Curiosity or Contempt?
Michael J. Sandel's 'The Tyranny of Merit,' and the search for the common good.
As the United States slides inexorably toward an encore performance of the 2020 presidential election, a show that seemingly no one wants to watch, but, oh well, I suspect that the toxic atmosphere that prevailed four years ago will again dominate our discourse—not that it ever really went away. Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the election of Barack Obama, an army of pundits, political scientists, and armchair commentators (it me!) has sought to explain our ever-widening cultural rift, the drift of the white working class away from the Democratic Party, and the rise of right-wing populism. It’s racial resentment! It’s stagnant wages! It’s globalization! It’s the urban/rural divide!
The political philosopher Michael J. Sandel’s 2020 book, The Tyranny of Merit, validates each of these explanations, while suggesting that the ultimate culprit for our era of extreme polarization, at home and abroad, is our sham meritocracy, and the attendant sense of hubris and humiliation it bestows, respectively, upon society’s alleged “winners” and “losers.”
I want to argue that for the beneficiaries of globalization, this hubris has led to a striking imbalance: in our conception of the ideological “other,” we are warehousing contempt while our supply of curiosity runs dangerously low. If our progressive values require us to fight for universal human dignity, we cannot preemptively exclude millions from our imaginative “we,” nor shun those whose economic interests align with many in our coalition, particularly when economic inequality has reached historic levels. But to achieve this requires introspection, and the dismantling of a number of myths bound up in the meritocratic ideal.
As children, nearly all of us were fed some version of the lofty American Dream, the notion that one can rise “as far as their talents can take them,” to borrow a phrase popular with presidents from Reagan to Obama. But in a meritocracy that disproportionately rewards those born into economic privilege, social mobility has grown sclerotic, causing the “rhetoric of rising” to ring false. But Sandel twists the knife further. “What if the real problem with meritocracy is not that we have failed to achieve it,” writes Sandel,
but that the ideal is flawed? What if the rhetoric of rising no longer inspires, not simply because social mobility has stalled but, more fundamentally, because helping people scramble up the ladder of success in a competitive meritocracy is a hollow political project that reflects an impoverished conception of citizenship and freedom?... [T]he meritocratic ideal is about mobility… [it] is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification for inequality.
Indeed, built on a foundation of intellectual elitism, meritocracy suggests that the smartest among us should receive the largest share of the pie. Meanwhile, ample evidence of the social acceptability of credentialism—a bias toward those with college degrees—can be found in popular culture, in the rhetoric of our elected leaders, and in the apportionment of federal dollars, which subsidize study at four-year colleges at 125 times the rate spent on professional and vocational training.
One of the most pernicious, and at the same time, paradoxical aspects of meritocracy is that it encourages intense competition among a small minority of the population whose economic and cultural privileges afford them entry to the race. It is not surprising then, that those who do make the cut believe that they have “earned their place,” which all too often spills into a sense of superiority over those who’ve been left behind. At the same time, the rhetoric of rising may lead those who have suffered as a result of the rapid shift to globalization and knowledge work to believe that they are responsible for their own economic hardship, thus engendering what Sandel calls “a politics of humiliation.”
Liberals have struggled to understand how a billionaire could dupe millions of Americans into the belief that he represented their interests. What they failed to understand was the extent to which many voters identify with Trump psychologically: despite his wealth, he is deeply insecure. While he rails against cultural elites, he craves their approval, and recognizes their contempt for him. Thus, writes Slavoj Zizek, “The subliminal message to ordinary people of Trump’s vulgarities was: ‘I am one of you!’, while [his] supporters felt constantly humiliated by the liberal elite’s patronizing attitudes towards them.”
Those patronizing attitudes are linked to the underlying logic of meritocracy, which, writes Sandel,
congratulates the winners but denigrates the losers, even in their own eyes. For those who can’t find work or make ends meet, it is hard to escape the demoralizing thought that their failure is their own doing…
The politics of humiliation… combines resentment of the winners with nagging self-doubt: perhaps the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor; maybe the losers are complicit in their misfortunate after all.
At the same time, elites have continued to fail upward, buoyed in part by a neoliberal and technocratic ethos, which, in its faith in markets and expertise, has treated intellectual achievement and rectitude as one and the same. “It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do” may well have been the bromide most frequently uttered by presidents Clinton and Obama, under whose watch, Sandel observes, intelligence and morality became rhetorically interchangeable. But this slippage, eliding smarts and ethics, is not only intellectually elitist but foolhardy. For our elite institutions, according to Sandel, are no longer sites of robust moral education, instead producing leaders who lack not only a community-driven sense of morality, but also basic competence. “Over the past four decades,” he writes,
meritocratic elites have… brought us stagnant wages for most workers, inequalities of income and wealth not seen since the 1920s, the Iraq War, a nineteen-year, inconclusive war in Afghanistan, financial deregulation, the financial crisis of 2008, a decaying infrastructure, the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a system of campaign finance and gerrymandered congressional districts that makes a mockery of democracy.
And yet, for all of their failures, the credentialed few have felt little compunction when punching down on the uncredentialed masses. Under Reagan and Thatcher, and later Clinton and Blair, “personal responsibility” became the watchwords of neoliberalism, implying that average people had themselves to blame for failing to make it in the new economy, even as government-led globalization, financial deregulation, and the gutting of the social safety net had opened up yawning inequality. The legacy of these policies, resulting in the increasing precarity of the livelihoods of millions of workers, does not reflect well on its architects.
“While per capita income has increased 85 percent since 1979,” writes Sandel, “white men without a four-year college degree make less now, in real terms, than they did then.” Considering this, is it any wonder that we have witnessed an epidemic of deaths of despair among this demographic, or that, in 2016, Donald Trump’s strength in Republican primaries could be accurately predicted by higher death rates among middle-aged white working class folks without college degrees?
This isn’t to say that racial resentment and the politics of grievance aren’t a part of the picture. Nor is it to propose that one analysis is more accurate than another. What I’m pushing back against is the moral certainty of mainstream liberals who think they know why people vote a certain way, who comfort themselves by confidently and blithely reducing legions of their fellow citizens to a monolithic caricature, and in so doing, absolve themselves of any concern for those people’s well-being, let alone an acknowledgment of their humanity. (And to be clear, folks on the right are just as guilty of this; I just don’t imagine that many of them read this newsletter.)
Here, again, is that hubris: when convinced of our moral and analytical superiority, we tend to see the behavior of others filtered through the lens of our values and experience. In other words, hubris stifles curiosity, the absence of which makes empathy more difficult to cultivate. And it’s here, perhaps, that my perspective as a songwriter might be of some value.
When I write from the point of view of a character distant from my own lived experience, the question I must ask is not, say, “how would I react if someone burned down my house?” but “how would I react if someone burned down my house and I were a Polish-Catholic woman from New Jersey who’d lived her whole life hopscotching the poverty line while raising two kids alone after having been left by her alcoholic, career military husband?” (In fact, these details are drawn from conversations that led to the song “Friends of Friends of Bill,” from my 2018 album, Book of Travelers, which chronicled my 2016 post-election train trip, a journey inspired in part by a desire to overcome in myself the very contempt I’m describing here. In the chorus, the character sings “But he would lift my burden / all the power, the comfort in his name / is that so much to ask / to believe and be unashamed?” Turns out I’ve been thinking about the politics of humiliation for a while.)
In the political realm, to be empathetic means seeking to understand the “other,” not by grafting our experience onto them and then puzzling over why they’ve made decisions we find reprehensible, but by striving to imagine their perspective. So, when it comes to, say, understanding the rise of right-wing populism, this might entail acknowledging not only the impact of racial resentment and economic precarity, but the loss of social esteem in a society that values intellectual talent over manual, physical, or artisanal labor. It could involve recognizing the ways in which liberal culture, from the Simpsons to late-night comedians to Hillary Clinton, has often reduced the white working class to a punchline or slur. And it might suggest imagining what it feels like to be the butt of those jokes or diatribes.
But ultimately, this is all conjecture. What I’m pleading for is not one analysis over another, but the humility to recognize that we cannot divine what’s in the minds of millions of people. I’m asking for a renewal of our sense of curiosity. Writing off right-wing populists as beyond rehabilitation may make us feel morally superior, but it is at once reductive, politically dangerous, and ethically untenable. At a time when housing costs are prohibitively expensive, millions cannot afford health care, the 1% are raking in profits hand over fist, and the planet rages between fire and flood, we cannot afford to preemptively reject millions of potential allies in our efforts to combat these overlapping crises.
The present reality is complex. We must be unequivocal in our fight for justice, and against bigotry. But this means having the self-awareness to expand who “we” are, and whose interests we’re willing to fight for. It means acknowledging that we may have been less than hospitable to millions of Americans for whom the rhetoric of rising has, for decades, rung hollow.
We can meet this moment by opting out of contempt for the ideological other. We can acknowledge that mainstream liberal analyses, rooted in an acceptance of the capitalist and technocratic status quo, do not ask us to examine the ways in which our hubris has played a role in widening the cultural divide, or that the shift to globalization has primarily been an economic boon for those of us who already enjoyed certain cultural and economic privileges. And in place of that hubris, and the contempt which so often derives from it, we can cultivate a sense of curiosity about those whose future is inextricably linked to our own. Our elite institutions have largely replaced moral education with a kind of boot camp for individual success and striving, to the detriment of solidarity and the common good. It will be our responsibility to bring these concepts back to the center of our discourse if we hope to transcend the fractiousness of our society, and to meet the profound challenges of this moment.
Thanks for this Gabriel. In between being raised in a blue state liberal social network and in mature adulthood returning to raise my kids in the same, there were a few college years in which I moved, had my being and identified as a conservative evangelical. Reflecting back, I will add that the sense of being condescended to and dismissed is a powerful accelerant to creating group identity. The sense of being under siege is intoxicating; for me as a young man being a part of this church community pricked an age-appropriate urge to rebel and self define, and probably kept me interested, connected and trying to make personal apologetics for certain theologies (that intuitively felt off) way longer than I otherwise would have. But it was far from all defense and fear, and though I decided to go a different way, I would actually say that those were some of the most relationally and even intellectually rich years of my life. I'm over here Amen-ing your call for humility and curiosity; because of my experiences I'm pretty sensitive to the cartoonish understanding of "the other side" by many folks in my sphere. Everyone longs for connection, purpose, and a way to make sense of and coexist with... death among all the other fears and nasty experiences. Glad you mentioned "Friends of Friends;" ( sorry, wary of wearing you out with kudos for this album) it really feels like a sorely needed message.
Love this:
“Here, again, is that hubris: when convinced of our moral and analytical superiority, we tend to see the behavior of others filtered through the lens of our values and experience. In other words, hubris stifles curiosity, the absence of which makes empathy more difficult to cultivate.”🙌🏾