Last year I taught a course at Yale University. The catalogue made it sound as if we would be reading internet blogs all term, so more than 200 students showed up to get into a class of 18. I asked the kids to write an essay on why they should be admitted to the course, and I quickly discovered that the sucking-up skills of America’s young achievers are not to be believed.
Many students went to the internet and quoted articles of mine they could not possibly have otherwise read, commenting liberally on the brilliance of my writing. Some Jewish students tried to play up the co-religionist angle. I got a call from a politician in California who said that one of his major donors had a daughter at Yale who really wanted to get into the course. Such networking skills at such a young age make you want to stand and gape, although not, alas, let the young woman into your class.
On the whole, the students were incredibly bright. But, as they are acutely aware, affluent young people in mobile, capitalist countries such as Britain and the US are the products of a certain sort of meritocratic system, a mighty achievement machine. They are weighed and scored at birth and the aptitude tests and the skill-enhancing tutoring sessions just keep coming. Educators, parents, psychologists and child development experts have constructed this endless series of hoops and challenges, so that by the time the young talents apply for university they have been so honed for success that the best of them have learnt several languages, started a few companies, cured at least one or two formerly fatal diseases and turned water into wine while also demonstrating their commitment to humanity by touring Tibet and tutoring the locals on environmental awareness skills and conflict resolution techniques. At least that’s what they put on their applications. As one university president put it: “I don’t know where these kids find lepers, but they find them and they read to them.”
All of this came back to me as I was reading about the case of Jayson Blair, the 27-year-old reporter who was caught fabricating facts in dozens of stories for The New York Times. Now, don’t worry, this is not going to be another essay on the state of journalism. No, what is fascinating about the Blair case is how he perfectly embodies the dark side of the meritocratic culture. He too is a product of the achievement machine, and illustrates that, sometimes, the results are not pretty.
Blair was, of course, a young man in a hurry, and he found himself confronted with a system that rewards certain traits. In the first place, he was rewarded because, as an affluent, well-educated black man, he was a privileged member of an underprivileged minority group, exactly the sort of person who gets scooped up in diversity enhancement campaigns. Since everyone wanted him to succeed, things were made easier for him, which in the long run did him no good.
Blair was hired by The New York Times as a collegiate intern, was offered a job and never bothered to get his degree, though he gave the impression he had. Like many of his peers, he seems to have been dazzled by the opportunities strewn at his feet. Four fifths of American college students, according to a Jobtrack.com study, believe it will take them ten years or less to achieve their career goals. Seventy-one per cent of American college students expect to become millionaires and 40 per cent expect to achieve this by the time they are 50. This awareness of bounty just over the horizon encourages a grab-it-now mentality.
Secondly, Blair was energetic. He was willing to work endlessly, pleasing his superiors. The meritocratic system rewards brains, remember, but more than that, it rewards active metabolisms. The aspiring meritocrat — Bill Clinton and Tony Blair exemplify the grown-up version of this breed — has to be able to rise at dawn, go from meeting to meeting, make contacts, milk others for information, leave 600 good impressions a day, attend business lunches and dinners and still have enough energy late into the night to read reports and prepare for the next day’s labour. According to The New York Times, Blair accepted one assignment after another, piling up deadlines in a manic effort to impress. Even while fabricating stories, he worked phenomenally hard, memorising extraneous facts so he would have ready answers when challenged.
Thirdly, Blair had a certain talent for making himself attractive to his elders. He was admired and nurtured by the top editors. This ability to perform subtle sycophancy only comes with practice. You can’t be too crude in your flattering techniques. (Remember the students who quoted articles of mine.) The key to being a mentor magnet is to adopt a tone of casual familiarity, to put the prospective patron at ease, while still making it clear, through a series of nearly invisible feints, that you are just a chirping cricket next to the implied, but never articulated, greatness of the Sun King boss.
To pull this off, the young meritocrat must have a genuine, rather than feigned, respect for authority. I have spoken with university professors from Berkeley to Cairo and they often tell me about the professional attitudes of their students as well as their disconcerting deference to authority. Some generations may have grown up with a sense that the world is out of sorts and needed a fundamental scrambling, but this generation of young strivers is not among them. They have seen what pompous idiots the 1960s radicals were. They have witnessed the carnage caused by Marxist and fascist radicalism. They have inherited a world that seems from their vantage point bounteous and just, and, impressed by the general rightness of things, are perfectly willing to climb their way up by pleasing authority figures rather than by challenging them.
I once came across a recruiting poster for KPMG, the consulting firm, that showed a hip-looking middle-aged couple. The text read: “Now that you’ve made your parents proud, join KPMG and give them something to smile about.” There was a time when you would not have recruited students on the basis of their desire to make their parents happy.
Blair had one other trait, which is also a common meritocratic characteristic, though he had it in exaggerated form. He wasn’t overly wedded to establishing the truth. The meritocracy encourages flexibility and openness. It does not reward those who are stubborn, argumentative or affixed to notions of absolute truth.
A few decades ago French literary critics pushed the idea that truth is indeterminate and all reality is just a bunch of floating signifiers. This seemed radical and subversive at the time. It turns out to be a set of ideas that is convenient for the young striver. There’s no need to argue if everything is relative. There is no need to cling to unpleasant ideas if there is no such thing as objective truth. Raised in such a climate, it would have been easy for Blair to slide away from the facts and into the realm of whatever works.
Blair, though not typical of the young meritocrats, represents the dark side of the meritocratic culture. Fifty years ago, one’s station in life was largely determined by birth and who one’s people were. That began to shift significantly as Cold War leaders (and university admissions officers) realised it was necessary to mobilise all of society’s talent to hold off the Soviet Union. Over the past decades, the meritocracy has purified with every passing year, and in the mid-1990s, it seemed to pass over a tipping point so that now the whole course of today’s middle and upper middle-class youth, instilled by ambitious and well-meaning parents, teachers and coaches, is in the direction of upward advance. How can we expect young people to be rooted in things such as character, morality and honesty? How is one supposed to be at once an arrow soaring skyward and an oak planted firmly in the ground?The meritocratic culture, hones strivers on every aspect of their lives save one — how to cultivate character.
The meritocracy is the best social system we have. It certainly beats the old-fashioned stratification system, which was based on blood rather than ability. It does encourage certain virtues — industry, geniality, enterprise. But it is nonetheless problematic, because it also encourages certain sins — shallowness, sycophancy, phoneyness. We’ve just seen a prime example of how things can go horribly wrong.
David Brooks is author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
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