Elite Meritocracy, with David Brooks

“We’ve just created a hereditary aristocracy in this society, and it has created a populist backlash.” (David Brooks, from the episode)

There’s a growing chasm that divides the affluent and non-affluent in American society, and it’s perhaps most pronounced in higher education. The elite meritocracy suggests that we should reward individual ability, ambition, and accomplishment. But what is “merit” anyway? What is “ability”? And how do they factor in our idea of “a successful life”?

In this episode Mark Labberton welcomes David Brooks (columnist, New York Times) for a conversation about elite meritocracy in higher education.

Together they discuss the meaning of merit, ability, success, and their roles in a good human life; hereditary aristocracy and the populist backlash; power and overemphasis on intelligence; the importance of curiosity for growing and becoming a better person; the value of cognitive ability over character and other skills; the centrality of desire in human life; moral formation and the gospel according to Ted Lasso; ambition versus aspiration; and the impact of meritocracy on the political life and policy.

About David Brooks

David Brooks is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times. His latest book is How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. He is also the author of The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, and founder of Weave: The Social Fabric Project.

Show Notes

• “How the Ivy League Broke America” (via The Atlantic)
• “The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new.”
• Money and the elite meritocracy
• “Every nation has a social ideal. And for the first half of the twentieth century, and the last half of the nineteenth century, our social ideal was the well-bred man.” (e.g., Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush)
• “Rich people rigged the system.”
• “Now, if you come from a family in the top 1 percent, your odds of going to an Ivy League school are seventy-seven times higher than if you come from a poor family. And a lot of schools around the country have more students in the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent.”
• “We now have this chasm between the children of the affluent and the children of the non-affluent.”
• Shocking stats: “By eighth grade, children of the affluent are four grade levels higher than children of the non-affluent. People who grew up in college-educated homes live eight years longer than people in high-school-educated homes, they’re five times less likely to die of opioid addiction, they’re twenty-two times less likely to have children out of wedlock, they’re two and a half times less likely to say they have no close friends.”
• “We’ve just created a hereditary aristocracy in this society, and it has created a populist backlash.”
• Too much power
• What is “merit”? How do you define “merit”? Who has “ability”?
• IQ is not a good indicator of merit.
• “Our meritocracy measures people by how well they do in school. The definition of intelligence is academic ability.”
• “What’s the correlation between getting good grades in school and doing well in life? The correlation is basically zero.”
• “We measure people by how they do in one setting, which is the classroom. And then we use that to declare how prepared they are for another setting, which is the workplace.”
• “Augustine said, we're primarily not thinking creatures, we're primarily desiring creatures.”
• Leon Kass (University of Chicago): “What defines a person is the ruling passion of their soul.”
• “We become what we love.”
• Predominant emotion of fear
• Curiosity, the love of learning, and getting better every day
• “You’re plenty smart. You’re just not curious.”
• Tina Turner’s memoir, discovering her voice and self-respect.
• “What matters is being a grower, the ability to keep growing.”
• “Getting old takes guts.” (David Brooks’s eighty-nine-year-old father)
• A sense of purpose
• The drive for the future, to be bold
• Henry Delacroix and the genius of America to drive for boldness, hard work, growth, and energy
• Moral materialism
• Vincent van Gogh said, “I’m in it with all my heart.”
• Paul Cézanne and Émile Zola, L’Oeuvre
• Yo-Yo Ma, cello, elite performance, and passionate humanity: “I’m a people person.”
• “Look at these creatures. They’re amazing!”
• Ordinary people in ordinary circumstances
• “Social intelligence” is not really intelligence—it’s an emotional capacity.
• Individuals and teams
• “What makes a good team? It’s not the IQ of the individuals. It’s the ability to take turns while talking. It's the ability to volley ideas and to feed into a common funnel of thought.”
• Project Based Learning
• Most Likely to Succeed (documentary, High Tech High)
• The Hour Between Dog and Wolf John Coates
• Self-awareness and adeptness reading your own body
• Emotional agility
• “The mind is built for motion. That what we do in life, we don’t solve problems, we navigate complex terrains.”
• “We’re all pilgrims. And we’re all searching for the journey that will transform us. And so it’s, the mind is not this computer designed to solve problems. The mind has helped us navigate through a space. And if we do it well, then we become transformed.”
• Applying meritocracy to the 2024 election
• “If you segregate your society on IQ, You're inherently segregating on elitist grounds.”
• “The rebellion that is Donald Trump.”
• Jesus’s form of selection—“When Jesus was selecting his twelve, he didn’t give them all a bunch of standardized tests. … He saw that each person was made in the image of God.”
• “And to me, what (frankly) the Christian world offers us is a re centring of the human person.”
• Controlling the passions of your heart
• Christian humanism
• Ecce Homo
• Rene Girard and mimetic desire
• Ambition vs. Aspiration
• The gospel of Ted Lasso and David Brooks’s favorite definition of moral formation: “My goal is to make these fellas better versions of themselves on and off the field.”
• *Still Evangelical* (essay by Mark Labberton)
• “Am I yet evangelical?”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.