Book
Review: Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy
Author: Christopher
Hayes
Publisher:
Crown Publishers, NY
Date of
Publication: June 2012
As a reviewer with not so few pretensions
to objectivity, I'm not supposed to say that I loved the book. That's how adolescent boys and girls begin their journey
on the path to self-destruction through making declarations of boundless love. I
did indeed love the book though. It is
written with a certain passion as if in response to the need of a time -- " the increasing inequality, compartmentalization, and
stratification of America in the post-meritocratic age" (212) -- that I
found particularly appealing.
There are books that are written
well without saying much and there are books that say a lot but make demands on
the reader when it comes to the cumbersome style of the author. This book is
both a highly intelligent one as well as eminently readable embodying the best
in American traditions of serious prose writing where you express a complex
thought in the most elegant way possible. Hayes combines the joy of reading a
book with the joy of learning something new. He takes a moderate, expository
tone often carefully understating his point as if he were a defense lawyer
talking to the jury in a law court -- in this case, of course, the jury being
the readers. The deadly irony of what he is trying to say can hardly be missed.
One central thesis that guides
the book is: " unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible" (57).
The entire work is a meticulous substantiation of this one statement to
devastate the false logic upon which meritocracy has been instituted as norm in
the United States. Neither should merit be an ideal nor is merit a reality, at
least the former never translated into the latter -- this is what I concluded upon
reading the book. "The conviction that in America those at the top and those at
the bottom are equal in the eyes of the law is one of our most fundamental and
cherished national creeds. But nearly everywhere you look, this basic principle
of fairness is ignored or violated" (70). This is also in fact how American
propaganda represents the United States to the world -- that, it is a fair
country and not that some are fairer
than others (the pun intended).
Meritocracy has become a globally
popular argument owing to the influence of American notions of what democratic
politics mean in practice. One of the faces of western-capitalist notions of democracy
is consumerism as can be viewed in the rise of the ultimate commodity which in
a sense runs through the phrase "personal choice." It is a phrase that
journalists and politicians use with hidden contempt and common Americans use
with innocence that is more like fear coming from deep-seated insecurity and is
puzzling more than anything else. That merit is a matter of personal choice and
anyone and everyone can get to the top is sincerely consumed as fact by most
Americans. People are not born with personal choices and they are privileges
granted by a "system of reality" (a phrase from James Baldwin); it is this
system of reality that makes sure that some stay at the top and many are
condemned to remain at the bottom. In this system of reality, the emphasis by
the powerful who sustain it is more on the "real" than on the "system." The
reality however is that there is no merit that justifies why those at the top
are at the top just as there is no reason to believe that those at the bottom
have made a "personal" choice to be there. It is a system of "true lies" made
to look natural and one that is effectively maintained by a philosophy of
fraudulence or what we call plain cheating. "When cheating becomes an accepted
norm within an institution, it produces a distinct and dangerous psychology in
those who rise to the top. They come to view themselves as ubermensches and
begin to hold in contempt those not in on the secret" (98). The system of
reality is in fact a system of illusions where those at the top view themselves
as "ubermensches" and they want the others to believe in exactly the same
things that they do. The inequality aspect is what Hayes emphasizes throughout
the book sometimes with profound indignation. "Our system is supposed to reward
the virtuous and punish the vicious, and yet everywhere you turn, it seems the
vicious are living high off the hog" (101). A vicious system keeps the
inequality viciously alive. In one of the most powerful passages in the book
Christopher Hayes makes a case for the "fundamental inequality of
accountability."
"Along with all of the other rising
inequalities we've become so familiar with -- in income, in wealth, in access to
politicians -- we confront now a fundamental inequality of accountability. We
can have a just society whose guiding ethos is accountability and punishment,
where both black kids dealing weed in Harlem and investment bankers peddling
fraudulent securities on Wall Street are forced to pay for their crimes, or we
can have a just society whose guiding ethos is forgiveness and second chances,
on in which both Wall Street banks and foreclosed households are bailed out, in
which both inside traders and street felons are allowed to rejoin polite
society with the full privileges of citizenship intact. But we cannot have a
just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and
the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we
currently reside." (102)
I would've concluded the passage
by saying, "This is the world in which we currently reside." However, in all
fairness to Hayes, the criticism is context-specific and meant to comment on
the meritocracy that destroyed the possibility of an equal society in the US --
all in the name of the most abused of words, "merit." The myth of merit haunts
us each day of our lives. Are some people born to sing and dance and others
born to write and paint? My answer is "yes!" Neither is Hayes denying this
aspect of difference. The worst face of meritocracy is when we see that the
sons and daughters of powerful people whether they are actors, politicians, sports
people, lawyers or doctors -- they enjoy access to the "merit" only because they
have the advantages of wealth and privilege. We really don't know whether the
poor are capable of all the attainments we see among the privileged because we
are not giving them the similar opportunities the rich possess to discover
themselves. An ideal meritocracy (if ever something like that is possible
outside the domain of argument) ought to open the doors equally to everyone
irrespective of class, power or status. That however is never the case. The
meager opportunity given the poor is usually in a top-down manner which barely
responds to the social and economic conditions of the underprivileged. Equating
democracy with meritocracy has been the biggest globally perpetuated illusion
in the past fifty years because it makes it look like the poor are down there despite
a more or less just system that gives them a chance to make it to the top
through hard work and industry. When we use the word haves in a strict sense, we are talking about those who have the
money and power to make the difference. "In attempting to get a handle on the
elite, income serves as a useful proxy for power more broadly because it allows
us to quantify what is otherwise abstract" (143). Hayes further adds: "Once a
member of the elite has sufficiently monetized his or her power, that money can
be traded for other kinds of power, which in turn can be invested and reap its
own kinds of rewards" (152). Basically, the meritocracy is nothing but an elite
clique that perpetuates itself. "That's because while money, political power,
platform, and network power may be distinct conceptually, they are tightly
correlated in practice"The members of today's elite have never been farther
from the median worker and closer, in the literal sense, to their fellow
meritocrats" (149). The crisis of the present American social and political
order is exactly this: an utter failure
of the meritocracy in living up to its own false image of itself. "The cascade
of elite failure has discredited not only elites and our central institutions,
but the very mental habits we use to form our beliefs about the world" (106).
The failure of meritocracy is the
failure of merit as a parameter around which we build a social order instead of
justice or equality. " Justice being taken away,
then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?" (112) Saint Augustine declares in
The City of God. Saint Augustine is
not talking about merit because he is aware that a just society gives people the
chance to pursue the gifts that nature has endowed each one of us with. It is
an unjust society that needs merit as an ideal in order to disguise social and
political inequalities. Therefore Hayes adds: " As American society grows more
elitist, it produces a worse caliber of elites" (155). The meritocracy is not
creating particularly honest doctors or brilliant engineers or committed teachers
or visionary writers. Unfortunately we see some of the worst floating around --
and all supposedly products of merit -- without sometimes even basic human
qualities that define what a person should be like. The insensitivity bordering
inhumanity and arrogance that goes into the principle of merit is one of the
worst outcomes of meritocracy. Using concrete instances from the real life of
sports and politics, Hayes demonstrates that some of the most corrupt people we
ever get to see are actually among the so-called meritorious. In his book Politics Aristotle says that " whenever some, whether a minority or a majority, rule
because of their wealth, the constitution is necessarily an oligarchy, and
whenever the poor rule, it is necessarily a democracy" (79). He further adds:
"The first
democracy, then, is the one that is said to be most of all based on equality.
For the law in this democracy says that there is equality when the poor enjoy
no more superiority than the rich and neither is in authority but the two are
similar. For if indeed freedom and equality are most of all present in a
democracy, as some people suppose, this would be most true in the constitution
in which everyone participates in the most similar way. But since the people
are the majority, and majority opinion has authority, this constitution is
necessarily a democracy" (110).
From an Aristotelian perspective,
the modern meritocracy is an oligarchy of elites who are able to " rule because of their wealth ." While
Aristotle views democracy as perversion of "constitutional government," he
probably never imagined democracies degenerating one step further into
meritocracies. Therefore, we don't live in a real democracy but a chimera of
one. The laws meant for the poor don't apply to powerful people. This is
because the poor have no share as participants in their own governance. An
inconsiderate society is the direct consequence of this situation. As Hayes
says:
"Democracies will always struggle
to protect the rights and interests of minorities from being swallowed up by
majority rule. Along the way, democratic societies will engage in brutal and,
in hindsight, indefensible ignorance of the plight of those who are in its
darkest corners. So it was with gay men facing the AIDS crisis in the 1980s,
the infirm and careless residents of New Orleans, and subprime borrowers."
(214-5)
The complete abandoning of marginal
groups -- the true minorities and "the wretched of the earth" as Fanon calls
them -- to the mercy of their own fates in the face of dire poverty, life-threatening
illnesses and natural calamities is a prominent feature of the meritocratic
version of democracy. Hayes reiterates his fundamental point when he says: "But
my central contention is that our near --religious fidelity to the meritocratic
ideal comes with huge costs. We overestimate the advantages of meritocracy and
underappreciate its costs, because we don't think hard enough about the
consequences of the inequality it produces. As Americans, we take it as a given
that unequal levels of achievement are natural, even desirable" (218). The
success of the propaganda machine is where inequality is made to look "natural"
and "desirable" simply because we refuse to imagine an alternative to it.
"The first step of obstacles has
to do with public opinion, or at least, perceptions of public opinion. It is a
widely held view that America's less egalitarian social structure is a manifestation
of a certain kind of exceptionalism, a shared cultural belief that with enough
pluck and gumption anyone can end up on the top. Politicians and advocates feel
they must frame their egalitarian arguments within the confines of the
meritocratic framework -- equal opportunity, level playing field, a fair shake
for those who work hard and play by the rules -- rather than the straightforward
language of social solidarity." (227)
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