should know better than to fall sway to Sandel’s tender-hearted, well-meaning griping.
Months ago before I had a blog, I actually wrote a small theoretical polemic defenestrating Sandel, which I will attach at the end of this newsletter. Months later having had recourse to review it, I still think my argument against him is pretty spot on, give or take.
But before I share this old small essay of mine with you, I would like to make only a few points in summary of my polemical exercise, months after writing it. This you could take as the abstract, if this were an academic setting.
Abstract
In Michael Sandel’s argument, which he might also describe as the moral limits of the market (the title of one of his earlier books)—but here just toss out market for merit—Sandel essentially criticizes market capitalism whose deceptive creed of meritocracy he blames for conferring a false sense among the successful that they morally deserve their success, while claiming those who don’t succeed, deserve their failure. As an ethicist he deplores our culture of winners and losers, for what he speculates has resulted in the systemic moral corruption of society, which he thinks also explains why society is so polarized.
Sandel argues that western meritocracy or the idea of careers open to talents, and that anyone, and mainly those who profit from their talents, deserves to succeed—he argues this ethical ideal (central to the neoliberal individualism we endorse) is a kind of false god, corrupting society by making the affluent hubristic and contemptuous, and leaving the less fortunate, less talented, less ambitious, tragically to deplore their lot and seek redress for their grievances by purporting to righteously despise the successful educated elites, who look down on them for no good moral reason.
Now I don’t deny the validity of Sandel’s observation, that the socially and financially successful are often conceited, and that the highly credentialed Type A accomplished overachievers frequently have contempt for those they consider beneath them. I’ve seen this hubris myself growing up in a very affluent community. I have seen firsthand the materialism, the complacency, the vanity that career success and class privilege can induce. And I will admit that even I myself whether because of my learning or intellectual superiority—or perhaps as a consequence of growing up affluent, good looking, intelligent—have over the years had the unpleasant side effects invariably of making me misanthropic, elitist, supercilious, proud, haughty, and disdainful.
I also acknowledge that there are a great many people in this country, whom we might for politeness’ sake refer to as low-skilled labor, who feel cheated by the transformation of our economy from an industrial to a service economy, which depends not on factory hands anymore but innovation, as the 21st century is rather driven by masters of the universe, the tech entrepreneur, the software engineer, the CEO, the doctor, the lawyer, the investor. And I don’t deny that this massive transformation of society has at least coincided with, or that it can be correlated with, the consequences of moral corruption that Sandel identifies. I might put it less heavy-handedly than him though. I would call it unpleasantness, not moral corruption. That is to say, indeed I think he overdramatizes the arrogance of the elites, and overplays how bad it is.
And I think not that his critique of our merit-based society supports a reorganization of it, but that our society actually only needs more merit, to fix some of the structural disparities, to which Sandel makes oblique allusion.
As Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles document in The Captured Economy, occupational licensing, excess copyright and patent law, and zoning regulation have become costly regulatory taxes, redistributing the wealth in society upwards, and concentrating opportunity, mobility, and resources in the hands of the affluent, and this is institutionalized by cronies in government and well organized lobby groups.
Indeed the usual suspects Sandel decries for their hubris, I would point out, all operate in highly protected industries, increasingly patronized by government making our economy uncompetitive and making opportunity less free, not least to the detriment of the national character—what I would call the coarsening of civil society. These vainglorious meritocrats, who benefit from big government patronage, constitute a whole class of people. The professional class is made complacent, I would argue, not so much by the ethical value of their success, but by their unjust structural advantages, the consequence of rampant cronyism and the growth of powerful rentseeking interest groups.
Medicine, finance, tech, education, law, the greedy hand of government is in all these professions, subsidizing and regulating their industries and barring entry to them, protecting them from competition. And if government weren’t bailing out the banks (the mortgage loan crisis), revolutionizing healthcare by executive fiat (the Affordable Care Act), and now bailing college-educated millennials out of student debt (loan forgiveness)—with taxpayer money—I wonder then if careers open to talents would be felt to be so unjust, hypocritical, or elitist—if government were not so heedlessly intervening to pick winners and losers, to adjudicate and engineer social outcomes.
Our wealthiest entrepreneurs who are the signal examples of high achievement, Elon musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, for example, have had their companies subsidized by government in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Zuckerberg has even asked for government to regulate social media, only so he can protect his monopoly. And I hypothesize Musk only impulsively decided to buy Twitter to appeal to the right as a free speech absolutist, in order to extract rents from Republican cronies down the line—after he fell out of favor with Democrats. Such people prove more and more what Obama said that everybody depends on government for help; as if just because since we could hardly exist without government, that were sufficient justification in itself to expand its administrative powers limitlessly.
I think it’s a timely inquiry worth making whether the populist right would be so obstreperously angry if the economy, and therefore society, were less regulated, and rather it were more open and opportunity were more free.
As he winces and gripes about how meritocracy doesn’t really exist (like a million left academics before him flattering themselves as diagnosticians of the hypocrisy of the American creed), Michael Sandel enjoys his privileged status as a tenured professor who for years has taught at Harvard, the universal emblem of the cream of the crop of higher education, which preens itself on its traditionalist “legacy admissions” while also discriminating against Asian people in the name of “Diversity.” Truly we are living in a semi feudal society in America, and it’s much more merit, not less, that is needed.
The irony of Sandel’s critique of meritocracy is that what he alternatively suggests would only wreak yet greater injustice. Sandel’s argument fundamentally is that meritocracy is an illegitimate ethic, because the concept is a self-contradiction, and the fact is: as he sees it, a person’s success depends mostly on someone’s circumstances, not their ability. He implies that since we don’t choose our abilities, we don’t deserve them either; so no one earns anything. Seriously he suggests, for example, that since an athlete doesn’t choose their physique and natural talents (giving him a natural advantage), then his abilities don’t deserve to be rewarded for what we ascribe to be their ‘merits.’
And Sandel goes further as to argue that since inherited wealth largely determines one’s success in life—and since wealth perverts merit, to the extent that market actors are not materially equal—he thinks then that we don’t really deserve any advantages we might reap from our financial circumstances!
So in Michael Sandel’s absurd, resentful perception, people are either successful or not for no good reason, and thus merit, the system of rewarding and monetizing talent, is only an agent of moral corruption, perpetuating privilege and entitlement, while punishing losers as lazy. Notably he sees merit and moral truth as opposed or potentially rival social interests in human affairs. ‘Merit’ is immoral because markets are nonmoral, and Sandel assumes we would be better off if presumably at the expense of markets, instead we reorganized society according to his arbitrary standard of moral decency. Cringingly the subtitle of his critique of merit book The Tyranny of Merit is, “what’s become of the common good?”
It hardly needs explaining how ridiculous his argument is. But what I would add before I leave you to my essay is that, even if Sandel were right—we should restructure society in a more ethical way—then I ask, what would be moral about rewarding the unfortunate and disadvantaged for their envy and resentment provoked by the affluent meritocrats? The envy, say, of the left behind is not worth, nor could it be the basis for, redistributing the proceeds of the talent of the affluent to the less fortunate untalented. The very basis of his argument for moral reform, or for example a more moral allocation of, or approach to, society’s talent factor, is in itself immoral.
Hence my argument that meritocracy—if perhaps we took some efforts to reform it to make it more meritorious and more pure—is actually more moral than Sandel’s absurd moral case against meritocracy.
You can also say he betrays a fundamental belief in merit that he condemns meritocracy as hypocritical while he seems to argue that a more moral society would be a more justified, or in other words a more meritorious, one. This would undermine the legitimacy of his critique overall, because his pleas underscore his unconscious notion that morality is what has true merit, not the ethic of merit—that is to say, nevertheless he still believes in merit. Indeed even to make a case against merit, you can’t deny your belief in merit. To make any rational attempt to persuade anyone involves a desire to have your argument taken on its merits.
Here is where we can really take Sandel to task: if we take Sandel’s case against merit to its logical conclusion, then we might also ask, so if merit is bullshit, then why should any of us even listen to him then? He’s a tenured professor. He didn’t acquire his authority by himself. Only Harvard’s patronage makes Sandel an authority.
Hey Michael—excuse me, professor—I agree with you! Down with the meritocracy! Wait now that since I realize meritocracy is an illusion, I can’t recognize the merit of your moral case against merit! Why the hell should I listen to you? So actually never mind.
So besides that he contradicts himself, the other problem with his critique of merit is that the critique also entails discrediting factual truth, on moral grounds. You might say any criterion of authority is not moral, and if you should deny that merit should exist, then all one is left with is one’s subjective moral idealism—unhinged as a principle of moral virtue—from empirical reality.
And what kind of raw deal would that be, moral virtue for factual truth?
The reason that Sandel is so frustrating to me is that he is effectively waging an intellectual assault on the fundamental moral principles of a free society, on moral grounds—in his highly esteemed, yet egregiously flawed, books and lectures, in which he often doesn’t even bother to disguise his erroneous left-progressive moral assumptions, which of course for all his philosophy, he never submits to a critique. If a left progressive were ever to take a break from indicting market society, and question their assumptions, they wouldn’t be a progressive anymore.
In laying waste to individualism and market society, in my opinion, Sandel echoes the counterenligthtenment critique of western civilization, Rousseau, Herder, Novalis and the German romantics, who in a sense were the philosophical precursors of totalitarianism, as they staged a romantic revolt against western rationalism and scientific progress whose materialism they scorned in the name of their advocacy of a retreat to a truer more authentic, more virtuous, nonsense mode of existence. However—I don’t care how painful it is for fuzzy headed idealists like Sandel to realize—it is a fact one simply cannot organize or build a society on a sentimental ideal of a foundation of collective moral merit, where everyone, in principle, would somehow be allocated the social outcomes they morally deserve. Sandel seems to mix the influences of Plato and Rawls into a protofascist plea that people voluntarily give up their striving for status and wealth, so somehow our lives might become less ambitious and harsh but more tender-hearted, so virtue or the common good or whatever can triumph.
It’s a slippery slope from Sandel’s well meaning left-academic aspiration for more equitable “social” democracy, to totalitarianism. Honestly movements for third reichs and united soviet socialist republics begin with tender-hearted intellectuals like Michael Sandel.
No one trust these pampered public intellectuals.
I will give you the essay I wrote in a separate post, because this was longer than I expected.
—Jay