Appiah on Meritocracy

“Against Meritocracy” by Kwame Anthony Appiah, retrieved from https://iai.tv/video/against-meritocracy

I first came across Kwame Anthony Appiah in 2018, when Teo You Yenn launched her bestselling book, This Is What Inequality Looks Like. Appiah’s entry into the national discourse that followed Teo’s publication made him a peripheral but relevant figure in the Singapore debate, mainly due to his extensive writing on identity, class and inequality. Perhaps one factor that accounted for this relevance was his British-Ghanaian upbringing, which added some postcolonial spice to his ideas. But one thing’s for sure — Appiah is no stranger to Singapore. He has discussed Singapore’s sociocultural policies in both his 2018 book The Lies That Bind as well as in an op-ed published in The Atlantic that same year. He still strikes me as more of a sociologist than a moral and political philosopher, but that is to be celebrated. The best philosophy, after all, is informed by and complementary to the empirical sciences.

Two years later, National Service — the Great Social Leveller, as it were — has compelled me to revisit Appiah. All the touted benefits of NS are somewhat true. You meet all kinds of people, many with crazy backgrounds — among others, one with millions in his bank account already, one who’s 26 and about to get married, one who worked as a chauffeur for a few years driving his boss on road trips throughout Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia and Morocco. You learn to see past one another’s differences and work together (not that it is particularly hard to do so anyway). But ultimately, NS does not aim to force people out of their own bubbles. NS just aims to get one to turn outwards and see what’s outside one’s bubble. And that can be done while being comfortably nestled within.

Is it obligatory to step out of one’s bubble? And if it is, on what grounds? On multiple occasions of reflection, I found that the answer was “no”. It is virtuous (and possibly obligatory) to look outwards and broaden one’s perspective. But stepping outside still resides in the province of permissibility and stops short of being obligatory. Inasmuch as all of us have our own habits, dispositions and cliques, there is no open space beyond our individual bubbles. When one steps out of his current bubble, he steps into another. We merely shift from hexis to hexis. There’s no duty to live the life of another. This works both ways; my friends who have trod the long and meandering path don’t expect me to go through what they have been through or share their aspirations, neither do I.

More pernicious than self-perpetuating institutionalised meritocracy, Appiah suggests, is the arbitrary comparison of incommensurable life paths. These two are interrelated and symbiotic, but not necessarily both sides of the same coin. After all, prestige isn’t just dictated by the dollar; a judge has a higher status than an investment banker although the former earns less than the latter. (The Weberian distinction between economic “class” and cultural “status” is useful here.) When we critique meritocracy, we often think about how different degrees and kinds of privilege result in disparities in material outcomes, and these material disparities eventually influence status in one way or another. But far more fundamental and pressing is the need for a basic respect for every profession and life path, one that accords dignity to all. ∎

The social rewards of wealth and honour are inevitably going to be unequally shared, because that is the only way they can serve their role as incentives for human behaviour. But we do not need to deny the dignity of those whose luck in the genetic lottery and in the historical contingencies of their situation has left them less rewarded.