Merit

I was once chatting with a friend who had climbed the ladders of a big multinational before joining the United Nations. “Everything I’ve achieved, I owe to myself,” she said – and the facetious Socrates in me couldn’t resist: “Really? What do you mean?” I asked. “Well, I’ve always worked hard at my job.” And it’s true, as far as merit goes, she’s a shining example of it. No nepotism, no wealthy family, nor even any sly networking seemed to have played a role in her ascent – just hard, conscientious work. “But would you have landed that first job if you hadn’t graduated from a good university?” I questioned her further. “Maybe not,” she replied confidently, as if to settle the question once and for all, “but I went to a good university because I got good marks at school. I was a good kid.” “But would you have been a good kid if you’d had bad parents?” She paused to think, then the friendly banter resumed. But the pause was heavy with philosophical pondering.  

The (real) myth of meritocracy

A lot of criticism has been levelled at meritocracy – systems in which jobs and academic positions are supposed to be awarded on the basis of merit alone –, most recently by the American philosopher Michael Sandel. And if (like my friend) you think you can rehabilitate the idea of merit by redefining it as effort… Sandel has news for you. 

“Even the effort that some people expend [...] depends on fortunate family circumstances for which we can claim no credit,” he tells his elite students in a highly entertaining lecture at Harvard university. He then asks them to raise their hand if they happen to be first-borns, and to their great surprise, a startling majority of them do. “Psychologists say that birth order makes a lot of difference in work ethic, striving, effort,” Sandel points out, before driving home his point: “Is it your doing that you were first in birth order?” 

‘The more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility’

—Michael Sandel, philosopher

Philosophers like Michael Sandel – and before him, John Rawls – critique the delusional belief in merit in order to expose the flaws in our modern meritocratic systems, to call for more safeguards for those who don’t succeed. Besides being self-deluding, such thinking is also “corrosive of civic sensibilities,” Sandel writes in his book The Tyranny of Merit (2020). “For the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility. And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good.” 

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