I am very happy to read another Micheal Sandel’s book about public justice. This time, he is probing into the populist emotion that is identified to be the driver of extreme right wing movements across the world.
What underneath the resentment and frustration of the “poor” and the “uneducated” is the feelings of disrepect and disempowerment. The lack of dignity experienced by these desperate people, Sandel argue, stemmed from the illusion of meritocracy. He examines the concept of merit, whether it is feasible to be truly meritocratic and whether a fully meritocratic society is just.
Emphasis of mobility is the centerpiece of the American Dream. It is a common belief that everyone can rise with their hard work and talents. This is the peach of Meritocracy, with the claim that it will create a more equal society. But these ideals do not uphold equality nor merits under scrutiny.
in the first part of the book Sandel digs into the history and culture practices that led to the belief of educational qualifications and skills equivalent to merit and how this belief allow people to feel deserve of their earnings.
One of the obivous example is obtaining a seat in the Ivy Leauge school, and the scandals about admission via the side-door or the back door. Why it creates so much outranges and why so many aspired and talent students struggle every year to get in is probably partly due to the high teaching quality and furture career prospectives, but a deeper reason is the conspicuous display of merit.
“our disagreements about merit are not only about firness. They are also about how we define success and failure, winning and losing - and about the attitidues the winners should hold toward those less successful than themselves.”
Loosely speaking those of the top, the sucessfully peeple are those with astronomical economical assets or those in the circle of the governing elites. In an unequal society, Sandel said, those who landed on the top want to believe their success is morally justified, which can then legitimize their disproportionated share of the resources and maintaining the explotative nature of the hierarchy. Here, meritocracy is upheld for the perpeturation of a so-called “fairness”. Meritocracy on one hand, is the idea that it is not our fault to fail due to the circumstances out of our control; but it mirrors with the belief that whatever success I get is my own doing. Thus we have a sense of self-entitlement of “I deserve it!” and a sense of despise to those less sucessful people.
Meritocracy based attitudes shifted the sufferings, the unfortunate events, etc. , generally the cards we have dealt by life, as something we brought upon to ourselves. We are not only sin-bearing human, we also suffer due to our poor choices. In the medieval time, it would be a lack of faith to christianity; in modern time, it would be a lack of grip to knowledge and skills to thrive in the job market.
This notion of a self-made man is encapsulated in the American dream - a binary cause-and-effect reward-punishment machanism operated in a “fair” marketplace, where praises of successes are totally atributed to mastery and virtue and blames of failures are no differences from personal attackes.
When all the successes and failings are interpreted as our personal responsibilities, we are less inclined to offer help to each others.
” Too strenuous a notion of personal responsibility for our fate makes it hard to imagine ourselves in other people’s shoes.”
Putting the systematic discriminations aside that the elites have been preserving to give themselves and their children an massive edge over others (you can read Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarder for an entertaining rant on the PMC class), Sandel argues that one still would not want to live in a truly meritocratic society.
In a complete meritocracy society, only those that are “real victims” of circumstances beyond their control deserve assistance. “Limiting welfare eligibility to those who fall on hard times through bad luck rather than bad behaviour is an example to treat people according to their merit” In that sense, destitute people have to go through such continuously invalidation to prove themselves as helpless victims in order to get help is just disempowering, and how can we expect them to get back on their feet after so many episodes of disproving themselves?
On the other extreme, those on the top would cultivate a sense of entitlement to their rewards and evade their duty to pay for public good at all cost. It is itself misguided because their success cannot be achieved outside a structure of society; in other words even those of the bottom have a contribution, no matter how little, to their success.
One obvious example is the economic success in selling a popular product. This success cannot be manifested outside a market, and from the countries that provide the natural resources and infrastructure, the means of production, to the labours working in the production and customers desires to the product, all contributed to the economical success.
” The people who produced were losing their ability to demand a share in what they made. The people who owned were taking more and more.”
To go deeper, Sandel pointed out that what we seek in merit is also related to justice. It is again about what we deserved and what we own each other.
“For nations as for persons, justice is one thing, power and wealth another.”
Sadly, economic successes do not tie to moral. From illegal drug to highly addictive social media apps, these highly profitable businesses are hardly moral nor contributing to mankind in any meaningful ways. Monetary value depends merely on market supply and demand, but has become the sole metric of success.
Even the fact that my talents and efforts happens to be highly prized by the market is a matter of fortune; this is the difference principle advocated by John Rawl, which concluded that “Those who have been favored by nature, may gain form their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out.”.
Thus, such emphasis on market values that tightly bind self-worth to salary greatly diminishes the dignity of the workers.
The main problem lied in the ruling liberals’ view of how to solve problems of unemployment, poverty, and political divide. To simply view working class people as misinformed, and countering that by “giving people more information” and “insisting everyone to get a college degree” further undermines the esteem and dignity of people that the market deemed obsolete.
Especially during the Obama presidency, Democrats persistently talked about the “smart” and the “dumb”. It started a trend of open disdain on the “under educated”, a widely accepted prejudice. Such acknowledgement gives the liberals the meritocratic ideals, and a free pass from confronting the systematic injustices causing million “deaths of despair” of people without a bachelor degree. And the fatal blow was that the Democrats lost all their credit when they bailed out the Wall street from its own creation of the 2008 financial crisis.
“By 2016, many working people chafed under the sense that well-schooled elites looked down on theme with condescension…. education had become the most decisive political divide, and parties that once represented workers increasingly represented meritocratic elites”
“Attributing political disagreement to a simple refusal to face facts or accept science misunderstands the interplay of facts and opinion in political persuasion”
Sandel reminds us that history showed that prestigious academic credentials have no association with practical wisdom nor good leadership. Ironically, people with college degrees fill the seats of parliaments, CEOs posts in top companies; these people forming a homogeneous educational background have monopoly over all kind of policy discisions at public and private levels. As Catherine Liu has pointed out, these people appear to be diverse on the outside (based on identity and physical differences) but are homogeneous on their behaviour, life style, and worldview as a PMC class. Putting all the political power on the elites deepens the distrusts of the ordinary people to the government.
Sandel also points out that the tertiary education, which focuses on abstract thinking, rarely engage in real-life problem solving that require a sense of pragmatism and empathy. The superior intellects, segregated from the ordinary people in living space, social circle and life experiences, after armed with the meritocratic view and contempt on the “poorly educated” have even less reason to engage in serious discussion with those without a college degree.
“Questions of honor and recognition cannot be neatly separated from questions of distributive justice”
Coming back in full circle, merit represented entitlements that govern how resources are distributed. There is no doubt that many people at the moment are suffering from poverty and homelessness, during the Covid pandemic. They also feel insulted and worthless by how they were treated under meritocracy.
Sandel urge us to “rethink the way we conceive success, questioning the meritocratic conceit that those on top have made it on their own, to challenge inequality of wealth and esteem that are defended in the name of merit but that foster resentment, poison our politics, and drive us apart.”
More importantly, we have to transform our way to honor work and education. Essential workers, whose work have been looked down on have been the key to keep our society functioning in the pandemic but are paid badly. They are struggling with great job insecurity, hostile working conditions and limited autonomy that greatly stun their development and wellbeings.
The foremost important thing is to compensate people sufficiently (in payroll, working conditions, social respect, and public services) on work that may not be attractive to the market but have great value and contribution to the society. In addition, Sandel suggests to put focus on vocational training program that truly equip what are necessary for people to perform their job well, rather than a four-year college degree; “to prepare them to be morally reflective human beings and effective democratic citizens, capable of deliberating about the common good”.
It is also about how we, as a society, build and distribute our common good to make sure we can live worthwhile and flourishing lives. It is hardly debated that we can afford to have more quality leisure time and resources, as in 2021, to develop and cultivate our interests, to pursue our intellectual or professional advances, or to engage in political movements for better changes. We have to put these values over merit to create an environment that allow people to thrive.
It is all about how we view work, “ the most important role we play is not as consumers but as producers… The value of our contribution depends on the moral and civic importance of the ends our efforts serve”. “Taking work seriously”, even though it raise uncomfortable questions for the mainstream liberals and conservatives, is a political agenda we have to push for and steer “the market outcome to reflect the true social value of people’s contributions to the common good”.