I have suggested before that while the country was obsessing about President Trump’s bizarre behavior, a much more important question was why half the voters in the country would vote for him (or a majority of voters in the UK would vote for Brexit, or The French “yellow jackets” would riot for weeks, or, or…) What was the root cause, or causes, of the profound discontent sweeping the Western world?
While on a short vacation last week I was browsing in a small independent bookshop in Ouray, Colorado, when I stumbled across Michael J. Sandler’s new book The Tyranny of Merit. It escapes me why I have never run across his writing before. He is, as one reviewer notes, an international rock star of moral philosophy, and author of several really good books.
Trained at Brandeis and at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Sandler is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of government and political philosophy at Harvard University, where he teaches a widely-respected course on Justice (his 2007 book Justice summaries much of the readings for this course).
To give a flavor of his writing and views, let me suggest his short 2017 article in Project Syndicate entitled Lessons from the Populist Revolt, and the excellent 2020 article in Harvard Magazine entitled No One Deserves a Spot at Harvard. With respect to his latest book, let me suggest the review in the Guardian, which can be read here.
Sandler echoes much of the views reflected in David Goodheart’s 2020 book Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect, and to some extent was foreshadowed by George Friedman’s theses in his latest book The Storm Before the Calm.
There was a concept in Medieval times of “noblesse oblige”, the idea that those born to privilege also inherited an obligation to those less fortunate. It wasn’t always followed, of course, but it was nevertheless a foundational moral principle of the times. We seem to have lost that, and Sandler argues for a return to something like it, along with a recognition that those of us with good educations and high-paying jobs don’t owe it all to anything superior about ourselves or our work ethic, but owe a good bit of it to the pure dumb luck of being born in the right place at the right time to the right sort of parents. We could have had the luck to be born, say, to a poor, low-caste family in India, and we might have remained poor and illiterate the rest of our short lives. Given that fact, the contempt that some elites feel toward those not so fortunate (Hillary’s “deplorables”) is wholly unwarranted, highly destructive, and quite possibly a major contributor to the current unrest.
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