The understanding and pursuit of "success" profoundly shapes the social atmosphere and values. Witnessing the political, cultural and other divisions in the United States in recent years, Michael Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University, proposed that widespread resentment is essentially due to changes in the definition of "social recognition" and "respect". In his view, most of the factors that affect "success" are not something we can decide on our own, and the meritocracy that advocates "more than the best" ignores this. It fuels the arrogance of the elite and deprives the "losers" of their dignity – and the accompanying diploma frenzy has alienated the school from its educational function and into a classification machine and a certification platform for "elite qualifications".
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Wen 丨 Kochakin Ed.丨 Leon
Professor Michael Sandel smells a tinge of unsettling in an increasingly competitive society.
Sandel has been teaching political philosophy at Harvard University since 1980. Forty years on end, life doesn't seem to have changed much, but one thing surprises him: "There seems to be a growing number of my students who believe that their success is the result of their own efforts and deserves it." ”
Michael J. Sandel
One of Harvard's "Most Popular Course Chair Professors."
Sandel's sentence sounds a little difficult to understand at first glance - Harvard students are "thousands of troops crossing the canoe bridge", how can the seats they "earn" not be said to be well-deserved?
However, the prominent professor of political philosophy challenges the idea of "common sense":
If you work hard, will you succeed?
Is the success of the elite really achieved by their own talents and efforts?
Can education really be a solution to inequality?
...... Sandel has dabbled in his famous "Justice" series of courses. The course has set a record for Harvard's "largest number of students" for many consecutive years, and after the implementation of the open class program, it has aroused widespread discussion around the world.
Faced with the social reality of elitism, Professor Sandel is no longer satisfied with discussing it only in the classroom. Recently, when his new book" "The Arrogance of the Elite" meets chinese readers, we may wish to follow Professor Sandel and rethink the question of "justice", and what is "success", what is "effort", what is "education"...
"The Last Grand Prejudice"
According to the survey, a whopping 77 percent of Americans believe that "most people can succeed if they are willing to work hard" — what Sandel calls "meritocracy."
Meritocracy does not believe in luck or grace, and believes that success depends entirely on itself. During a period of gradual collapse of hereditary aristocratic rule, "self-made" entrepreneurs flocked to become believers in the merit system.
On the face of it, meritocracy pushed the "artificial aristocracy" out of power and encouraged the growth of a truly talented "natural aristocracy"—what we today call an elite.
However, under the atmosphere of the whole society's promotion of "elites", the environment has quietly changed. One of the most prominent signals is that diplomas, unconsciously, have become the basic condition for people to gain social respect.
"One of the most embarrassing features of elite arrogance is diplomatism," Sandel said.
Even politicians in high positions are obsessed with diplomas:
Trump, who is obsessed with "IQ genetics", often mentions that his uncle is a professor at MIT, an academic genius, to prove his high-quality genes. The unabashed president often expressed contempt for the elite, yet was so eager to be respected by the elite;
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh, in response to the "sexual assault scandal" in 2018, was full of his brilliant experience at Yale University, as if the diploma could become a defense of exoneration and a proof of a person's innocence.
Sandel summarizes these phenomena as "diploma weaponization":
"Diplomaism has become a ubiquitous basis for judgment, a universal credibility narrative, deployed in moral and political struggles that go far beyond the campus gates."
The moral judgment of the "successful" implicit in meritocracy has had a devastating side effect: higher education has almost automatically tied to the "elite"; in turn, people who did not go to college have an increasingly difficult time getting respected by society.
Sandel argues that while there is little correlation between political judgment and the winner of standardized tests, the United States has turned Congress and Parliament into the exclusive domain of the degree-educated elite— arrogant elites alienated from the working masses and misguided in decision-making.
Discrimination does not only exist at the top of society.
A group of social psychologists have done a series of surveys in Europe and the United States, and the results are surprising: among various elements such as "poverty", "obesity", "race", etc., "low education" has become the object of unanimous discrimination at all levels - no diploma is simply an original sin, and even the people at the bottom think like this.
Many people naturally think that not getting into a good school is not enough effort, and not receiving education is self-abandonment and unforgivable.
Thus, Professor Sandel said: "When racism and sexism fall out of favor, diplomaism becomes the last bigotry."
Exaggerated "effort"
Obama once said in a radio address: "No matter what you look like or where you come from, as long as you are willing to work hard, you can succeed." ”
Even as "diploma discrimination" intensifies, people remain obsessed with the effort itself. As a result, two groups of people appear in society:
If you have not yet succeeded, believe that you are on the road to success through hard work;
Those who have succeeded are complacent about what they have achieved.
Professor Sandel, however, "a bucket of ice water and two scoops," argues that both attitudes are problematic — effort, at least on two levels, is grossly exaggerated.
1. The benefits of effort are exaggerated
U.S. President Bill Clinton put a love quote in his speech: "We think everyone should be able to go to college, because what you can earn depends on what you can learn." ”
Excellence is paramount to emphasis on struggle and promises a vision of mobility. But Sandel said the belief that "effort can get ahead" is clearly no longer in line with reality.
He takes us back to the sensational U.S. college admissions fraud scandal of 2019: celebrities and tycoons spend money to "buy" admissions to higher education institutions such as Yale and Stanford for their children by bribing their children.
If such incidents only provoke public anger without shaking the root of "effort", then the following facts make the supremacy of good performance slightly embarrassing:
More than 2/3 of harvard and Stanford students come from the highest-income families in the United States;
In the entire Ivy League, less than 4% of students come from the cold door, and the success rate of children born in the top wealthy families (top 1%) "climbing the vine" is 78 times that of students from poor families (the last 20%);
Sat scores and the wealth of candidates' families proved highly correlated: families with an annual income of more than $200,000 and children born to families with less than $20,000 had a score of more than 1400 (out of 1600) with a score of more than 10 times.
It is not that effort is completely ineffective, but that effort is less effective than the privileges and status enjoyed by the elite.
Although U.S. colleges and universities and the federal government provide substantial financial aid to the bottom, the proportion of "generation students" (the first students in the family to attend college) has not increased significantly over the decades, and the mobility rate is usually difficult to exceed 2%.
Sandel makes a clever analogy: "Higher education in the United States is like an elevator in a building, and the vast majority of people enter from the top floor." ”
2. The moral significance of effort is exaggerated
Sandel reminds his students that even when they are at Harvard, they should not forget the timing and good fortune of their success.
People are often intoxicated by the "achievements of self-struggle", but success and effort do not naturally constitute a causal relationship - success is a combination of material conditions, social status, talent, the era in which they live, and so on.
Even in a relatively just society, where there is no fraud, no bribes, or even the privileges of the rich, "success on one's own efforts" is an illusion, he said.
Public opinion and the media are very fond of shaping the personal image of "struggle". For example, in the coverage of the Olympic Games, television focuses not on the feats of athletes, but on how they overcome difficulties and overcome obstacles...
But the truth is that talent is never less important than hard work to become a world champion, and it has an immeasurable impact on success in many cases. There are thousands of people in the world who "try" to run, but there is only one flying bolt - talent is precious and has a strong contingency.
Moreover, living in a society where "talent can be rewarded" is not something that can be done for self-reliance, and many times it may be just luck.
Sandel said the world champion is not as popular as basketball stars, but it's not his fault, it just happens that people in this society love basketball more
All in all, there are too many things as important as "effort" to influence success, but these factors are often drowned in people's fascination and intoxication about their own agency.
Sandel's examples are in fact a declaration of war on meritocracy: in his view, the problem with meritocracy is not that it fails to work out, but that "this idealistic thinking itself is flawed."
Inequality of descent has been basically overthrown in most countries, but the distinction between merit and merit has been invisibly "normalized" by society.
Sandel laments that "the modesty of successful people has become a scarce emotion today," and the term "meritocracy" has been abused since its inception as a "term of praise and desire."
Bring schools back to their educational function
Beginning in the 1990s, mainstream Political Parties in the West have embraced education as a key tool in addressing social problems such as inequality, stagnant wage growth, and the loss of manufacturing jobs.
Bush Sr., for example, once said, "The solution to every problem should begin with education."
However, the one-minded transfer of social problems to education has not only had little effect, but also fueled diplomaism, with destructive side effects: almost all groups have been hurt to some extent when competing for admission to the "elite".
First, people who have not gone to college are increasingly feeling prejudiced and discriminated against society, and even if they make the same effort, it is difficult to obtain reciprocal respect.
In a society where excellence is paramount, "going to college has reached the point where it determines success in life" has greatly reinforced the social stigma of people with low academic qualifications.
As Sandel puts it, "If education were seen as an individual responsibility, then people might not be so harsh on the social inequalities that stem from educational differences."
Second, the struggle for elite education has given rise to an "educational culture that is not conducive to the growth of adolescents" – from 1976 to 2012, American parents spent more than five times more time tutoring their children's homework.
Despite the enormous advantages of the affluent class, uncertainty about admissions to elite universities has risen with the primacy of merit. In the case of Stanford University, for example, if you applied in the 1970s, 1 in 3 students would have been admitted, but today the acceptance rate is less than 1/20.
In order to enter a prestigious school, almost all children have to go through a stressful and anxious adolescence, and preparation counseling, physical training, and dance music cannot be left behind.
Some psychologists have noticed that many of the children of wealthy families who are ostensibly successful are actually unhappy, they are disconnected from the outside world, lack independence, and are prone to frustration and anger.
The higher the threshold of famous schools, the more they can endorse the label of "elite", and even the upper class has to rely on it - in the 2019 college fraud scandal, those rich celebrities are not thinking about the problem of "giving their children a job guarantee", but buying a "signboard" and a "reputation guarantee" that matches the identity.
So what did the school become? Sandel bluntly criticized:
The qualification function of colleges and universities began to expand, even overrode its educational function. Categorization and scrambling have squeezed out teaching and learning.
Since schools are "qualification bodies," it's not hard to understand why even Harvard is so full of case files of academic misconduct — after all, who can't be fooled by "elite" status?
"Miserliness toward the losers, oppression of the successful, and the primacy of merit becomes a kind of tyranny," Sandel points out unceremoniously.
epilogue
Professor Sandel's theory is undoubtedly a reflection on this social whiplash full of "theater effect".
For a long time, meritocracy was considered a rational and efficient system, which broke the justice of blood and immediately packaged itself as a just spokesman.
However, the merit system is not only greatly reduced in reality, but also subtly justifies the layering between people ("winners" and "losers") in the core of the concept, exacerbating the tearing of society.
When diplomaism pervades every aspect of society, Sandor pointedly pointed out that the supremacy of merit is making our institutions of higher learning "smell".
Universities are becoming less and less like ivory towers that cultivate good citizens and enlighten human wisdom, but become "qualification certification bodies" that drill camps with "high thresholds" and "elitism", which not only hurts the dignity of "losers", but also distorts the body and mind of "successful people".
Through the criticism and reflection of "meritocracy", Sandel leads us to realize:
For a good society, the definition of "success" needs to be re-examined, and educational institutions should not be used as classification and screening machines, but should return to the essence of "educating people"; as for the social elite, it is better to be more humble and less arrogant.
"This humility transcends high-performing tyranny and points us in the direction of a less hostile and more inclusive public life."