So although the scandal revealed by last week’s arrests involves college admissions, it has touched a nerve not because of a widespread desire to get into Yale but because of a widespread perception that the people who go there think they can get away with anything. It isn’t aggravating because it’s a betrayal of the principles of meritocracy but because it is an example of the practice of it. That’s not a problem that can be addressed through more fair and open college admissions. It is a problem that would need to be addressed through more constraints on the behavior of American elites
Read the whole piece. I think that this is a point worth dwelling upon.
Levin sees today’s elites as un-moored from traditional institutional sources of accountability. I would put it this way:
–They don’t like working for a profit, which would enable consumers to hold them accountable. Instead, by working for government or in the non-profit sector, they can self-validate the worth of their jobs.
–They disdain traditional religions. Instead, they invent their own norms in relation to race, gender, the environment, etc. They proceed to punish as heretics those who fail to Keep up with these rapidly-evolving norms.
–They don’t belong to organizations in their local community. Instead, they live dissociated from their neighbors, if not walled off from them completely. Their spirit of generosity is limited to the use of other people’s money.
I would read it, but I am to lazy to find the article. Can you provide a link?
I believe this is it: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-sting-of-meritocracy/
I don’t see the point of doing this. Once they are in on false claims about academic or athletic achievement they won’t be able to keep it up and will be fired on account of being lightweight and useless.
Maybe, maybe not. People say the same about affirmative action, but then they just switch to some lightweight humanities major, graduate, and get a new token affirmative action job at a BIGCORP. There they don’t really need to perform either, because there is a ton of slack at every bigcorp and someone else will do the work for them.
Also, some of the things universities want that were faked, like a bunch of nonsense extracurriculars that were faked, might not be an indication of anything but OVER-conscientousness. Aren’t are heroes people who dropped out of Harvard to work on cool things rather than doing the work of their nonsense classes.
That describes me, am I elite?
What’s dangerous is that the separation of church and state does not apply to them.
Except most of the people in the scandal (if not all) worked in the private sector and there was a lot of CEOs on the defendant lists. (My guess government employees can’t afford this type of service in general.)
Yeah.
I also think Douthat style “anti-meritocracy” complaints are silly. Is there any reason to believe that non-meritocratic Harvard admits would be more morally virtuous than those with higher SAT scores? If anything not belonging there based on merit seems to make people more desperate and grasping in terms of towing the party line to get ahead.
If there is a morality problem at Harvard it needs to be fixed directly.
But how? How do you convince people that believe that they have earned everything they have that they have responsibilities to others that sometimes supersede pursuing their own self-interest? Much less that perhaps most of the time that they will have to put the good of others before their own self-interests.
“It is a problem that would need to be addressed through more constraints on the behavior of American elites”
Levin is obviously correct that elites need constraining, but I am skeptical of his notion of a “resurgence of a certain king of institutionalism – one that views institutions (from Congress and the presidency to the university and the professions and into civic, religious, and family life) as molds that shape the people within them to take on a certain character.” The “piety displays” that Lorezo Warbly described in his piece linked to here yesterday, are all too compatible with institutionalism and are all too easy to mistake for “character.”
Having read over the weekend two books, “Art from the Swamp: How Washington Bureaucrats Squander Millions on Awful Art” by Bruce Cole and Susan J. Crockford’s “The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened” as well as “How I was Kicked Out of the Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting” by Mary Frances Williams, it would appear that the institutions we have today are more about protecting elites from accountability than they are about anything else. The institutions we have today mold a lot of character, but not necessarily in a good way. Nothing short of radical reform of the institutions of the US government and education systems is going to restore them to a balancing role that can help shake off the clouds of doom hanging over the US today.
In the meantime, though, Dr. Kling’s call to arms yesterday against intimidation, resounds. Maintaining the ability to debate and air unpopular opinions is essential to any prospect for progress. Free speech must remain an absolute. The increasing share of the public that would silence opponents by labeling their views as “hate speech” need to be recognized as the nihilists and threat to humanity that they are.
You talking about Yale grads like Bart O’Kavanaugh?
Levin’s paragraph reminded me of this from Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’
(Ch 3)
I’ve no faith the ‘educated’ people would come to the front in times of stress, but as we saw after 9/11 once the danger had subsided, they did presume to be the ones whose opinions mattered.
Hi Arnold,
I think I am a member of what can fairly be called part of “the elites”; I live in a posh SF neighborhood with a bunch of fellow senior tech folks and similarly successful professionals; I would be surprised if more than one in five of my peer/social/neighbor group was an avowed adherent of a traditional Abrahamic religion, and very surprised if more than one in ten was a Trump voter.
I say that to establish credentials to dispute your first and third points about lack of elite accountability. Maybe in light of the below you will say you meant a different segment of the elite, but I do think that gets a little motte-and-bailey.
On the first, the vast majority of my cohort work in the for-profit sector if only because it is so difficult to afford a comfortable lifestyle in a closed access city on a government or nonprofit salary. Some of us might take the government/nonprofit route if we had our druthers, but I think the majority actually prefer the sense of productive autonomy one gets in the private sector (though here the over representation of Bay Area tech startup types may make my peer group more unrepresentative).
On the third, the “bowling alone” stereotype really does not match my observations of people getting deeply involved in neighborhood association and school volunteering and fundraising. I would say that our involvements tend to be focused perhaps *too* locally and inattentive to the concerns for the broader community that you would think self-avowed progressives would prioritize. For example, I am a somewhat lonely voice in my neighborhood for YIMBYism as against resistance to upzoning and for fundraising for less fortunate schools in SF and not just our own very fortunate neighborhood school.
Your second point is closest to correct and here I would call out a point Levin omits, namely that selective colleges since the Sixties have abandoned the mission of acting in loco parentis. I went to both a selective college and a selective private high school. The high school was very much concerned with self-consciously molding the character of future elites with a sense of noblesse oblige; the college was not. I would bet that most students at elite colleges today do not come from traditional private schools; the days of Exeter being the royal road to Harvard and Andover to Yale are long past and from a meritocratic standpoint that is a very good thing. Since high school students are still considered minors, it may be worth thinking about how a spirit of accountability and character-building could be more broadly inculcated at that level.
“Outside Europe, the state created sophisticated elites utterly different from the masses in all and every respect; but the unwashed, vermin-infested, badly clothed, badly housed, illiterate and half-studied barons and clerics who held sway in medieval Europe were barely distinguishable from the serfs they ruled…” From Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies.
So elite is a protean term, and already in medieval Europe the elites aren’t as elite as they’re supposed to be. But a proper elite is supposed to be “utterly different from the masses in all and every respect.” They’re supposed to be bureaucrats. Not in trade.
If you work for money, you aren’t elite.
This is why working for a non-profit is so important. You can make a lot of money without being part of the economy, or “working” in the same demeaning way that a grubby merchant or ill-bred plowman works. Having money is not defiling. But making money is defiling, if you lower yourself to the level of the person who serves at the pleasure of her customers or offers something in exchange for wages.
I would think that living in a Posh neighborhood in a closed access city would definitely fit with the spirit of Mr. Kling’s third point, as you somewhat noted with your comments about Yimbyism and the hyperlocal focus of your neighbors. It sounds like you are living in a gated community full of people who don’t really engage with the world outside their wealthy enclave except to make a buck. It doesn’t sound like any of them would be mistaken for civic leaders or pillars of the community. Honestly, even a country club sounds like it would be more civically minded, as doctors, lawyers, local businessmen and upper management of local companies mingle and inevitably talk about the problems facing the city (or the portion of it from which the club draws its members), and talk about what they can do to help, even if most of the time they are just spitballing and don’t end up acting on those ideas.
I’m surprised to hear that you find Trump voters so rare in the SF tech scene. I would have guessed it was closer to 50:50 strongly pro:against Trump in tech. I think of people like Peter Thiel as being pro-Trump from the SF tech scene. And Thiel isn’t a single outlier.
I don’t know if “elites” have to follow religion or engage with local community.
I have a simpler complaint: the universities don’t deserve the broad power that they currently have. Most individual professors and administrators worked very hard, I don’t begrudge people their success, but the universities have broad institutional power that I don’t believe is merited. I’d simply like to see more separation of school and state.