Snakes and Ladders, London Review of Books, Abril 2021

Once upon a time, the distribution of power and privilege was determined by birth. Now. it is determined by merit. And that, in a nutshell, is the history of the long 20th century.

It may be a parody, but this little narrative encapsulates one of the structuring claims of contemporary public debate. We can argue over the extent to which merit is, in fact, now the chief determinant of reward, but there is remarkably wide agreement that it should be, and that the operation of this principle is part of what defines a properly modern, even progressive, society. This agreement is underwritten by a yet more encompassing principle, typically expressed in statements of the form ‘Everyone has the right to realise their full potential.’ Quite apart from the now common inflation of the quasi-legal language of ‘rights’, there is a curious emptiness to this claim. It seeks to be at once egalitarian, relativist and positive. ‘Everyone’ has this right; no one can say what another’s ‘full potential’ might be; ‘realising’ it, whatever it is, on this universal scale will be a good thing. Yet has anyone ever realised their full potential? Could it be that in realising my potential, I might get in the way of you realising yours? And what if my potential is to become the most successful mass murderer in history?

 

The label most commonly used to refer to this cluster of assumptions is ‘meritocracy’. As an ideal, it exacts allegiance, or lip-service at least, from across the political spectrum. ‘The Britain of the elite is over,’ Tony Blair proclaimed on taking office in 1997. ‘The new Britain is a meritocracy where we break down the barriers of class, religion, race and culture.’ Like so much New Labour discourse, this strikes the upbeat note of a motivational talk, while the assumption that the structuring features of social experience should be seen as ‘barriers’ indicates an underlying individualism. Where cliché led, could Theresa May be far behind? ‘I want Britain to be the great meritocracy of the world,’ she declared in 2016, ‘a country where everyone has a fair chance to go as far as their talent and their hard work will allow.’

As usual, there is little mention in all this of the people who don’t ‘succeed’, but the clear implication is that, however grim their fate, they ‘deserve’ it: after all, everyone gets a ‘fair chance’, so it’s nobody’s fault but your own if you don’t take advantage of the ‘opportunities’ presented to you. We are asked to believe in a world in which individual agents are in full possession of undivided selves, unshaped by social determinants, and able to realise outcomes simply by willing them strongly enough. It is assumed that there is an uncomplicated thing called ‘talent’ or ‘ability’, and that some people have more of it than others. It is also assumed – pretty much as a fact of nature, it seems – that some people will make more ‘effort’ and work ‘harder’ than others. Meritocracy proposes to rearrange the world (shouldn’t take long) so that, for those who combine ability and effort, every day is Christmas Day.

At the same time, in much recent social science, unmasking the sham of ‘equality of opportunity’ has become a familiar five-finger exercise. Study after study suggests that where people get to in life is largely determined by where they start. But the very fact that it is so easy to assemble the evidence for this truth gives the literature on the topic a slightly tired, stale character. Journalists and politicians alike may express amazement and outrage at each fresh revelation that advantage is cumulative and self-perpetuating, yet sociologists and radical social theorists cannot fall back on saying ‘I told you so’ each time. Challenging – let alone reshaping – the individualist dogmas that underwrite the discourse of ‘opportunity’ is an uphill struggle, however, not least because it means departing from some of the commonsense axioms about human agency and fairness that we all draw on in our everyday social interactions. We may be forced by the evidence to acknowledge that our society is not in any genuine sense a meritocracy, but at the same time we cannot easily give up the psychological and ethical assumptions on which claims about equality of opportunity are based.

But what is a ‘genuine sense’ of meritocracy? When, in 1958, Michael Young put the term into general circulation with the publication of The Rise of the Meritocracy (he did not, as is often assumed, coin the term), the suffix pointed to an analogy with democracy or aristocracy as forms of rule or government. It suggested that people with ability didn’t just realise their potential: they ran the place. And ability was understood, here, largely as a matter of measurable IQ, regarded as an innate and fixed quality – a notion that was held in greater esteem in the 1950s than it is now. In Young’s dystopian satire (it’s striking how often both its satirical and dystopian aspects are now overlooked), life has become an enlarged version of the eleven-plus. Those who are ‘clever’ go on to take the top jobs; the rest are confined to their subordinate positions on merit.

As Young recognises, the very explicitness of this sifting operation is likely to generate resentment in all those being told they are, comparatively speaking, ‘stupid’. If you feel you are being unfairly discriminated against or are the victim of corruption, you may be angry and resentful, but your self-respect can remain intact – indeed, in some cases it can be enhanced. But in a pure meritocracy the losers, who are the majority, cannot apply that balm: the sense of being written off by the accepted rules of the system festers. Young’s book projects a future in which this smouldering discontent finds political expression. So, nothing relevant to our present situation there, then.

The term ‘meritocracy’ soon slipped its original moorings and became used more loosely to indicate any set of social arrangements in which outcomes were, notionally, determined by ability (effort is a more recent emphasis), not by the traditional mechanisms of rank, nepotism, inherited wealth and so on. Contrary to the spirit of Young’s minatory sketch, it has become an overwhelmingly positive term, bound up with what it is to be ‘modern’. The implicit narrative of progress that the term now encodes has proved to be astonishingly impervious to counter-evidence. As Jo Littler puts it in Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility (2017), the idea functions as ‘a neoliberal justice narrative’. Such narratives ‘recognise the egalitarian deficit as a meritocratic deficit and prescribe competitive neoliberal meritocracy as the solution, which in turn produces more inequality’. In other words, the mass of counter-evidence is interpreted as showing that we need to install more effective mechanisms of competition if we are to achieve a ‘genuine meritocracy’, though this only compounds the problem.