‘Meritocracy’ argument ignores systemic inequalities

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This article was published 16/12/2021 (1734 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In a recent National Post article (“Minority professor denied grants because he hires on merit,” Nov. 24), a researcher protested that he has been refused two federal government grants for failing to ensure diversity and inclusion in hiring staff for his proposed projects.

McGill University professor of chemistry Patanjali Kambhampati’s application to the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) was declined because, in the council’s judgment, “the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion considerations in the application were deemed insufficient.”

Kambhampati, who is originally from India and has repeatedly suffered racism himself, stated that his commitment was to hire on merit, not on identity.

“I don’t care about the colour of your skin,” said Kambhampati, who insisted that merit, fairness and equality must be the criteria for selection processes, not affirmative action policies. Objecting that those like him who maintain such principles “get called out as racist or sexist,” he declared that “My way of dealing with racism, or sexism or any other ‘ism’ is to treat people as individuals.”

Predictably, Kambhampati accused woke culture of “disrupting society… I think what’s happened is the woke and the social justice warriors have made a moralistic argument … and now people are afraid to challenge them. But I think it’s OK to say I believe that equality is a morally valid position. I believe that meritocracy is a morally valid position… People are afraid to think.”

So how should we think about fairness, equality and meritocracy? However we do will express our ideology, which is a coherent set of interrelated ideas (about what is) and ideals (about what ought to be) that explain and justify (legitimate) the prevailing or proposed distribution of power, wealth, and privilege.

Or, as public intellectual Terry Eagleton put it, “Ideology is a system of concepts and views which serves to make sense of the world while obscuring the social interests that are expressed therein, and by its completeness and relative internal consistency tends to form a closed system and maintain itself in the face of contradictory or inconsistent experience.”

All ideologies, whether conscious or subconscious, are action-oriented systems of thought, at once both descriptive and normative, both moral and political. Yes, diversity and inclusion policies of government funding agencies are ideological. So, too is the meritocracy — the rule of merit — to which Kambhampati ascribes.

The ideology of meritocracy is the assumption that ability and effort are the sole determinants of personal achievement, and that equality of opportunity is therefore the only social arrangement required to reveal the relative merits of people fairly. But equality of opportunity is hollow and meaningless in the absence of equality of social conditions.

Meritocracy is only extant and fair when there is also equality of conditions, when everyone starts the race from the same starting line, instead of some starting 50 metres back, or when some face additional hurdles in their lane.

Comparative achievement or merit is not only about who crosses the finish line first. It is also about who has actually run the fastest, overcome the most hurdles or progressed the furthest, which can only be calculated by taking respective starting points and hurdles into account. In unequal conditions, winning the race is not necessarily the highest achievement, or the measure of greatest merit.

Equality of opportunity alone does not constitute fairness.

Inequality of outcome, such as in selective hiring practices, is only fully fair when all applicants have experienced equality of both conditions and opportunity in preparing and competing for the job. Equality is indeed a “morally valid position,” but mere equality of opportunity alone in applying for the job falls short of systemic justice.

Exceptional individuals such as Kambhampati who overcome unequal social conditions, including race, sex, social class, or regional location, typically discount their effects, implicitly crediting their personal merits. Nonetheless, in social conditions rife with favourable and unfavourable prejudicial attitudes, and institutional and systemic discriminatory actions, to avow meritocracy is to ignore or deny inequalities of conditions.

The one who crosses the finish line first is not necessarily the most meritorious.

The social interest driving the ideology of diversity and inclusion is to extend fairness by taking inequality of conditions into account. The original meaning of being “woke,” before its critics transformed the term into derision, was to be awakened to the empirical reality and effects of inequality of conditions in society.

In contrast, the social interest driving the ideology of meritocracy is nothing more than perpetuating the social system that has (dis)advantaged particular demographics.

To treat all people as individuals is to deny the existence of the social structures that shape them. To be colour-blind is to be blind to the systemic inequality of conditions of people of colour.

Dennis Hiebert is a professor of sociology at Providence University College.