The System That Dare Not Speak Its Name

I'm not sure I'm going to make it all the way through Chris Hayes's Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (Crown, 2012).  I know I said I was going to read it, but I got sixty pages into it yesterday and got so dispirited that I didn't want to go on.  I think he's mapped out his assumptions by the point I've reached, and they are what's wrong with the book.  Put simply -- and Hayes is not a complex thinker -- he believes that the United States is a meritocracy: that our rulers are people who showed that they were qualified to run a complex society and its institutions.  He keeps referring to our elites as "the meritocracy," begging repeatedly the question that they actually have merit.

This emerges very clearly in the second chapter, "Meritocracy and Its Discontents."  Hayes begins:

Whether we think about it much or not, we all believe in meritocracy. It is embedded in our very language: to call an organization, a business, or an institution “meritocratic” is to pay it a high compliment.  On the portion of its website devoted to recruiting talent, Goldman Sachs tells potential recruits that “Goldman Sachs is a meritocracy.” It’s the first sentence [31].

I presume that by that first sentence Hayes means that "we" all believe a meritocracy is an ideal to be worked toward.  If so, he may be right, as when he wrote a few pages earlier that meritocracy "is an ideal with roots that reach back to the early years of the Republic" (21), that people should achieve wealth and status through disciplined hard work, not have them assigned by accident of birth.  Or, as he also puts it, "In a meritocracy, people are judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. This crucial distinction between the contingent and essential features – between skin color and intelligence – appeals to some of our most profound moral intuitions about justice and desert" (51).

He goes on to offer what he considers a "compelling" argument, that meritocracy is not "necessarily fair, but rather that it is efficient. By identifying the best and brightest and putting them through resource-intensive schooling and training, we produce a set of elites well equipped to dispatch their duties with aplomb. By conferring the most power on those equipped to wield it, the meritocracy produces a better society for us all. In rewarding effort and smarts, we incentivize both."  He goes on to concede that "meritocracy in practice is something different.  The most fundamental problem with meritocracy is how difficult it is to maintain it in its pure and noble form" (52-3).  Before you can "maintain" a meritocracy, however, you have to achieve it.  Hayes only assumes that it has been achieved (for a few bright shining years in the Sixties, I gather), and this is not something that can be assumed; you need to provide an argument and evidence, which he doesn't do.

Instead he begins with a case study, the Hunter College High School in New York City, of which he is an alumnus.  (Along with many other well-known people, including Florence Howe, who wrote about her experience there in her memoir A Life in Motion.)  Rather flustered, Hayes describes how Justin Howard, a graduating senior at Hunter, delivered a commencement address in 2010 that challenged many of the school's pretensions.

Hunter, Hayes explains,

embodies the meritocratic ideal as much as any institution in the country.  It is public and open to students from all five boroughs of New York City, but highly selective.  Each year, between 3,000 and 4,000 students citywide score high enough on their fifth-grade standardized tests to even qualify to take Hunter's entrance exam in the sixth grade.  Only 185 are offered admission ...

Hunter is routinely ranked one of the best high schools in the nation.  In 2003, Worth named it the highest-ranking public feeder school, and Newsweek, in a 2008 evaluation of high schools, named it one of eighteen "public elites."  In 2007, the Wall Street Journal identified Hunter as sending a higher percentage of its graduates to the nation's top colleges than all but one of its public peers.  That year, nearly 15 percent of the graduating class received admission to one of eight elite universities that the Journal used for its analysis.  The school boasts an illustrious group of alumni, from famed Civil Rights activist and actress Ruby Dee, to writers Cynthia Ozick and Audre Lorde, to Tony Award winners Robert Lopez (composer and lyricist, The Book of Mormon and Avenue Q) and Lin-Manuel Miranda (composer and lyricist, In the Heights), to West Wing writer and producer Eli Attie, to Supreme Court justice Elana Kagan [32].

Where do I begin?  Well, first and I hope most obviously, Hayes takes standardized tests very seriously: he seems to think that they actually measure merit.  In reality they measure ability to choose correct answers from multiple-choice options under intense time pressure in a competitive environment.  Marking in bubbles on an answer sheet -- neatly, neatly, don't get outside the bubble! -- while the clock ticks is indeed a skill of some kind (I did quite well at it myself in the day), but I'm not sure it is equivalent to "merit."  Hayes is sure it is.  He considers the SAT, for example, "an objective measure of the 'merit' of the applicant" so that "the nebulous subjectivity of the admissions procedure would be eliminated in favor of an equal, accessible, and objective metric" (37).  There is quite a large literature which explains why this isn't so, but Hayes seems not to be aware of it.  Well, nobody's perfect.  (For now I'll refer the reader to two articles by Alfie Kohn, available online, and to his book The Case Against Standardized Testing [Heinemann, 2000].)

Notice that the famous alumni Hayes names are not, in fact "crats," however much merit they have, except for Justice Kagan.  Poets, composers, writers: they contribute to our society, no doubt, but they don't rule it.  This is a problem that runs throughout his discussion.  Not only is he confused about what merit is, he consistently ignores the "-cracy" in meritocracy.  He's far from alone in doing so, of course.

Hayes also seems to want to impress the reader by how selective Hunter is.  Thousands apply, but only a few, the best! get in.  The best!  If only a few are let in, they must be really good, right?  And it proves that the school is good, right?*  He's so attached to this idea that he misunderstands Justin Howard's critique of the Hunter system -- or rather, of the system that produced Hunter, the system Chris Hayes mistakes for meritocracy.  Howard's entire speech is available online; I'll mainly stick to the portions Hayes quotes.  "I feel guilty," Hudson said,

... because I don't deserve any of this.  And neither do any of you.  We received an outstanding education at no charge based solely on a test we took when we were eleven-year-olds, or four-year-olds.  We received superior teachers and additional resources based on our status as "gifted," while kids who naturally needed those resources much more than us wallowed in the mire of a broken system.  And now, we stand on the precipice of our lives, in control of our lives, based purely and simply on luck and circumstance.  If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city, then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside, and Flushing, are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvestant, and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that [quoted by Hayes, 33].

Hayes reports that the "parents in the crowd were, not surprisingly, a bit taken aback.  The teachers offered a standing ovation.  Jennifer J. Raab, the president of Hunter College and herself a graduate of Hunter College, stayed seated" (34).  Hayes himself is indignant: "Unlike elite colleges ... entrance to Hunter rests on a single 'objective' measure: one three-hour test.  If you clear the bar, you're in; if not, you're not.  There are no legacy admissions, and there are no strings to pull for the well connected.  If [NYC Mayor] Michael Bloomberg's daughter took the test and didn't pass, she wouldn't get in.  There are only a handful of institutions left in the country about which that can be said" (34).

But Hayes is missing the point, partly I think because Howard didn't make it clearly enough.  I think he'd have preferred to miss it anyhow.  In one sense, I disagree with Howard: I think he and his fellow students do deserve the "outstanding education at no charge" that they received at Hunter.  But every other child in New York City, and indeed in the US and around the world deserves an outstanding education at no charge.  Not the same education, mind you, but an outstanding education that would bring out and nurture the capacities each child has.  Most children in New York don't get anything like that unless their capabilities match those valued by elite universities, which Hayes, begging the question, assumes to be merit.  This is the source of Howard's survivor's guilt, and Hayes misses it entirely.

Only 185 children are offered admission to Hunter each year.  That seems an arbitrary number, but I suppose it's the capacity of the school.  There is no reason why there couldn't be other good schools in the city, each admitting another 185 of those who've scored high on the entrance exam; even those who take the test in the first place have already been selected from the mass of students by the preliminary test they took in fifth grade.  There are other elite schools in New York, of course, like the Bronx High School of Science attended by Samuel R. Delany.  I imagine there could be even more, if there were the will to spend the money to establish them.

It's good that such schools exist, but there also need to be good schools for all the other children.  There aren't, and that's the root of Justin Howard's guilt and anguish.  This is especially true because we can't know in advance what any given child is capable of, though the testing industry and many educational "professionals" are built on the premise that we can.  Michael E. Young satirized this belief in the 1950s in his The Rise of the Meritocracy, which Chris Hayes has read but whose satire he can't quite grasp.  Young mocked the pretense of psychometricians to be able to identify children's potential at ever earlier ages.  Though it's well established that there is no measure, "objective" or otherwise, that can really do this, Hayes, like other believers in meritocracy, wants to believe that there is, or could be.  And one of the core features of meritocracy as an ideology is that those who rise in the hierarchy must be willing to accept the values of the rulers and leave behind the lesser, lower orders from which they came.  The values of the rulers must be meritorious, because they are the rulers' values and the rulers wouldn't be rulers if they didn't have merit, right?

"Hunter's approach to education rests on two fundamental premises," Hayes declares in his apologia.

First, kids are not created equal.  Some are much smarter than others.  And second, the hierarchy of brains is entirely distinct from the social hierarchies of race, wealth, and privilege.  That was the idea, anyway.  But over the last decade, as inequality in New York has skyrocketed and competition for elite education has reached a fever pitch, Hunter's single entrance exam has proven to be a flimsy barrier to protect the school's meritocratic garden from the incursions of the world outside its walls [35-6].

Hayes makes several blunders here.  First, different is not the same as unequal.  That people are not equally intelligent does not mean they are or should be unequal in terms of rights; Hayes's allusion to the opening of the Declaration of Independence shows that he either doesn't understand the difference (more likely, I suppose) or that he's deliberately blurring it (in which case he isn't as smart as he likes to think).  Second, there is not really a "hierarchy of brains" distinct from the "social hierarchies of race, wealth of privilege," especially since (as Hayes uncomfortably admits) the two are intimately connected, even intertwined where Hunter is concerned.  The percentage of black students entering Hunter dropped from 12 percent in 1995 to 3 percent in 2009, he reports on page 36.  Have black New Yorkers gotten 75% dumber in 14 years?  I doubt it very much, and even Hayes can't quite bring himself to say so.  (No doubt because of the "open-minded, self-assured cosmopolitanism that is the guiding ethos of the current American ruling class," that he says he "absorbed" at Hunter [35].)  Hunter isn't responsible for the growing economic inequality, with all its destructive consequences, of the world outside its walls -- or is it?  After all, its graduates are disproportionately represented among the elites who are responsible for the increase in inequality.  It appears likely that something important wasn't covered in that outstanding education they received.

I don't find that surprising.  Hunter isn't an alternative approach to education, it's a portal that admitted a few people who wouldn't have gotten past the old aristocratic sorting methods of the elite schools.  Hunter was founded at a time when the prevailing sorting methods were frankly racist and sexist; basing admission solely on test results was a good start, but it was only a start.  Its aim is to assimilate its students into the values of the ruling elites.  Remember that it was very intelligent, highly-educated products of the system represented by Hunter -- the "best and brightest" -- who invaded Vietnam and devastated Southeast Asia in the name of anti-Communism.  Just as George W. Bush's staff 'fixed the intelligence' to justify the US invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon Papers revealed that the Eisenhower administration fixed the intelligence, despite the absence of supporting evidence, to prove that Ho Chi Minh was a Kremlin agent; Kennedy's men bought this fabrication and ran with it as if it were a game of touch football.  Of course, very few of them died as a result of their brilliance.  (Most of the casualties, American or Vietnamese, didn't merit an elite education.)

Ursula K. Le Guin put it neatly in words she invented for the philosopher Odo in her novel The Dispossessed, originally published in 1974 (reprinted by Perennial, 2003, p. 358):

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger.  Have we not eaten while another starved?  Will you punish us for that?  Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate?  No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

These words leapt out at me when I first read them decades ago, because I'd recently encountered the same idea in Walter Kaufmann's Without Guilt and Justice, where he attacked "the idea of deserving" at length.  I don't expect Chris Hayes to have read either of these books, of course.  But he needn't have read them to have encountered some enlightening alternative views of ability, education, and social justice.

Hayes alludes a couple of times to the metaphor of the cream rising to the top.  So does the scum, but he prefers not to think about that.  In either case it is a metaphor which has dubious relevance to education or the running of a society.  He eventually claims that at Hunter, "over time the mechanisms of meritocracy have broken down. With the rise of a sophisticated and expensive test-preparation industry, the means of selecting entrants to Hunter has grown less independent of the social and economic hierarchies in New York City at large. The pyramid of merit has come to mirror the pyramid of wealth and cultural capital" (54).  This is all wrong.  There is no pyramid of merit, not even figuratively.  The "mechanisms of meritocracy" were never in place.  Perhaps Hayes believes that Hunter's entrance exam could be revised so as to weed out the kids who've been prepped for it, leaving only the truly, innately excellent -- but there is no reason to think so.  Hunter isn't to blame.  The fault lies with the system Hayes mistakenly buys into, no doubt because he has benefited from it: the hierarchy of wealth and power that justifies itself by declaring itself a meritocracy.  The merit involved can only be instrumental, the ability to carry out efficiently tasks whose value isn't open to question.  Should we invade this or that country?  Don't ask: the only question is whether we can do it efficiently.  I think Hayes is obscurely and uneasily aware of this, but isn't ready to challenge the values of the society that raised him up and gave him a platform to write books like this one.

Speaking of which, it looks like the next chapter will focus largely on professional baseball's doping scandals.  The ability to play baseball well is a merit easier to measure than the ability to govern a country well and wisely, but baseball players don't rule the country either.  I have to remind myself that what concerns Hayes is that our elites have let us down.  Say it ain't so, Joe!  I'm going to have to steel myself to keep reading.

* P.S.  On rereading this it occurred to me that while it was obvious to me that Chris Hayes was wrong to assume that Hunter's extreme selectivity was evidence of its merit, and of its students, it might not be obvious to everyone else.  Sarcastic rhetorical questions, while fun, aren't an argument.

So: suppose that Hunter still only admitted 185 new students each year, but did so purely on the basis of a lottery, a random drawing.  It would still be very selective, but no one would claim that this proved the "merit" of the 185.  Or suppose that admission was based on the ranking of the students' parents among New York City's wealthiest families.  (Or its poorest, if you like.)  There are probably people who'd argue that the richest have demonstrated their merit and their children have demonstrated theirs by choosing good parents to be born to, but I don't think Hayes would be one of them.  Selectivity by itself doesn't prove much; consider the negative associations of the word "exclusive," as in "exclusive country club."

Hayes claims (or assumes -- after all, he passed it, so it must be good!) that Hunter's entrance examination is an "objective measure" of the students' aptitude for the Hunter experience, but I doubt it: could it be any better than IQ tests or the College Board examinations, both of which are seriously flawed as measures of intelligence, intellectual ability, or scholastic aptitude?  If so, Hunter should share it with the world.  But here I'm only really concerned with his evident belief that selectivity is a good in itself.

When I Hear the Word "Meritocracy" I Reach for My Critical Thinking

I'm not sure why it seems important to write something about Chris Hayes's recent book Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (Crown, 2012).  Glenn Greenwald recommended it highly, and I have a lot of respect for Greenwald.  (On the other hand, he also thinks more highly of Rachel Maddow than I do.)  For another, Hayes has done some good work on his TV program.  But the most important reason is that I find the whole question of elites and meritocracy provocative.

Before reading Hayes's book, though, I read a classic of sociological satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870-2033, by Michael D. Young, originally published in 1958. Young invented the word meritocracy, and it's remarkable how quickly what he intended as snark was adopted by the very people he was mocking.  Understandably, this annoyed him, and in 2001 he complained in print that the Labour party had borrowed the word for its own purposes, along with the abuses Young had warned about.

"Meritocracy" is a hybrid word: like "homosexuality," it consists of a Latin and a Greek component glued together.  The -ocracy was an obvious choice, given its already widespread use.  Why didn't Young use a Greek prefix?  Maybe because such a compound already existed: aristocracy, which means rule by the best or most excellent.  For several hundred years, though, aristocracy had taken on connotations of rule by the privileged, the "best-born," and one could refer to an aristocrat without meaning that he or she was an excellent person -- rather the opposite.  Even those who mainly supported the social order, like Jane Austen, were aware that birth and breeding didn't guarantee excellence, virtue, or even mediocrity: an aristocrat could be crass, stupid, dishonest, and corrupt.  I don't think I'm the only person for whom aristocracy suggests an inbred class of people, probably related to each other, who assume their excellence, especially when they have none.

Merit has similar ambiguities, though, like any abstraction.  It used to mean an earned reward or punishment; I guess demerit eventually took on the sense of an earned punishment.  Two of Merriam-Webster's definitions, "the qualities or actions that constitute the basis of one's deserts" and "character or conduct deserving reward, honor, or esteem", are probably what Young was thinking of.  They're basically circular, but then Young didn't mean his new word to be a sensible one.  Still, in 2001 he could write, "It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit."  The difficulty is working out exactly what "merit" is pertinent to a job.  One common problem that seems to be overlooked, probably because it's intractable: Even after a person has occupied a position for some time, he or she can be excellent in some respects and terrible in others; so what do you do?  Young's fictional narrator could claim that by the late 1900s, testing had been developed to the point where a candidate's aptitude for a given spot could be measured precisely; in the real 2010s we're still far from such discernment.

There appears to be a widespread notion in the US and in the UK that we already live in a meritocracy.  Or sort of one.  Or we'd like to.  Or we should.  Or we used to, but it's turning into an oligarchy.  I did a web search for "we live in a meritocracy," and most of the results were questions rather than declarations.  Not too surprisingly, the pundit David Brooks came up with his own use for the word: "The hunger for recognition is a great motivator for the meritocrat ... Each person responds to signals from those around him, working hard at activities that win praise and abandoning those that don't", as if simply wanting to rise in a hierarchy made a person a meritocrat, or constituted merit.  (The article is a tiny masterpiece of free association.)

Most people who use the word "meritocracy," even critically, seem to take for granted that people in high places actually have proven their merit.  I don't.  Generally their success within the system is assumed to be evidence that they have merit, which is conveniently circular.  In the absence of better evidence, I think Noam Chomsky had a good point:

One might suppose that some mixture of avarice, selfishness, lack of concern for others, aggressiveness, and similar characteristics play a part in getting ahead and "making it" in a competitive society based on capitalist principles. Others may counter with their own prejudices. Whatever the correct collection of attributes may be, we may ask what follows from the fact, if it is a fact, that some partially inherited combination of attributes tends to lead to material success?

People tend to overlook the suffix of "meritocracy," the idea that those with "merit" should rule. The first violinist of the New York Philharmonic may be one of the best violinists in the world, but the main benefit accruing to his or her merit is ... playing in the New York Philharmonic.  Some prestige too, no doubt, but the achievement is an end in itself, as achievement mostly should be.  The same goes for star athletes: they may get paid a lot of money, but no one thinks that their achievement entitles them or qualifies them to do anything but play their sport.  Yet people who make large amounts of money in business or finance often think, and are thought by some, to know how the government should be run, or even just the economy.  Aside from the huge business and fiscal disasters over which such people have presided, their public statements since the re-election of Barack Obama should have disabused most people of any notion that they're even qualified to decide their own salaries: they routinely think they're worth a lot more than they are.

Lately at the library book sale I stumbled on The Reality Club (Lynx Books, 1988), a collection of papers from (according to the blurb) "New York's most vibrant intellectual salon", which offered "every reader a journey to the cutting edge of ideas and knowledge in our culture."  I decided to buy it because one paper was "In Defense of Elitism," by Gerald Feinberg, a Professor of Physics at Columbia.  Strictly speaking, "elitism" isn't the same thing as "meritocracy," but since neither word is well-defined, they work out in practice to be roughly the same thing.  (Feinberg helpfully posts a definition as an epigraph to his article: "the leadership by the choice part or segment" [275], though the definition is neither helpful nor very grammatical: "the leadership"?)  Like "aristocracy," "elitism" has acquired some negative baggage, but there's always somebody game to defend it.

"In what passes for social commentary in present-day America, it is hard to find someone who has anything favorable to say about elitism," Feinberg bravely begins.  Yet "No voices have been raised to condemn the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, even though those institutions are elitist according to any plausible definition of that term" (275).  Really?  I'm not sure they fit even Feinberg's definition.  What do they "lead"?  Who chose them?  Audiences attend events featuring either "segment" not to be led, but to see what they hope will be excellent performances; but also from local chauvinism, loyalty to the brand, to see and be seen by other fans, and so on.  Or again: who "leads"?  It's not the players but their coaches who lead, and the course of the orchestra will be influenced if not determined by wealthy donors who possess no musical excellence themselves.

Feinberg is quick to distance himself from political elitism:

I am not arguing that elitism is a desirable approach to determining who should govern society.  I agree with the view that was adopted early in our society that participation in the process of government by a large part of society is a more important matter than how effective the governors are [276].

Cute.  And disingenuous; surely Feinberg is aware what a question-begging word "effective" is in this context.  Does he mean, say, making the trains run on time?  He also seems to overestimate the actual "participation in the process of government by a large part of society" in the American system, even in theory.

My defense of the proposition that elitism is a desirable attitude, at least in certain situations, is based on two simple ideas.  One is that some activities are accepted as so worthwhile, both by those that do them and by society at large, that they should be done as well as they can be done.  The other proposition is that some individuals are much better at doing these activities than others, or can become by any methods now known [276].

Even if I grant his ideas, what does either one have to do with leadership?  Why should  acceptance by the ignorant canaille ("society at large") have any more weight in determining what is "worthwhile"?  True, Americans do invest a large amount of interest, energy, and money in elite sports, but in what way does that make the NBA or the NFL more worthwhile than pro wrestling?  Classical orchestras are having increasing financial trouble, so does that mean that they are less worthwhile than they used to be, and would Feinberg admit the worth of more profitable music with less old-people prestige, such as Lady Gaga or hiphop?  The idea that only two-hundred-year-old European art music is "worthwhile" has less to do with its intrinsic excellence (which is often real, I'm not disputing that) and more to do with class stratification.

Excellence in sport or musical performance has a certain advantage over other kinds of excellence: it's a lot simpler, and easier to evaluate, than excellence (or effectiveness) in politics or artistic invention or many other areas.  Feinberg glosses over this problem with handwaving, and it soon becomes clear that his article, far from being cutting edge, is an old-fashioned attack on the Trash They're Letting Into College These Days, and the Barbaric Garbage That Is Being Taught/Sold as Art.  He's deliberately vague about the details, but then he could probably count on his intended audiences agreeing.

Ironically enough, Feinberg turns out to be part of the problem he's complaining about, when he dismisses "what passes for social commentary in present-day America."  He may not know much about society, politics, or art, but he knows what he likes.  On top of that he's a particle physicist and a professor at an elite institution of higher learning, so his uninformed and half-thought-out ramblings on social policy and the arts are supposed to count for more than the opinions of someone who has actually studied such subjects and knows what he or she is talking about.  As a physicist Feinberg was elite -- he shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for work on neutrinos -- but expertise in physics doesn't translate into expertise on social issues.  It doesn't even follow that a Nobel Laureate in the sciences is qualified to lead his own academic department; if he is, it's coincidence.

That's the trouble with elitism, though it resembles Feinberg's swipe at popular participation in the process of government, the notion that one man is as good as another and a damn sight better too.  Elitism as an ideology encourages people who do well in one area to believe they can automatically do well in others.
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My next post on "meritocracy."

Move 'Em Up, Head 'Em Out

I finally finished Chris Hayes's Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, which turned out to be even less meritorious than I expected.  Hayes's ongoing misuse of the word "meritocracy" annoys me like a stone in my shoe: "institutions that create meritocratic elites" (64), "the energetic force of meritocratic competition" (75), "American political economy during the meritocratic age" (142), "several decades of failed meritocratic production" (155), "the class of meritocratic overachievers" (201), "the meritocratic era" (203), and the like.  What meritocratic era?  He can't seem to make up his mind whether meritocracy has been an aspiration, or a brief shining moment that has alas faded, or some combination of the two. 

He even quotes someone else's misdefinition:

Adam Michaelson, a former advertising executive who worked in Countrywide [Financial]'s marketing division, recalls the atmosphere of the business this way: "Countrywide fashioned itself a meritocracy, that is, whoever generated the most value or profit for the firm would be granted the greatest rewards, growth and prestige."  As happened in so many places over the past decade, the institutional definition of merit inside Countrywide became thoroughly perverse [97-8].

But the "institutional definition" didn't become "perverse," it was perverse in itself.  Those who generated value and profit for the firm weren't running it (the -cracy part of meritocracy again): the upper ranks of executive officers did that.  Those upper echelons skimmed off immense wealth for themselves from the "value and profit" their underlings generated:

Between 2001 and 2006, [cofounder Angelo] Mozilo managed to arrange for himself a staggering $470 million in in total executive compensation.  The most cynical interpretation of these actions, though also the most plausible, is that Mozilo was looting the company he'd built as fast as he could before the markets or regulators caught up with him [97].

Earlier in the book Hayes wrote, "In a meritocracy, people are judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character" (51).  Leaving aside the fact that we have no way of judging the content of people's character directly, before they are granted access to money and power, it seems fair to say that Mozilo showed his character all too well as he squirreled away vast amounts of money.  In the end the Securities Exchange Commission caught up with him, but he managed to avoid trial or jail by reaching a settlement in which he "agreed to pay $67.5 million in fines and accepted a lifetime ban from serving as an officer or director of any public company ... The terms of the settlement allow Mr. Mozilo to avoid acknowledging any wrongdoing.  In February 2011, the U.S. dropped its criminal investigation into the facts behind that civil settlement."

This isn't, contrary to Hayes's repeated lament, a new crisis of authority and public trust in the US.  What bothers me is that he really thinks that it's important that we believe authorities, and that they used to or even theoretically could deserve unquestioning trust.  He seems to think, for example, that the "mainstream" corporate media used to be reliable, or ought to be treated as if they were.  It "wasn't just the rise of technology that produced the explosion of the blogosphere; it was the perceived failings of the mainstream media" (118).  That word "perceived" bothers me.  It could mean that those failings became manifest and so were perceived; but in context it seems to mean that people only thought they discerned those failings.  If Hayes has ever heard of I. F. Stone, he doesn't let on.  As he concedes,

It turned out that ... someone sitting in a basement in New Jersey, using the Internet, reading from a diverse set of sources about WMD intelligence, could actually get closer to the truth than the beat reporter with the inside sources at Langley [118].

That's essentially what Stone did.  Expelled from the Washington press corps in the late 1940s, he started his own newsletter and worked by close reading of corporate media and government publications.  He didn't even need the Internet.  Access to government insiders, that consummation devoutly to be wished among most American journalists, has more to do with wanting to rub elbows with the powerful than with doing serious journalism.

Critical thinking makes Hayes uneasy, for some reason.  He admits that authority figures have made lethal mistakes, and that professional "consensus" can be and has been completely wrong.  But he still seems to think that somewhere there's a meritocratic elite who will be right and can be trusted, if we can just find them.  That, it seems to me, is the root of the problem.  No one individual can know everything, so we have to delegate learning to other people.  But if we expect to find someone who knows everything and never errs, we're bound to be disappointed when our elites turn out to have feet of clay, and then go looking for the next true authority.  It's not necessary to be cynical about it, just realistic, but that option seems not to have occurred to Hayes.

Hayes assumes that competition selects for merit, and that is probably his biggest mistake.  In some cases it may do, where merit can be narrowly and specifically defined: as the fastest runner or the highest jumper.  But that applies only to a very small part of worthwhile human endeavor.  When merit is defined as making as much money as possible for your hedge fund, you get into trouble.  Or consider this example:

[Economist Sherwin] Rosen argued that certain technological trends had radically expanded the demand for services for those who were the best in their field: in 1950, a top basketball player could only monetize his talent with an endorsement deal that would sell sneakers to Americans; today, LeBron James is featured on billboards from Florida to Turkey to China [142-3].

I think "market" would be more accurate than "demand," but the real fault here is the assumptions that there is one indisputable "best in their field," and that no one else can "monetize his talent."  Many elite athletes have their fans, who'll buy products endorsed by their favorite stars, and those fans disagree about who is the best.  You don't have to be the top basketball player in the world to become rich, or even financially comfortable.  And again, sport is a field where excellence is relatively easy to define and detect, compared to the arts, let alone politics.  Hayes goes on:

The same goes in a whole host of domains: the best opera soprano can, with the advent of MP3s and the Internet, sell to anyone in the world with an iPod, which spells trouble for the fifth best soprano. If you can buy the best, why settle? [143]

This assumes that people seek out the best, or the world's best, singers, and that they agree who is the best.  Neither is true.  A fan may have his or her favorite diva, and argue that she's the best against the fans of rivals, but there is room (and a need) for more than five great sopranos in the opera world, just as there's no reason why New York City can't offer excellent educations to more than 185 new students each year.  Those who aren't the top 185 still have a claim on learning, and something to contribute.  (P.S. I think that Hayes's remarks here could only be made by someone who doesn't much like it, and knows next to nothing about it.)

I realize that I'm probably not a typical music listener, but I don't think in terms of seeking out the best singer, or songwriter, or guitarist, or pianist, or band in the world.  I look for music or other art that gives me pleasure, or moves me emotionally, and I'm drawn by a range of artists.  Sure, there are fans who root for their band or their singer against all others -- I remember with distaste the divide between Beatles and Stones fans in the 60s, for example -- but it isn't necessary to denigrate all other singers than your personal fave.  The mindset that does so is fed by the competitive ethos of capitalism, but that's what is wrong with it.  Few of even the most fanatical fans have records by only one performer in their collections.  And none of this has much if anything to do with merit, let alone meritocracy.

Hayes structures his book around a few hot-button stories that many writers and pundits can agree are important -- the Roman Catholic abuse scandals, steroids use in baseball, corruption in business and finance and politics -- but they don't have much to do with "meritocracy."  That's not too surprising, since he doesn't have a very clear understanding of what meritocracy is or might be, and Twilight of the Elites is a frustratingly insubstantial discussion of some serious problems.

The Best!

Lately I saw a little surge of talk about meritocracy on Twitter -- a surge in my little neighborhood, anyway.  I've had a lot to say on that subject here before, but this morning, as I was riding my bicycle to the library, I had a thought I don't think I've had before.

I suspect that there's a connection between faith/belief (they're not quite the same thing) in meritocracy and overrating the things or people to which we assign merit.  If you believe, as Chris Hayes for example does, that meritocracy means hiring the best, putting the best in charge of things, then you will probably feel an impulse to overrate the merit of those you nominate.  It may not be a simple cause-and-effect tendency.  You may want to give the person the job, the slot at your elite school, your money for their CD, because you think they're the best, rather than the other way around.  But they may not be the best, and it doesn't entirely matter.

For example, some years ago I saw that Bob Dylan had been ranked high in a Playboy readers' poll as a harmonica player.  Now, I like Dylan -- his early work anyway, up to 1970 or so -- but I never thought he was the best harmonica player around, or the best guitarist, or pianist, or singer.  He was good enough for what he wanted to do, and he violated norms for "good" singers in a good way: you don't have to be trained or have a pretty voice to be an expressive singer, and for some purposes having an ugly voice may be preferable.  But that doesn't mean you're the best singer, nor does it matter.

Now compare what Chris Hayes wrote on this subject in The Twilight of the Elites:

The same goes in a whole host of domains: the best opera soprano can, with the advent of MP3s and the Internet, sell to anyone in the world with an iPod, which spells trouble for the fifth best soprano. If you can buy the best, why settle? [143]

As I pointed out before, "best" is not the right word here.  Among seven billion people, there are going to be many thousands of operatic sopranos at such a level of excellence that it's really meaningless to call any of them the best.  The differences between them will be so tiny that most people can't detect them.  (This also applies to world-class athletes: the difference between the fastest runner and the tenth-fastest runner in the world is likely to be some tenths of a second, and some of that will be accidental, due to luck rather than "merit.")  To say that this "spells trouble for the fifth best soprano" is false; it doesn't spell trouble for the five hundredth best soprano.  As the example of Bob Dylan shows, you don't have to be the best singer or guitarist or harmonica player to make music that many people will want to buy -- more, most likely, than will buy the music of the best soprano.  Even in the domain Hayes elected to cite, his point is invalid, laughably so.  We often love things or people who are not the "best," and it would be ridiculous to claim that they are.  But they don't have to be.  We don't love them because they're the best.  We think they're the best because we love them.

This impulse emerges early in life, I think.  My mommy is the best mommy, the most beautiful mommy in the world.  I'm the best, handsomest, smartest little boy in the world.  These are conventions for expressing the intensity and sincerity of our love for someone.  But they're not literally true, and most of the time we know it.  It's believers in meritocracy who mistake metaphors for literal truth.

Is it even necessary to the concept of meritocracy that the best person should occupy a position?  Again, outside of a narrow range of fields, you cannot quantify qualifications for most jobs.  The fastest miler, for example, can be found.  (Next year, or the year after that, he won't be the fastest anymore, which is also important.)  The best CEO, the best accountant, the best IT manager, cannot. The best students for admission to elite colleges, or for that matter to community colleges.  One bit of evidence for what I'm suggesting here is the inflation of requirements for many positions: the applicant is expected to detail how and why denying insurance claims of the terminally ill is her passion, the goal on which she has focused, laser-like, since infancy.  Why he is very excited at the prospect of working the drive-through window at McDonald's.  (I've been allergic for decades now to the term "excited" in announcements; bullshit almost always follows that word.  But by now it too is a convention: if you didn't say you were excited to announce that this Friday will, once again, be Casual Friday, many people would feel that something important was missing.)  I've helped numerous friends fill out extremely long and detailed online applications, complete with a hundred personality-assay questions, to wash dishes in chain restaurants.  Something is wrong there, even leaving aside the invasion of privacy involved.

For many positions, what is needed is not the best, but someone who is simply good enough.  Often people grow into jobs; certainly we hope that students will grow into their educations.  All too often, despite the competition, the personality tests, the interviews, the trial-by-ordeal, the winning candidate isn't even good enough.  There are probably many things that need to be done to correct that, if it can be corrected; but one beginning might be to stop pressuring people to prove what can't in most cases be proven - that they're the best.

I'll Show You the Life of the Mind

One of the more interesting American phenomena to me is the way many of the same people who pay lip service to equality and other all-American values will, at other times, glumly but complacently declare that confidentially, y'know, everybody isn't equal and we need to learn to abandon sentimentality and live with reality.  Those who take this position range from jingoes like the late Robert A. Heinlein to nice mainstream liberals like Christopher Hayes to intellectual leftists like George Scialabba.  Most recently I came upon a post by the blogger and academic Freddie deBoer, written in a familiar more-in-anguish-than-in-exaltation mode.  DeBoer has taken some good, brave stands, but here he fell on his face.  I'm going to quote from his post at some length because deBoer has taken down his blog, and I don't know if this post in another venue will remain available:

To me, the hard political question is the gap after the gaps — the question of what to do with differences in academic and intellectual potential after we have closed the racial and gender achievement gaps. What do we do with differences in academic achievement after they no longer fall along traditional lines of inequality?

Perhaps it’s easier to say that I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that hoary old bigotries about the inherent intellectual abilities of different groups are wrong, and though much work remains to be done, as a society we are increasingly coming to shared public understanding that this is the case. Black people are not less intelligent than white, women have no less inherent talent for science, Asian people do not have some sort of genetic superiority in math. Those ideas seem to have largely been discredited and discarded by thinking people, and for that I’m glad.

The bad news is that there now appears to me to be overwhelming evidence that there are profound individual differences in academic potential, that different individual human beings have significantly unequal likelihoods of ascending to various tiers of academic performance. Educational philosophy for centuries has assumed great plasticity in the academic potential of any particular student, that given good teachers and hard work, most anyone can reach most any academic pinnacle. And the case that I would someday like to make, that I have been tinkering with making for many years, is that this appears to be substantially untrue. Instead, it appears that in general and on average, human beings are remarkably static in how they are sorted relative to others in all manner of metrics of academic achievement. In education, with remarkable consistency, the high performers stay high, and the low performers stay low. And it seems likely that this reflects some complex construct that we might call academic talent, which whatever its origins (whether genetic, environmental, parental, neonatal, circumstantial, etc) is far less mutable than has traditionally been understood,

There are many, many things that are implied, and crucially not implied, if we imagine a world where different individual students possess profoundly different academic talents.

• This condition is not rigid, certain, or unalterable; we live in a world of human variability, and individual students will always exist who start out low and go on to excel. There are undoubtedly many exceptions, in either direction. And in fact the degree of plasticity of outcomes itself is likely highly variable. The question, particularly from the standpoint of public policy, lies in trends and averages.
• This condition may be a matter of strict genetic determinism, but it doesn’t have to be. Simply because a given trait is not genetic in its origins does not mean that it is inherently or permanently mutable. Environmental and parental factors are not genetic but neither are they therefore necessarily mutable.
• This condition does not imply educational nihilism, a belief that teaching is pointless or learning is impossible. All students can learn, consistently over time, even as relative position remains stable. Indeed, I would argue that is in fact the reality in which we live.
• This condition does not mean that inequalities in environment are not real, important, or a problem. Individual academic talent is subject to the influence of external forces like any other. Poverty, abuse, affluence, chance — all materially impact outcomes, raising the less talented and restricting the more talented, or amplifying privilege and disadvantage alike. The existence of talent does not imply the irrelevance of external factors, nor does the impact of those factors erase the reality of differences in talent.
• This condition does not imply that our metrics are the correct ones, that the abilities and knowledge that we select for in our tests and schools are the only real, useful, or valid means of sorting human minds. It does not require use to believe in the wisdom or benevolence of our education system or economy. It only requires us to believe that the socially-designated, contingent abilities we have decided are worth rewarding are not equitably sorted or equally available to all.
• This condition does not entail some sort of overall difference in the inherent value of different people. There are many more ways to be a good, worthwhile, positive person than simply to fit into our current Procrustean metrics for what makes you a good student.
• This condition does not imply a conservative, you-get-what-you-deserve attitude towards economics. Indeed, I think it amounts to a powerful argument for socialism

So: good news and bad news, he's been struggling for years with the empirical facts, we have to leave behind romantic illusions and face the cold, hard but still potentially socialist music.

Myself, I don't see any news here at all, bad or good.  DeBoer anticipates that reaction:

This claim is strange in that it prompts both reactions that it is obvious, that “everyone knows” that different individual humans have different academic abilities, and reactions that insist it is offensive, undermining of human dignity, dangerous. What is clear, however, is that in the world of policy, the notion of fundamental differences in the academic potential of different individual students seems bizarrely ignored.

The first thing to notice here is deBoer's focus on "academic abilities."  Though he disclaims it in his bullet-point qualifications, he seems to take for granted that academic abilities are "the socially-designated, contingent abilities we have decided are worth rewarding," and that they the only abilities that matter.  I don't agree that "we have decided" these abilities are "worth rewarding," except in school, and the rewards they receive there are mostly of the gold-star, teacher's-pet variety.  People who excel in school are generally regarded ambivalently in our society; it's proverbial that book smarts aren't worth as much as common-sense smarts; and they are not necessary for worldly or commercial success; not even to get a job and do it well.  The most that can be said is that the years of schooling required to get many "good" jobs have increased over the past century, but this has little or nothing to do with the skills or knowledge those jobs require.  The same high school diploma that used to be a sign of unusual achievement and intelligence will now, maybe, get you a job at McDonald's.  And even that is more because schooling is intended to inculcate obedience, punctuality (the ability to regulate oneself by the clock), neatness (the ability to color within the lines), willingness to take orders, and tolerance of boredom, not the academic abilities deBoer is concerned with.

It's certainly true that "'everyone knows' that different individual humans have different academic abilities."  DeBoer says it's mainly "in the world of policy" that this platitude is ignored, but I'm not so sure.  I recently read the biologist Ernst Mayr's One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Harvard, 1993), and Mayr discussed the interesting problem that although individual variation is a pillar of Darwin's theory, scientists have often tended to ignore it, preferring to view populations as uniform; which, aside from being empirically false (as any naturalist could and did point out), rejects a crucial part of the theory they are using.  Ignoring individual variation in groups is a common, perhaps normal human trait.  It persists, I think, because it simplifies whatever question you're thinking about, but it also leads to false and often destructive answers.  Additionally, as I said, a remarkable range of people say, in public, things like "kids are not created equal," trying to give the impression that they are bravely saying the Unpopular Things that 99% of those in public life haven't got the guts to say.

While 'everybody knows' that students have differing abilities and potential, 'everybody' also tends to ignore this knowledge.  Attending to students' individuality costs more money, for instance, and those who want to destroy public education are always seeking ways to cut costs, especially for the schooling of Other People's children.  But it also conflicts with a traditional model of schooling, that of rote memorization and drill, part of whose function is to sort students, though much of it is intended to even out individual differences.  Those who stand out in approved ways may get special, individual attention and permitted to advance to actual education; the rest will not.

The traditional model is also compatible with deBoer's insistence that his "condition does not entail some sort of overall difference in the inherent value of different people."  Traditional, hierarchical, Great-Chain-of-Being models of humanity generally pay lip service to the notion that everybody has his place in God's great creation: red or yellow, black or white, all are precious in His sight.  Know your place, tug your forelock, don't be ambitious, the nail that sticks up gets the hammer.  Let me stress that deBoer isn't pushing such a model; his point appears to be that, given individual variation, he doesn't know what to replace it with.  I suggest that we already know what to replace it with, at least in practice: attention to individuals with full awareness that they have different talents and abilities.  Plenty of teachers and educational writers have addressed this over the years.

That's why deBoer's crucial question is misconceived: "What do we do with differences in academic achievement after they no longer fall along traditional lines of inequality?"  First, in the traditional model of schooling I mentioned, "traditional lines of inequality" often weren't a problem; such schools functioned in 'racially' uniform communities, and their very purpose was to sort students according to academic achievement.  This is true in modern Japan, South Korea, Europe, and other countries with programs to sort students into various vocational tracks or niches; numerous Americans have argued that the US should follow their example. Sexist discrimination was a factor in Japan, for example, but not racial discrimination.  Class discrimination also was a factor, and I am struck by deBoer's failure to mention it, especially given the role class plays in recent efforts by biological determinists to justify stratification based on IQ and other dubious metrics.  In fact, it seems to me that his crucial question is basically that of The Bell Curve, which contrary to what you may have heard, was primarily meant to address the same question deBoer asks, using the same assumptions: What will we do when we've eliminated unfair discrimination and every student, every citizen, is evaluated not by sex or skin color but by their innate ability and merit?

DeBoer also has a short post about a study of Head Start, also available at medium.com, which begins by reassuring the reader that he's

in favor of universal Pre-K on social justice grounds and believe that it’s worth it even if there’s no demonstrable educational gains, as parents should have governmental help in rearing children, particularly so that they can go back to work and be more economically secure. And I’m also in favor of broadening our definitions of success as the study’s authors call for.

But in the second paragraph he bemoans "the complete absence of any frank acknowledgment that there is such a thing as natural academic talent," etc. etc., "And until we recognize that there are persistent inequalities in natural talent, we’re not engaging in a productive discussion about real-world problems."  In the longer post he writes:

Yet consider that society: if even a moderate portion of this difference in talent lies outside of the hands of the students themselves, the basic moral architecture of our supposed meritocracy has been undermined. A system that portions out material security and abundance according to the fickle distributions of academic talent, which children do not choose, is a system that has no basis for calling itself fair. Yet if we successfully combated the forces of white supremacy and sexism to the point that we achieved a racially and sexually equal society, many people would content themselves that the work of social justice had been done. But we would continue to live in a world of terrible and punishing inequality. It would simply be distributed on different lines.

The reference to "our supposed meritocracy" may be the giveaway; it shows that deBoer is evidently as confused as most people who talk about meritocracy.  So let me explain.

First: America is not a meritocracy.  Propagandists and apologists for every society will tell you that rewards and punishments are distributed fairly in their green and pleasant land, no matter how unfair the actual distribution may be.  Whatever differences you observe in the distribution are the result of people's merit or lack thereof, though of course there are malcontents who claim otherwise.  They're just jealous of their superiors and want to drag them down to their miserable level.  Just about everybody seems to agree that people should be hired, admitted to university, etc. on the basis of their merit; the trouble is that most people are convinced that merit is connected to class, race, sex, test scores, and other markers that are not, in fact connected to merit.

Second: DeBoer is confusing inequality and difference, as so many people do, and assuming (probably unconsciously) that you can't have a society of equals as long as there are any differences between individuals.  If you believe that, you do indeed have a problem, but if you jettison that assumption the problem evaporates.  He pays lip service to the contrary position in his bullet points, but abandons it when he sums up the Problem.  In the classroom, for example, equality doesn't mean that every child must earn, let alone be gifted, an A regardless of his or her performance -- even assuming for the sake of argument that performance reliably reflects "potential."  The utility and fairness of grading should not be assumed either; there are good reasons why grading, especially competitive grading, should be abolished.

Third: The preceding is true when we move from schools to society at large.  Equality doesn't mean that everybody has the same things.  To begin with, everybody doesn't want the same things.  Nor does everybody need the same things.  I've had some revealing debates with people who confused equality of outcome with political equality, and who couldn't or wouldn't grasp that equality doesn't mean that everybody must get open-heart surgery or take insulin or get an abortion; or that everyone must live in a penthouse apartment in a big city, or alternatively in a farmhouse with a white picket fence surrounded by amber waves of grain.  None of these is more meritorious than other alternatives.

It could be said as truly that there is such a thing as natural athletic or musical talent, or other talents that are not equally distributed through the population.  As Noam Chomsky wrote decades ago, this is not really a problem either.

... The question of heritability of IQ might conceivably have some social importance, say, with regard to educational practice. However, even this seems dubious, and one would like to see an argument. It is, incidentally, surprising to me that so many commentators should find it disturbing that IQ might be heritable, perhaps largely so. Would it also be disturbing to discover that relative height or musical talent or rank in running the hundred-yard dash is in part genetically determined? Why should one have preconceptions one way or another about these questions, and how do the answers to them, whatever they may be, relate either to serious scientific issues (in the present state of our knowledge) or to social practice in a decent society? [from For Reasons of State, Pantheon, 1973, p. 361-362]

There lurks in deBoer's declaration of the Problem the assumption that the difference in potential he refers to must be expressed or discovered in competition, whether in the classroom or in the workplace, and that "material security and abundance" should be parceled out to the winners, with the losers getting less or nothing at all.  If you share that assumption, deBoer's objection that such "a system ... has no basis for calling itself fair" collapses: such a system is fair by definition.  If you don't share the assumption that social "rewards" should be parceled out to the winners of the Game of Life, then deBoer's Problem simply disappears.

Ellen Willis put it very well years ago in a review of The Bell Curve: "If I bought the authors' thesis, I would still be allergic to their politics. I don't advocate equality because I think everyone is the same; I believe that difference, real or imagined, is no excuse for subordinating some people to others. Equality is a principle of human relations, not Procrustes' bed" (40).*  Nor is equality a statement about the talents or other endowments of human beings; individuals are different, but political and social equality has nothing to do with such things.  It means that the person who is less gifted has the same right to a fulfilling life (to say nothing of basic human and civil rights) as the person who is more gifted.  (By which I mean a life that fulfills him or her, even if it wouldn't fulfill me or Freddie deBoer.  From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, y'know.)  I find it interesting that deBoer, who makes much of his commitment to socialism and the left, has somehow managed to miss that.  But then, the academic talents of which he makes so much have often served to make excuses for political inequality, by fostering confusion between equality and sameness, inequality and difference.

It may be that by "hard political question" deBoer merely means the difficulty of getting American society to accept the principle of political equality.  That will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, I would agree.  But it's so difficult because people resist it so strongly.  Empirical research can't settle it, because as Ellen Willis said, equality is a principle, not a fact.  That Freddie deBoer is so confused about it is further evidence of people's difficulty in grasping the difference.  So I'm not sure that he is referring to the practical difficulty of getting the idea of equality across; he sees it as a problem because he wants it to be a problem.  And because so many intelligent and educated people agree with him, that's a problem.

* In Don't Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (Beacon, 1999).

What He Said

Saith the IOZ (typos repaired, just because I'm feeling anal today):

Were it not so plainly a result of obvious yet resolutely unexamined intellectual prejudices, I would find it curious that our freemarketarian friends are so dutifully committed to the plainly preposterous notion that within enterprises outside the political realm, true merit and virtue are rewarded; the cream rises; talent is recognized; ability is a boon. On a small scale, this is funny because it presumes the existence of enterprise outside the political realm. On a grand scale, it's funny because its most ardent proponents have so obviously never spent much time in a business enterprise, where the perversities of who does and does not rise are, if anything, even more deranged than in the strictly political territory of electoral politics. While there are certainly some very smart, talented, incisive, conversant, articulate, and well-cultured businesscreatures in the world, most of our captains of industry are even more cretinous, subhuman, moronic, and depraved than the average US senator, and that's no low hurdle or short sprint.

P.S. From Noam Chomsky's "Psychology and Ideology" in For Reasons of State (Random House, 1973, reprinted The New Press, 2003) p. 355:

One might speculate, rather plausibly, that wealth and power tend to accrue to those who are ruthless, cunning, avaricious, self-seeking, lacking in sympathy and compassion, subservient to authority and willing to abandon principle for material gain, and so on. Furthermore, these traits might very well be as heritable as IQ, and might outweigh IQ as factors in gaining material reward. Such qualities just might be the valuable ones for a war of all against all. If so, the society that results (applying [Richard] Herrnstein's "syllogism") could hardly be characterized as a "meritocracy." By using the word "meritocracy" Herrnstein begs some interesting questions and reveals implicit assumptions about our society that are hardly self-evident.

Elitism for the Masses, Revisited

So, I'm reading George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For? Essays and Reviews (Boston: Pressed Wafer, 2009), and I'm surprised at how much I disagree with him. It was because of Scialabba's review of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's The Political Economy of Human Rights years ago that I first got really interested in Chomsky's writing, and I've liked some other work of Scialabba's that I've seen, so I started assuming that our views were similar, and you know what happens when you assume.

I appreciate the fact that, like me, Scialabba is in the university but not an academic -- he graduated from Harvard in 1969 but became an office worker there, managing a "mid-sized academic office building" for many years. Unlike me, he was raised Catholic and joined the reactionary and ascetic group Opus Dei, but in college he fell under the spell of secular modernity and abandoned his thoughts of a religious vocation. He's only a couple of years older than I am, so our trajectories have some similarities, but our interests and values are often quite different.

For example, in the book's second essay, "The Sealed Envelope", Scialabba laments that "the masses have fairly consistently disappointed their well-wishers, including me" (26). This is a common complaint on the Left, and I've made it myself, but Scialabba proceeds from there to accept

the argument for elitism: that most people will always be incapable of the energy, imaginative range, sensual and familial detachment, and inner poise required for citizenship in a republic. There is no disgrace in this: most of us are not gifted musicians or mathematicians and feel no shame about it. It is not, obviously, a precise analogy: fellow citizens influence and sometimes govern us; musicians do not. But in another respect the analogy may be valid and actually encouraging. Mathematical and musical ability can be fostered, up to a point, especially if the effort begins in childhood. And generations of what might be called equal early-environmental opportunity may level differences in aptitude. Might a similarly benign civic pedagogy produce a similarly vast rise in the general level of republican virtue?

Once again, conservatives without imagination will wearily or indignantly object that civic pedagogy on a mass scale – any effort to produce rather than merely permit social virtue – must end in totalitarianism. Conservatives (and liberals and radicals) without imagination are, I suppose, always numerous and influential enough to be worth arguing with. Some other time, though; what haunts me most keenly at present are not Isaiah Berlin’s and Leszek Koliakowski’s pontifications nor the grandiloquence of the nouveaux philosophes, but rather these sadly, quietly authoritative observations of Ortega y Gasset:

The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are; without imposing on themselves toward perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves. … As one advances in life, one realizes more and more that the majority of men – and women – are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external compulsion. The few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out isolated. … These are the select men, the noble ones, the only ones who are active and not reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving.

Any number of objections will doubtless spring to a generous mind, but one that can hardly do is that the distinction Ortega proposes is not “the most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity.” If humanity will always be a mass of dough leavened sporadically by a yeast of heroes, then why talk of “radical democracy”? Capitalist democracy requires only consumers, fermented occasionally by entrepreneurs. The resulting loaf is not very nourishing, but a lot more so than Stalinist or pre-modern brands. And if Ortega is even roughly right, what other kind of democracy is possible? [27-28]

Scialabba makes things too easy for himself by labeling everyone else either "without imagination" on the right, and possessed of "a generous mind" on the left, leaving him with Ortega somewhere in between. Psychoanalyzing one's opponent, while satisfying, is not an argument, and it's argument that's lacking here.

It doesn't matter whether Ortega's division of humanity is "radical" or not. One can divide humanity any way one likes -- I'm sure you've heard the joke about there being two kinds of people, those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't -- but in order to use such a division as the basis for politics, it is necessary to show that the division has some basis in the real world. Neither Ortega nor Scialabba does so. Scialabba assumes that "humanity will always be a mass of dough leavened sporadically by a yeast of heroes", and accepts "that most people will always be incapable of the energy, imaginative range, sensual and familial detachment, and inner poise required for citizenship in a republic." It's not enough to assert such things, they must be supported. Scialabba simply begs the question.

It's not obvious that humanity can be divided into "those who make great demands of themselves" and those "for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are; without imposing on themselves toward perfection" -- but even if this is the case, it isn't obvious that society is presently ruled by those who make great demands of themselves and are consequently the "yeast of heroes" possessed of "the energy, imaginative range, sensual and familial detachment, and inner pose required for citizenship in a republic." Who, I wonder, could Scialabba have in mind? Ronald Reagan? George Bush? (Either one.) Rush Limbaugh? John McCain? For that matter, Barack Obama?

But leave Republicans aside. It was "the best and brightest" of the Democrats, quite full of their own civic virtue and superior learning, who waged the Cold War and, among other spontaneous and joyous efforts, got the United States into Vietnam. Scialabba himself, in another essay collected here, tells how

The New Republic’s editors and contributors, especially John Dewey, urged “realism” and a more indulgent view of the uses of force. They were confident that “intelligence” (that is, they, the intelligentsia) could turn the forces set loose by the war to creative social purposes at home and abroad, could turn mechanized lunacy into a “democratic war.” But to do this it was necessary to ally themselves with – in fact, to subordinate themselves to – state power. They did so enthusiastically, and thereafter (like many liberal supporters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq) devoted a good deal of polemical energy to jeering at radicals and pacifists, whose scruples, the “realists” claimed, could lead only to isolation and impotence" [36-7].

Or as Noam Chomsky wrote,

One might speculate, rather plausibly, that wealth and power tend to accrue to those who are ruthless, cunning, avaricious, self-seeking, lacking in sympathy and compassion, subservient to authority and willing to abandon principle for material gain, and so on. ... Such qualities just might be the valuable ones for a war of all against all. If so, the society that results (applying [Richard] Herrnstein's "syllogism") could hardly be characterized as a "meritocracy." By using the word "meritocracy" Herrnstein begs some interesting questions and reveals implicit assumptions about our society that are hardly self-evident [For Reasons of State (Pantheon Books, 1973), 355].

Of course, this isn't what Ortega meant by people who make great demands of themselves, or what Scialabba meant by those who have the imaginative range and inner poise necessary for civic virtue, but it's not clear what they did mean. What disturbs me is that Ortega appears to be drawing on the "life force" fantasies that were common among many intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw evolution as a movement up the Great Chain of Being. These were compatible with, and encouraged, the blood-and-soil racism that flourished on both sides of the Atlantic -- and there too, the superiority of the rulers was assumed, not proven.

On the other hand, I'm not persuaded that "the masses" never make great demands of themselves. (But then, neither Ortega nor Scialabba tries to persuade; they simply assert.) Scialabba recounts how the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously "renounced his wealth and his career in order to teach children in rural Austria, only to conclude that peasants and children alike were as vile as Cambridge dons" (26). This would be better reversed: Cambridge dons, and Wittgenstein himself, were as vile as peasants and children -- but then the division between the rulers and the masses would collapse. If they (or should I say "we"? from the viewpoint of the rulers, Scialabba and I are part of the masses) are often intellectually and morally lazy, so are the rulers, with much more destructive results.

Nor do I agree with Scialabba's "unimaginative conservative" that our present social arrangements "permit civic virtue"; rather they have evolved to suppress it. All efforts to keep the proles and peasants in their place, though, encounter resistance, often successful. The poor and downtrodden, being too ignorant to realize that they lack "civic virtue" and are mere complacent "buoys that float on the waves", have an alarming tendency to demand more, both of themselves and of the societies they live in. So we get such surprises -- to the elites, anyway -- as the 1990 election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti; the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua; democracy movements in South Korea, China, Venezuela, Bolivia, and elsewhere; and the refusal of the Vietnamese people to submit to foreign rule, whether French, Japanese, or American. Even in the US, the people don't always listen to the wise leaders who try to instill civic virtue in them. These efforts may not lead to "radical" democracy, but they are seldom allowed to. How can these upheavals be reconciled with Scialabba's "case for elitism"? I don't think they can, but they also trump it, and they indicate to me that Scialabba gave up on the people too easily.

As for Scialabba's "benign civic pedagogy," he seems to assume, as much as any unimaginative conservative, that it can only be imposed from above. But as Amartya Sen wrote in Development as Freedom (Oxford, 1999, p. 79),

There is an interesting choice here between "technocracy" and "democracy" in the selection of weights, which may be worth discussing a little. A choice procedure that relies on a democratic search for agreement or a consensus can be extremely messy, and many technocrats are sufficiently disgusted by its messiness to pine for some wonderful formula that would simply give us ready made weights that are "just right." However, no such magic formula does, of course, exist, since the issue of weighting is one of valuation and judgment, and not of some impersonal technology.

Sen also remarked (151):

Are the citizens of third world countries indifferent to political and democratic rights? This claim, which is often made, is again based on too little empirical evidence .... The only way of verifying this would be to put the matter to democratic testing in free elections with freedom of opposition and expression -- precisely the things that the supporters of authoritarianism do not allow to happen. It is not clear at all how this proposition can be checked when the ordinary citizens are given little political opportunity to express their views on this and even less to dispute the claims made by the authorities in office. The downgrading of these rights and freedoms is certainly part of the value system of the government leaders in many third world countries, but to take that to be the view of the people is to beg a very big question.

This observation applies no less to the First World masses, I'd say. I don't think I'm either a "radical democrat" or a "utopian" one; I expect the process of democracy to be messy, as Sen says, and the people will often be wrong. But the mistakes (and the crimes, come to that) will be theirs. I don't believe it's the masses who are the problem; it's the self-styled elites.

A Matter of Opinion

I just read Occupy, Noam Chomsky's new pamphlet of interviews and speeches on the Occupy movement.  It's a slim volume, and there's nothing new in it, but it's always interesting to read what Chomsky has to say.  (The appendix by the National Lawyers' Guild on dealing with police and arrest, however, will be immediately useful to many people.)  One bit that caught my attention was a question and Chomsky's answer to it in an interview with an NYU student:

The late British philosopher, Martin Hollis, worked extensively on questions of human action, the philosophy of social science and rationality.  One of the claims he made was that any anarchist vision of a society rests upon an idea of human nature that is too optimistic.  In short, he argued that anarchism is only viable if humans by nature are good.  He says that history shows us that humans cannot be trusted to this degree; thus, anarchism is too idealistic.  Would you mind responding to this objection very quickly, given your commitment to some of the ideals of anarchism?

It's possible to respond to arguments.  It is not possible to respond to opinions.  If someone makes an assertion saying, "Here's what I believe," that's fine -- he can say what he believes, but you can't respond to it.  You can ask, what is the basis for your belief?  Or, can you provide me with some evidence?  What do you know about human nature?  Actually, we don't know very much about human nature.  So yes, that's an expression of his belief, and he's entitled to make it.  We have no idea, nor does he have any idea, if it's true or false.  But it doesn't really matter; whatever the truth turns out to be, we will follow the same policies, namely, trying to optimize and maximize freedom, justice, participation, democracy.  Those are goals that we'll attempt to realize.  Maybe human beings are such that there's a limit to how far they can be realized; okay, we'll still follow the same policies.  So whatever one's un-argued assertions may be, it has very little effect on the policy and choices [66-7].

I disagree with Chomsky on several points here.  I think you can respond to opinions.  I'd consider the kinds of questions he suggests to be responses to opinions.  Chomsky has certainly spent more time debating people in his career than I have, and he has his own approach, but to me it seems important not to let opinions stand unanswered or uncriticized.  I've encountered many people who believe that their opinions should be "respected" without question or criticism, but I haven't observed that they draw a distinction between arguments and opinions: they just won't tolerate any disagreement with their beliefs (though they feel free to disagree with the beliefs of others).

Besides, it looks to me like Hollis was making an argument, though I can't be sure since I can't look at his own words; the interviewer doesn't give a source, and I haven't found one online.  It looks like he was arguing something like this:

If anarchism is to work, human nature must be good.
But human nature is bad.
Therefore anarchism can't work.

It's a badly flawed argument, but it's an argument, and a response can be made to it.  It's flawed, first, because "good" and "bad" beg numerous questions about human nature.  (A Randian Objectivist, for instance, would consider selfishness and a refusal to cooperate with other people as "good.")  It's flawed because of its assumptions about what anarchism requires in order to work, and also about what it would mean for anarchism or any other political system to work.  These are objections that would have to be answered before you even get to Chomsky's, valid as they are: we don't know enough about human nature to say whether or not anarchism is compatible with it, and even if we did, we wouldn't necessarily be required to behave in ways that we consider wrong.

The anarchist Paul Goodman addressed virtually the same objection forty years ago, in his last public speech, reprinted in a posthumous collection of his political writings, Drawing the Line (Free Life Editions, 1977).

Question: But people are naturally greedy – without some political compulsion they’ll do harm to each other and never reform.

Goodman: Let’s assume, as you say, that people are greedy. First, people are just what they are; the beauty of the decentralist, anarchist position is that nobody can do much harm. As an anarchist, and all anarchists are decentralists, our view is not that human nature is good, but on the contrary, that human nature is probably lousy. It’s improvable, but probably lousy. People are corrupt as hell, therefore don’t give anybody any power, because that’s where the trouble comes from, because the people who have power are not going to be better than the other people. In fact we know that the more power people have the more corrupt they become. Let’s make sure that everybody has an independent free-hold of their own, and if they’ve got that then there will be a limit to how bad things can get. And that’s all you want out of politics. You don’t want politics to give you a good society. All you want is a tolerable background so the important parts of life can go on. We all know what the important parts are, the arts, the science, sex, justice, worship of God, love of nature. The political things are insignificant. But if they are bad, wow, can they cause damage. I don’t want to change human nature. I couldn’t care less. All I want to make sure is that there are enough goods to go around, and there will be enough goods to go around in this highly productive and intelligent race, on this highly productive planet, if you don’t allow it to get concentrated [271-2].

As Goodman said, even if you grant the assumption that people are naturally "greedy" (which I suspect is close to Hollis's), it doesn't follow that some people should therefore be allowed power over others -- the opposite, in fact.  The same people who hold that human nature is essentially greedy and corrupt tend to be the same people who support hierarchies of power.  I don't know whether they believe that some people are less greedy and corrupt than others, and therefore can be trusted with that power, or that pyramidal hierarchies somehow keep those at the top from abusing their power.  Experience would seem to suggest that neither is true in any case, so it is at least a fair to question to ask how to prevent such abuses, and Goodman's anarchist answer -- make sure no one has much power -- is reasonable.  (How to get from a centralized, hierarchical society to a decentralized anarchist one is another question, which numerous anarchists, including Chomsky, have addressed.  Only the very young, I think, believe that the process will be easy or short, but then the young are more inclined to believe that five years is a long time.)

The biblical scholar James Barr made a similar point in his writings about fundamentalism, though it extends to conservative Christianity in general: the same Christians who insist on the inescapability of human sinfulness tend to structure their churches according to a cult of personality which quietly exempts their leaders from Original Sin, with scandals both small and large resulting.  On the secular side, there are the various forms of social Darwinism, which claim that people who make large amounts of money or achieve high political office have proven their superiority to their fellows, by definition.  As Chomsky wrote at around the same time Goodman made that speech (in For Reasons of State [Random House, 1973], 375):

One might speculate, rather plausibly, that wealth and power tend to accrue to those who are ruthless, cunning, avaricious, self-seeking, lacking in sympathy and compassion, subservient to authority and willing to abandon principle for material gain, and so on. Furthermore, these traits might very well be as heritable as IQ, and might outweigh IQ as factors in gaining material reward. Such qualities just might be the valuable ones for a war of all against all. If so, the society that results (applying [Richard] Herrnstein's "syllogism") could hardly be characterized as a "meritocracy." By using the word "meritocracy" Herrnstein begs some interesting questions and reveals implicit assumptions about our society that are hardly self-evident.

As Chomsky says at the outset, this is speculation -- but so are the opinions he and Goodman opposed.  If Chomsky's speculation pointed us in the right direction, though, we'd face another difficulty: it would mean that "human nature" is not uniform, and that some people appear to be constitutionally unsuited to living peaceably and cooperatively with others.  If anything, it's those who become our rulers who would have to be recognized as the dangerously inferior breed of Homo Sapiens, not the many. How would an anarchist society, which rejects compulsion, deal with such people?

There's plenty of evidence (most recently gathered and discussed by Rebecca Solnit and Alfie Kohn) that people prefer to cooperate, even in times of great stress.  Once again the notion that people need to be repressed when there's a disaster, that the only alternative is rioting and mob rule, turns out to be a projection by those who have scrambled to the top, and assume that the majority of people are like them.  Whenever someone stresses the human potential for cooperation and nonviolent forms of conflict resolution, there's bound to be someone else who derides it as a wishful kissyface-huggybear hippie fantasy.  From what I've seen, that's not the case either: those who stress cooperation don't suppose an absence of conflict, only that conflicts needn't be resolved by violence.  Nor do they postulate the disappearance of greed and selfishness, they are arguing that these traits needn't be regarded as the human default.  In practice, despite their occasional crocodile tears about the horrors of war, or the dreadfulness of rape, the critics of cooperation clearly prefer war as the first resort of international conflict resolution, and they're much more upset by the possibility that men might be restrained from forcibly making sperm deposits than they are by the suffering of the victims. (Indeed, as I've pointed out before, many men have real trouble telling the difference between rape and consensual sex.)

Beware the (self-styled) clear-eyed realists who cheerfully accept the necessity of hierarchy and violence -- for other people -- and lightly dismiss other possibilities.  The assumptions they select reveal what really turns them on.