Michael Sandel writes:
The meritocratic ideal is not a remedy for inequality; it is a justification of inequality.
As the father of a high school senior, one of the more interesting parts of Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit was about the Rick Singer and the college admissions scandal, which landed celebrities Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin behind bars. Singer, under the guise of a non-profit was paid by the über wealthy to get their kids into elite colleges such as Stanford, Yale, USC, and others. Parents paid anywhere from $100,000 to $2M dollars for Singer’s services to help cheat on the SAT and ACT or be admitted through the “side-door” of pretending to be athletes on rowing, rugby, and other less visible sports teams.
When the story broke, Americans of all stripes were enraged. “I’d never pay $200,000 to cheat my kid into USC,” we said. And the truth is we wouldn’t. Part of the reason we would not is because few of us have $200,000 to drop on college, much less just to get into college.
What is fascinating though is the fact that these privileged parents, for all their wealth and connections, saw the college admission process itself as rigged. Admissions offices offered class spots to athletes who might not otherwise be able withstand the academic rigger of the school, to legacy students, to parents who used their wealth to build buildings on campus, and by other means that had little to nothing to do with the merit of their students. This, for them, was a rigged way of breaking into a rigged system. “What’s the big deal? they thought.”
Sandel argues that hardly anything is meritocratic and when we investigate nearly any topic, all we have to do is scratch below the surface and we will see that it’s not meritocratic, or at least as meritocratic as we’ve been lead to believe it is. Rather, says Sandel, we use the allure of meritocracy to maintain rigged systems, and in the end, few people will be in the position to rise in the way our rhetoric would suggest we can.
Sandal, unexpectedly, offers a remedy for the tyranny of merit. What? Grace.
Oddly enough, in a world trying it’s best to deny the reality of God’s love and attention for humanity, we keep coming back to our only safe home.