CONCLUSION:

Merit and the Common Good

Henry Aaron, one of baseball’s greatest players, grew up in the segregated

South. His biographer, Howard Bryant, describes how, as a young boy,
“Henry would watch as his father was forced to surrender his place in line
at the general store to any whites who entered.” When Jackie Robinson
broke baseball’s color line, Henry, then thirteen years old, was inspired to
believe that he, too, could play one day in the Major Leagues. Lacking a bat
and ball, he practiced with what he had, using a stick to hit bottle caps
pitched to him by his brother. He would go on to break Babe Ruth’s career
record for home runs. 1
In a poignant observation, Bryant writes, “Hitting, it could be argued,
represented the first meritocracy in Henry’s life.” 2
It is hard to read this line without loving meritocracy, without seeing it as
the ultimate answer to injustice—a vindication of talent over prejudice,
racism, and unequal opportunity. And from this thought, it is a small step to
the conclusion that a just society is a meritocratic one, in which everyone
has an equal chance to rise as far as their talent and hard work will take
them.
But this is a mistake. The moral of Henry Aaron’s story is not that we
should love meritocracy but that we should despise a system of racial
injustice that can only be escaped by hitting home runs. Equality of
opportunity is a morally necessary corrective to injustice. But it is a
remedial principle, not an adequate ideal for a good society.

BEYOND EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY

It is not easy to keep hold of this distinction. Inspired by the heroic rise of a
few, we ask how others might also be enabled to escape the conditions that
weigh them down. Rather than repair the conditions that people want to
flee, we construct a politics that makes mobility the answer to inequality.
Breaking down barriers is a good thing. No one should be held back by
poverty or prejudice. But a good society cannot be premised only on the
promise of escape.
Focusing only, or mainly, on rising does little to cultivate the social bonds
and civic attachments that democracy requires. Even a society more
successful than ours at providing upward mobility would need to find ways
to enable those who do not rise to flourish in place, and to see themselves as
members of a common project. Our failure to do so makes life hard for
those who lack meritocratic credentials and makes them doubt that they
belong.
It is often assumed that the only alternative to equality of opportunity is a
sterile, oppressive equality of results. But there is another alternative: a
broad equality of condition that enables those who do not achieve great
wealth or prestigious positions to live lives of decency and dignity—
developing and exercising their abilities in work that wins social esteem,
sharing in a widely diffused culture of learning, and deliberating with their
fellow citizens about public affairs.
Two of the best accounts of equality of condition appeared in the midst of
the Depression. In a book entitled Equality (1931), R. H. Tawney, a British
economic historian and social critic, argued that equality of opportunity is at
best a partial ideal. “Opportunities to ‘rise,’” he wrote, “are not a substitute
for a large measure of practical equality, nor do they make immaterial the
existence of sharp disparities of income and social condition.” 3

Social well-being … depends upon cohesion and solidarity. It

implies the existence, not merely of opportunities to ascend, but of a
high level of general culture, and a strong sense of common interests
…. Individual happiness does not only require that men should be
free to rise to new positions of comfort and distinction; it also
requires that they should be able to lead a life of dignity and culture,
whether they rise or not. 4
In the same year, across the Atlantic, a writer named James Truslow Adams
wrote a paean to his country entitled The Epic of America . Few recall the
book, but everyone knows the phrase he coined in its closing pages: “the
American dream.” Looking back from our time, it would be easy to equate
his account of the American dream with our rhetoric of rising. America’s
“distinctive and unique gift to mankind,” Adams wrote, was the dream “of a
land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with
opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” 5

It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream
of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to
attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be
recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous
circumstances of birth or position. 6

But a closer reading reveals that the dream Adams described was not only
about moving up; it was about achieving a broad, democratic equality of
condition. As a concrete example, he pointed to the U.S. Library of
Congress, “a symbol of what democracy can accomplish on its own behalf,”
a place of public learning that drew Americans from all walks of life:

As one looks down on the general reading room, which alone

contains ten thousand volumes which may be read without even the
asking, one sees the seats filled with silent readers, old and young,
rich and poor, black and white, the executive and the laborer, the
general and the private, the noted scholar and the schoolboy, all
reading at their own library provided by their own democracy. 7

Adams considered this scene “to be a perfect working out in a concrete

example of the American dream—the means provided by the accumulated
resources of the people themselves, [and] a public intelligent enough to use
them.” If this example could be “carried out in all departments of our
national life,” Adams wrote, the American dream would become “an
abiding reality.” 8

DEMOCRACY AND HUMILITY

We do not have much equality of condition today. Public spaces that gather
people together across class, race, ethnicity, and faith are few and far
between. Four decades of market-driven globalization has brought
inequalities of income and wealth so pronounced that they lead us into
separate ways of life. Those who are affluent and those of modest means
rarely encounter one another in the course of the day. We live and work and
shop and play in different places; our children go to different schools. And
when the meritocratic sorting machine has done its work, those on top find
it hard to resist the thought that they deserve their success and that those on
the bottom deserve their place as well. This feeds a politics so poisonous
and a partisanship so intense that many now regard marriage across party
lines as more troubling than marrying outside the faith. It is little wonder
we have lost the ability to reason together about large public questions, or
even to listen to one another.
Merit began its career as the empowering idea that we can, through work
and faith, bend God’s grace in our favor. The secular version of this idea
made for an exhilarating promise of individual freedom: Our fate is in our
hands. We can make it if we try.
But this vision of freedom points us away from the obligations of a
shared democratic project. Recall the two conceptions of the common good
we considered in chapter 7 , the consumerist and the civic. If the common
good consists simply in maximizing the welfare of consumers, then
achieving an equality of condition does not matter in the end. If democracy
is simply economics by other means, a matter of adding up our individual
interests and preferences, then its fate does not depend on the moral bonds
of citizens. A consumerist conception of democracy can do its limited work
whether we share a vibrant common life or inhabit privatized enclaves in
the company of our own kind.
But if the common good can be arrived at only by deliberating with our
fellow citizens about the purposes and ends worthy of our political
community, then democracy cannot be indifferent to the character of the
common life. It does not require perfect equality. But it does require that
citizens from different walks of life encounter one another in common
spaces and public places. For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide
our differences. And this is how we come to care for the common good. 9
The meritocratic conviction that people deserve whatever riches the
market bestows on their talents makes solidarity an almost impossible
project. For why do the successful owe anything to the less-advantaged
members of society? The answer to this question depends on recognizing
that, for all our striving, we are not self-made and self-sufficient; finding
ourselves in a society that prizes our talents is our good fortune, not our
due. A lively sense of the contingency of our lot can inspire a certain
humility: “There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the
mystery of fate, go I.” Such humility is the beginning of the way back from
the harsh ethic of success that drives us apart. It points beyond the tyranny
of merit toward a less rancorous, more generous public life.