The essay by the American philosopher Michael Sandel “The tyranny of merit” comes out on February 14 with the newspaper. Good will and commitment are not enough if structural injustices make competition unfair
Michael Sandel’s book The tyranny of merit, now on newsstands with the Corriere della Sera, is a philosophically accurate, politically acute, culturally necessary essay. It is first a text that subjects the theme of merit to rigorous philosophical analysis, both in its conceptual aspects and in its links with the history of ideas. It is then a work capable of developing a powerful fresco of the despotic consequences that derive from the combination of some traits characterizing the idea of merit with the milieu society in which this idea is rooted. Finally, it is a reflection that signals to the reader the dark side of merit on a cultural level, at a time when, becoming the mantra of contemporary democratic society, it ends up draining its ethos and converting it into an oligarchy from modern times, the so-called meritocracy.
Obviously, no one would like to live in a society where merits were not recognized, nor does Sandel intend to deny that he does the idea of merit defined the transition from Ancien Régime societies to democratic societies, in which it is no longer lineage, but competence, that guides individual paths, potentially allowing everyone to prove their abilities and make their way in the world. It is the abuse of him, the tyranny that we let him exercise, that creates the problem.
To understand how we got to this point, according to Sandel we need to go back to one quarrel
of a theological nature: are we saved by individual works or by divine grace?
It is known that the Protestant Reformation has shifted the emphasis on the second, but it also happened that its Calvinist version, by making worldly success an indicator of the probability of salvation, paved the way for a vision of human affairs in which almost everything is reduced to individual responsibility and to the commitment that each one puts into doing things, and therefore, ultimately, to the merits and demerits that can derive from it.
In the American cultural horizon, this idea has taken root in an extreme providentialist variant, fueling a rhetoric of (social) ascent that has rooted the conviction that, if you work hard, you will succeed (and, conversely, if you don’t make it, it’s because you didn’t do enough and didn’t deserve any ascent).
Too bad that the data on social mobility, which Sandel presents and discusses, do not at all support this point of view: few of the children born at the bottom of the social pyramid make that leap forward which leads them to be, as adults, part of the ruling class, and today this happens even less than in the second half of the 20th century.
In short, good will is not enough of individuals, precisely the commitment, when the structural injustices are so entrenched as to make the competition for success irreparably unfair; on the contrary, judging the results of this competition through the categories of deserving and undeserving does a disservice to a correct assessment of the real abilities of individuals and to understanding the causes of economic and social inequalities.
However, according to Sandel, merit is not only an ideal that does not find a concrete realization worthy of its promises, victim of the difficulty of translating it into practice: it also has intrinsic limits, at the very moment in which it eludes the question they certainly cannot be deserved, because the talents with which one is born are not the object of choice and the family and social context in which one grows up – what another American philosopher, John Rawls, effectively defined as the natural lottery and the social lottery. And this is all the more necessary to emphasize the more merit becomes a cultural determinant, which directs public and private choices, merging with what the author calls “credentialism”, or the perspective according to which through credentials, mainly academic, we are able able to certify the value of people.
Among other things, such a perspective triggers a relentless competition, in which from childhood one is educated in a system of continuous acquisition of “merit” which can then be spent on access to the most prestigious universities and, through these, to jobs more profitable. With the double perverse effect, on the one hand, of generating a deplorable feeling of superiority in those who, thanks to family and social advantages, win in the competition, on the other hand to stigmatize those who lose in that competition because they are excluded from the start, thus generating in these people rancor and resentment towards the elites, and reinforcing the storm populist and its anti-democratic tendencies.
The tyranny of merit
it is definitely a very American book, for how it develops the themes and for the cultural climate it analyzes and tries to question. But if it is true that he considers and explores aspects of social and political life which, in old Europe, have not yet manifested themselves, at least in all their virulence, however, it remains a book that also speaks to us Europeans; and not only for the usual story according to which what happens across the Atlantic sooner or later will also assert itself on this side, but also and above all because understanding certain deeper dynamics of meritocratic societies on a theoretical level can already today help us isolate one of the elements that rekindle populism, i.e. the arrogance of the elites, and at the same time warn us against a regrettable and dangerous possible outcome for our communities, i.e. a clear and radical division into winners and losers.
If liberalism historically arose as an alternative proposal to absolutism and as an enemy of tyranny, this book by Michael Sandel is a genuinely liberal text, only it is recognized that merit can be tyrannical and must therefore be subject to some kind of limitationat least if we intend to have socio-political structures in which it is worth living.
The debate. The search for a structure that ensures true equity
The essay by the American philosopher Michael J. Sandel comes out on newsstands with the «Corriere della Sera» on Tuesday 14 February The tyranny of merit, at the price of 9.90 euros plus the cost of the newspaper. The volume, created in collaboration with the Feltrinelli publishing house, will remain on newsstands for a month: it has been translated by Corrado Del Bò and Eleonora Marchiafava. Del Bò, who signs the introductory article published on this page, is professor of Philosophy of Law in the Department of Law of the University of Bergamo. Michael Sandel was born in 1953 in Minneapolis, in the US state of Minnesota. He teaches Theory of Government at Harvard University and is one of the most authoritative voices in the philosophical debate in the United States of America. He has lectured in Europe, China, Japan, India and has been visiting professor at the Sorbonne in Paris. Numerous books by him published in Italy, among which What money can’t buy (translation by Corrado Del Bò, Feltrinelli, 2013) e Justice (translation by Tania Gargiulo, Feltrinelli, 2010). In the book, Sandel also takes care to indicate an alternative to meritocracy: “Often – he writes – it is assumed that the only alternative to equality of opportunity is an equality of sterile and oppressive results. But there is an alternative: a broad equality of condition that allows those who do not obtain great wealth or prestigious positions to live a decent and dignified life, developing and exercising their skills with a job that wins social esteem, sharing a culture of learning widely disseminated and deliberating together with their fellow citizens on public issues”.
February 13, 2023 (change February 13, 2023 | 20:59)
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