The Misuse of Meritocracy

An argument you see about “meritocracy,” one common among those on the ideological right, is that some groups, typically women, have a harder time understanding or accepting merit and meritocracy than others, typically men. If meritocracy is good, and if power should be awarded and wielded based on “merit,” then it is bad if control of power, within institutions and more broadly, shifts away from those who understand and appreciate meritocracy, and towards those who don’t.

I’m wary of meritocracy talk like this, not because there’s something wrong with the idea of merit itself, but because talk like this often obfuscates motivations that either have nothing to do with merit, or misunderstand the concept in ways analogous to the accusations they’re making about others.

Humans are quite good at self-deception, and the idea of meritocracy—particularly when framed as “My tribe, demographic, or cultural group is meritocratic, while their tribe, demographic, or cultural group isn’t”—is fertile ground for such deceit. Each of us is part of one or more “interpretive communities.” These are made up of the people we associate with, but also the texts internal to that community: Your community has a shared corpus you believe to be true, and which shape the methods of thinking and interpretation you apply when encountering new texts outside of that corpus and outside of your community. It’s important to note that “texts” here doesn’t just mean books. It means the intellectual and argumentative content you create, engage with, and are exposed to. So the arguments you hear from people outside of your community are texts, as are the beliefs shared within interpretive communities not your own.

We need theories to give context to the information we consume and process. We need an interpretive framework. But because that framework is shared within our community, and because we have a natural suspicion of those outside our community, this framework, while being helpful, can also create blindspots, or lead us to misread and misinterpret texts grounded in the shared methods and epistemologies of other communities. We believe our own community is at least largely right in its basic beliefs and interpretive framework, or else we’d be either agitating for change within the community or seeking a different home.

This is important when thinking about the concept of “meritocracy” because the very idea of merit is a social one. Merit is just what we’ve chosen to value and what we’ve chosen to reward. Sometimes we choose for good reasons, and so it would be unwise to change the standard. But sometimes we choose for bad reasons, and what we take to be meritorious is, instead, simply the idiosyncratic or self-serving preference of our particular tribe or interpretive community.

The way to respond to a critique of the standards of merit we hold to is to say, “Sure, let’s discuss it, and you should offer up your standard and then build a case for it as a better alternative, while I defend my standard, and we’ll see whose argument holds up.” But saying, “Your standards are different from mine, and the burden of proof is on you to persuade me,” while correct in an ideal sense, becomes complicated by the fact that you and your interlocutor are coming from different interpretive communities. What your request means, with that context, is, “Your standards are different from mine, and the burden of proof is on you to persuade me by the standards and in the interpretive framework of my community.”

It’s crucial to emphasize the role that “interpretive framework” is playing here. Imagine that you and I are both offering our advice to a person suffering from an illness, and we have different prescriptions for making them well. It’s one thing if we both share the same concept of wellness, and then differ on which medicine will most fully and safely result in it. It becomes a good deal more complicated if we instead differ on what it means to be “well” in the first place, and so have distinct methods for talking about and evaluating the merit of medicines. If we limit our conversation to the two opposing medicines and which is “better,” but without acknowledging and clarifying the concept of “wellness,” we’ll simply be talking past each other.

It’s true that the idea of “wellness” or “health” has broad agreement. But it’s not total, and it changes over time. If you read male psychologists from a hundred years ago (and most psychologists were men a hundred years ago) on the topic of what it means for a woman to be psychologically healthy, it doesn’t look much like psychological health today, but instead is a state of subservience, performative quietude, and unquestioning acceptance of “traditional” women’s roles and a power structure with men at the top.

We tend to harden the shared truths and interpretive framework within our community through a process Roland Bartes called “myth making.” We take historically or culturally contingent beliefs internal to our community and build a story about how they are instead “natural” facts of the world. Once we have naturalized (or “mythologized”) these beliefs, they become buffered from critique, because you can’t critique nature. And they become artificially elevated against alternatives, because any alternative is, by definition, unnatural.

Thus what we’ve labeled as “merit,” internal to our community, might well have degrees of objective worth, in the same way “health” does. Thus, just as we can talk about some medical interventions (such as taking Ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19) as objectively false in their purported efficacy and harmful to health, we can talk about some traits or behaviors being correctly labeled as “meritorious,” and others as correctly labeled unworthy. But most conceptions of merit are a good deal more gray, and a good deal more contingent on standards internal to and contingent upon interpretive communities.

Further, because the idea of “merit” is moralized, we have an incentive to view criticisms of our standards of merit with moral suspicion. It’s not just that people who critique us are wrong, it’s that they’re bad—and we’re inclined to think they reject the very idea of merit itself. But it’s awful difficult to actually think of communities that reject merit, or reject the idea that people should be rewarded for worthy things. Instead, there are disagreements about what we should be rewarded for. In many communities once dominated by men, the entrance of women has meant a declining relative status of those men. Men used to be at a top, were the most well-respected, and their ideas defining the community’s consensus. Men who made it to the top sometimes did so for meritorious reasons, but frequently what counted as “merit” was instead behaviors that fall under what we’d now label “toxic masculinity,” for example. Aggressiveness, lack of empathy, petulance in the face of critique, and a systematic exclusion of questioning viewpoints from women and minorities.

If we’re not careful to critically examine our own beliefs, we tend to fall back on defining a meritocracy as “a system where people like me are at the top,” and so a move to a system where other people rise in status, or end up viewed as leaders or exercising power, is definitionally a retreat from meritocracy. Women have historically, systematically been excluded from many institutions, and so those institutions had an internal culture that, among other features, was one that excluded women, and was accepting of that exclusion, and saw that exclusion as the result of meritocracy. Thus when women enter those institutions, their very presence, and then their ascension to positions of power and leadership, is viewed by some members of the male-dominated community, and particularly those who benefited from it, as evidence not that those women have merit, but that meritocracy is in retreat. Women must be DEI hires, or the result of unjust affirmative action, or only supplanting (some) men in the status and merit hierarchy because standards have fallen. Getting outside of your interpretive community’s bubble is an important first step.

If you find yourself believing, based on the framework and shared perspectives internal to your interpretive community, that half the population lacks standards of merit, and further rejects the idea of merit, this should be a flag that something has gone wrong with content and ratiocination of your interpretive community, and that a more careful, more open-minded and epistemically humble critical examination is warranted—one that is aware of the blindspots of interpretation, the incentives of status games, the risks of mythologizing, and has a willingness to accept that sometimes a genuine meritocracy doesn’t have you at the top.