David Brooks's Critique of Meritocracy

David Brooks

"We need to build a meritocracy that is true to its values, truly open to all," writes New York Times columnist David Brooks in "The Strange Failure of the Educated Elite."

Today's meritocracy, Brooks writes, replaced our "older establishment" — in which the status of our movers and shakers was based on birth, not talent — that "won World War II and built the American Century."

Following WWII, Brooks tells us, Americans' status became increasingly merit-based; yet the putative values of us post-WWII baby boomers in favor of ushering "formerly oppressed" groups into their fair share of the American Dream have atrophied. Boomers ascended America's economic and social ladder based on their individual abilities, but then they began to "use their intellectual, financial and social advantages to pass down privilege to their children, creating a hereditary elite that is ever more insulated from the rest of society."

But that's not Brooks's main point. His main point is that "the ideology of meritocracy itself" is flawed. It's flawed because it "encourages several ruinous beliefs":

1. Exaggerated faith in intelligence
2. Misplaced faith in autonomy
3. Misplaced notion of the self
4. Inability to think institutionally
5. Misplaced idolization of diversity

Brooks's discussion of these five errors in today's thinking takes our minds into the region of the quite abstruse, so herein I'd like to try to unpack some of Brooks's ideas as best I can.

Exaggerated faith in intelligence refers to our tendency to judge ourselves and one another by the scores we achieve on I.Q. tests. Under the assumption that one's I.Q. equals that individual's potential for success, we think someone's I.Q. therefore equals his or her value to society. Yet, Brooks writes, "many of the great failures of the last 50 years, from Vietnam to Watergate to the financial crisis, were caused by extremely intelligent people who didn’t care about the civic consequences of their actions."

I'd modify that to say "didn’t care enough about the civic consequences of their actions." My belief is that the movers and shakers who brought us the war in Vietnam, Watergate, and the financial crisis often at least intended to be civic-minded in making their choices and undertaking their initiatives. Yet what they did hurt us instead of making us better off.

Misplaced faith in autonomy indicts boomers' emphasis on the "individual journey" that every modern-day person supposedly undertakes en route to hoped-for success in life. Sadly, too much individualism atomizes us. It separates the meritorious who do manage to get ahead from everybody else. It engenders "a society high in narcissism and low in social connection." So here we Americans are, living in our present moment.

Misplaced notion of the self is Brooks's way of talking about our unfortunate elevation of "achievement" over "character." (I'm put in mind that the Puritans who settled New England believed that becoming conspicuously wealthy was a sign of God's favor.) Yet Brooks says:

If you base a society on a conception of self that is about achievement, not character, you will wind up with a society that is demoralized; that puts little emphasis on the sorts of moral systems that create harmony within people, harmony between people and harmony between people and their ultimate purpose.

That quote is the place where Brooks gets to the kernel of his thinking. He wants us to conjoin morality, harmony in its various modalities, and "ultimate purpose." Later on he introduces the word telos, so I'll delay further discussion of this point until I mention ...

Inability to think institutionally: This refers to a loss of faith in our social, political, and economic institutions, many of which were built after WWII by the older establishment's movers and shakers; thus, we've become disenchanted with the postwar global order. But we've also come to disrespect older great institutions such as the U.S. Congress.

... and I'll also mention ...

Misplaced idolization of diversity: the newfound "diversity" in American life has to do with "widened opportunities [for] those who were formerly oppressed," and thus would seem to be entirely good. But diversity is not the be-all-and-end-all, Brooks says.

Here's where Brooks introduces the idea of telos, thereby pushing us off the edge of our metaphorical swimming pool and into that pool's intellectual "deep end."

Telos is an ancient Greek word meaning "end," "purpose," or "goal." Another idea the word expresses is "meaning" — under the assumption that the meaning of history and the end-purpose of all our striving are identical. That's why Brooks says that

... diversity is a midpoint, not an endpoint. Just as a mind has to be opened so that it can close on something, an organization has to be diverse so that different perspectives can serve some end. Diversity for its own sake, without a common telos, is infinitely centrifugal, and leads to social fragmentation.

In other words, our newfound insistence on fostering diversity and inclusiveness is a necessary "way station" en route to the telos which is our history's ultimate meaning. But that ultimate meaning, that telos, includes more than just diversity.

And so Brooks ends by saying:

The meritocracy is here to stay, thank goodness, but we probably need a new ethos to reconfigure it — to redefine how people are seen, how applicants are selected, how social roles are understood and how we narrate a common national purpose.

I fully agree. But I also wonder exactly what that new ethos — "the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize [our] community, nation, or ideology — is going to have to be, and how we can go about forming that new ethos.