For most of our history, we lived in a world populated by spirits and walking abstractions — and then, in a relative instant, we didn’t. The philosopher Owen Barfield called this process “internalization”: those powers that were held to be out there, active forces in the external world, were discovered to be in here, parts of the human personality. Think of how the word “genius” has evolved: originally a guardian spirit, it became a metaphor for a person’s talent, and then a talented person. “Inspiration” once meant that something was breathing an idea into you; now, we make our own inspirations. Today, a fortune is something we make or we own. But for centuries, Fortune was a woman.

Page from the Carmina Burana, showing the inscriptions “regnabo, regno, regnavi, sum sine regno” (12th century)

You can actually visit any number of museums and watch Fortune disappear. One Italian brown-ink drawing from the 17^th century, for instance, is called “The Allegory of Fortune” — but you have to scan most of the page before you find her, faintly drawn, right at the top. She’s hovering over a fortress tower, naked and inviting, but doing not a thing. The scene is dominated instead by dozens of humans, scaling the tower with ladders, hauling one another up on ropes, wrestling on the battlements, shoving unfortunates over the ledge. Fortune’s favorite is enthroned on the heights, and at the base is a huddle of frustrated climbers who seem to have given up. Each man ascends, or not, under no one’s power but his own: not exactly pleasant, but not superstitious, either. This is what meritocracy looks like.This is a picture, in other words, that we can relate to: if you have made it, or if you have not, credit or blame no one but yourself. How much more fatalistic, and how much more alien, to think of Fortune as an active power, a capricious and mysterious force intervening in our lives: not as the reward at the end of the climb, but as a woman who turns a wheel and decides your fate. For centuries that was the dominant motif, and long before someone thought to draw those humans with ladders scrambling over the walls, depicting Fortune meant drawing men strapped to a wheel. There was a king at the top and a beggar at the bottom, and figures on either side alternately hopeful and despairing, who seemed to have the best sense of the direction things were turning. There was nothing for those figures to do but reflect passively on what was being done to them, and sometimes they were given resigned quote bubbles where they did just that: “Regnabo, Regno, Regnavi” — “I will reign, I reign, I reigned.”

Florentine Minchiate (Tarot) card featuring Fortune’s wheel, and a Pauper reading a book

We could look at this change in icons, from Fortune’s wheel to Fortune’s fortress, and congratulate ourselves: this is one of the moments at which we became modern. But not all change is progress. In the drawing of Fortune’s fortress, the climbing men are essentially interchangeable and indistinguishable; the only fact worth knowing, it tells us, is one’s height relative to the others. Some of the best drawings of Fortune’s wheel, on the other hand, can be wonderfully subversive. My favorite is an Italian tarot card about a century older than the fortress: at first glance it is a wheel similar to all the others, but a closer look shows that the beggar in the dirt is wisely consoling himself with a book and that the king, with his orb and scepter, also has the head of an ass. Crude as the artwork is, it is multidimensional: there are more things worth knowing about a person, it tells us, than his or her place in Fortune’s favor. There is wisdom in the dirt, and the heights of worldly success will not necessarily cure you of your ass’s head. There are whole dimensions of merit that fail to align with the dimensions of the wheel.

We seem to be living through a long anti-elite moment — one that encompasses the Occupy and Tea Party movements, gains for anti-system parties from Britain to Germany to Italy, revolutionary unrest from Turkey to Brazil to Egypt, and historically low levels of trust in public institutions — at the very time when the elite portrays itself as more fairly constituted, more meritocratic, than it has ever been. As Chris Hayes has pointed out in Twilight of the Elites, the most sweeping victories for postwar American liberalism have all been victories for an expanded meritocracy. Even in the midst of Gilded Age-style inequality, the American elite has never been more open to women, people of color, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians. The American elite has never, to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton, looked more like America. At the same time, confidence in the elite has rarely been lower. If this is a paradox, how do we begin to explain it?

We could begin by remembering that the very word “meritocracy,” now almost universally used to praise a system or institution, was invented as a pejorative — or at least a warning. The word was coined in sociologist Michael Young’s 1958 satirical novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy. Perfect equality of opportunity ends not in paradise, but in dystopia, and the meritocracy of the future is brought down by a working-class revolt. For Young, the parallel with “aristocracy” was deliberate: he saw the concept of merit as the Trojan Horse that smuggles inequality and class hierarchy into democracy fully intact. “If the soil creates castes,” he wrote in a reflection on his book in the 1990s, “the machine manufactures classes — classes to which people can be assigned by their achievement rather than ascribed by their birth.” And the classes of a meritocracy can be every bit as rigid, hedged around with their own prejudices and taboos, as aristocratic castes: thanks to meritocracy, “social inequality can be justified, and…such a justification is almost always needed in a democratic society which has bowed to equality at least as far as elections are concerned.”

So it is the faith that economic rewards are due to achievement, not birth, that sanctifies democratic inequality. Earned inequality can strike us as intuitively fair. But it was Young’s insight that meritocracy can grow socially corrosive at the same time it appears to grow more fair: “If the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become, and, if they were convinced it was all for the common good, how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage.” And the effects for those on the other end of the meritocratic bargain must be equal and opposite: imagine being told that you’ve been left behind not because of a bad break or two, but because you’ve been found conclusively lacking in merit. To defend our system of rewards as utterly fair (or as approaching utter fairness), to erase fortune from the picture, is to turn economics into a branch of morality. It’s to build a culture on equal parts entitlement and despondency.

It’s not a coincidence that some of the best-loved entertainment of our era, from Mad Men to Downton Abbey, has a tendency to romanticize the pre-meritocratic world, whether the last throes of the midcentury WASPocracy or the waist-coated British aristocracy itself. But is there a way to criticize meritocracy — the system that let a Jewish kid like me attend college without fear of quotas — without turning reactionary, or pining for the return of Lord Grantham? I think there is, and it starts in appreciating what is best in meritocracy without giving ground to what is worst. I imagine that we want a world in which positions and rewards are open to all on the basis of talent, not birth, connections, or identity — but not a world in which winners and losers alike are thoroughly convinced that they merit all they get, in which market outcomes are habitually viewed in moral terms, and in which a very narrow kind of success is deified. In the early decades of the last century, as the great transformation was getting underway, the economic historian R.H. Tawney hit exactly on meritocracy’s equivocal bargain: “The distinctions of wealth and power which survived when these anomalies [of inherited privilege] had been removed, it surrounded with a halo of intellectual prestige and ethical propriety. It condemned the inequalities of the feudal past; it blessed the inequalities of the industrial future.”Needless to say, we have continued blessing our inequalities nearly a century later. Not for nothing did Senator Phil Gramm, architect of financial deregulation, call Wall Street “a holy place.” Not for nothing did prosperity preacher Joel Osteen see the face of God in a complimentary airline upgrade: “It was simply the favor of God that allowed us to sit in the front row of that plane.”

Against this backdrop, it’s clear that Twilight of the Elites is the most important recent work exploring Americans’ conflicted relationship with their meritocracy. Hayes’s work is required reading for anyone who wants to understand this anti-elite moment and its grounding in the suspicion that America once again has an insular, incestuous ruling class. But the book is, unfortunately, pulled in two separate directions. At its best, Twilight of the Elites is a meditation on the potential ugliness of meritocracy, even when it works as promised. Even a well-oiled meritocracy will be a social-distancing machine, with results ranging from the trivial (Lehman Brothers’ private CEO elevator, which saved Dick Fuld the indignity of mingling with his employees as his bank collapsed) to the tragic (bureaucrats’ failure to comprehend how few New Orleans residents had access to reliable transportation on the eve of Katrina). Even a well-oiled meritocracy will tend to develop its own “cult of smartness,” in which the main determinant of academic success is lionized to the exclusion of “wisdom, judgment, empathy, and ethical rigor,” as Hayes writes. In other words, the most measurable kind of merit becomes synonymous with merit in its entirety. Moreover, even a well-oiled meritocracy can corrupt the judgment of its elites: Hayes cites a wealth of experimental studies suggesting that the powerful are “psychologically disposed to close themselves off to the perspective of others.” In fact, the better meritocracy performs its core function — defining, identifying, and promoting merit — the likelier these ugly results grow.

The more that market outcomes are seen to align with fairness, the less conflict we perceive between social distance and democratic legitimacy — and the more we imbue wealth, and even intelligence, with moral weight. For an example of the latter tendency, consider “Defending the One Percent,” a paper by Greg Mankiw, economic advisor to George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, in which the words “rich,” “talented,” and “productive” are used interchangeably. More strikingly, Mankiw wants to justify America’s weak social mobility on the grounds that “parents and children share genes, a fact that would lead to intergenerational persistence in income even in a world of equal opportunities.” For Mankiw, the “genetic transmission of economic outcomes” is entirely benign. This is meritocracy’s sleight-of-hand: we’ve moved from a factual premise (smart parents often have smart children) to a moral conclusion (as long as inequality is based on the inheritance of smarts rather than the inheritance of privilege, it’s morally peachy).

If the more challenging strand of Hayes’s book questions the similar assumptions of any meritocracy, the other strand simply calls for us to build a better one. It’s easy to look at the facts on American social mobility — down dramatically since the 1980s, and now among the worst in the industrialized world — and conclude that our meritocracy is rusted out. In this telling, a brief period of postwar openness gave rise to an elite that did what elites tend to do: entrench its privilege for its children. American privilege, the argument goes, might wear the mask of merit, might be validated now by test scores and admissions boards rather than bloodlines, but is still as ossified as ever. Dwell on the fact that few things are more predictive of SAT scores than the income of a child’s parents — or on the existence of private preschools whose yearly tuition for one student exceeds the salary of a public school teacher — or on the ways in which the huge and widening gap in families’ child-enrichment spending locks in inequality for the next generation — or on the social media that allows us to reinforce and exploit our school networks in ways the poshest Old Etonian could have only dreamed about — and you may arrive at the sneaking suspicion that we have simply exchanged one aristocracy for another. The old one inherited land or stock; the new one inherits “merit.”

And yet, if this is the case, it’s relatively good news — because it’s one of the oldest and most familiar human stories. If meritocracy really is broken, and American inequality is the result of elite entrenchment, then our political challenges are deep, but our conceptual challenges are shallow. Our bout of inequality would be another chapter in the old story of talent against privilege, openness against cronyism, efficiency against myth. In his recent book The Origins of Political Order, political theorist Francis Fukuyama has called this the struggle over “patrimonialism,” the tendency of elites to distribute goods and positions to family members and favored insiders. Few societies have ever escaped it. Societies that fall into the patrimonial trap tend to decay, producing weak leaders, rigged rules, and feeble governments susceptible to revolt from within and domination from without. Maybe the rusting of meritocracy is a reminder that we Americans aren’t exempt from history. If so, I imagine that Hayes’s appeal to efficiency, the argument America is in the midst of producing a less competent elite, will prove a powerful weapon. Or rather, the argument will in the long run prove self-executing: incompetent elites don’t last.

But I have the nagging sense that this analysis of the problem is too comforting. What if this time — what if this elite — really is different? The fact of our weak, declining social mobility is consistent with at least two explanations. There is the familiar explanation of elite game-rigging and meritocracy in decline. And then there is a much more uncomfortable possibility: this is meritocracy working just as expected, a sorting-out that has never been more merciless or thorough. Start with the demonstrable rise in “assortative mating” by income, in which partners of similar income and education levels pair off to have children, a rise likely fueled in part by one of the signal successes of the postwar meritocracy: the opening of higher education and the workforce to women. Now add two fairly uncontroversial propositions: that income is correlated at least somewhat with intelligence, and that intelligence is at least somewhat heritable (and even more heritable in high-income families). Other things being equal, the result would be a meritocratic society with declining social mobility over time, even if game-rigging were minimized.

A burst of openness as old class barriers fall, and then, over decades, the whole thing slowly freezes: we could explain it as the failure, or the triumph, of meritocracy. Hayes asks, “What if meritocracy broke down?” But Michael Young’s old question is still more troubling, and still unresolved: “What if meritocracy didn’t break down?”

The Allegory of Fortune, c. 1678, by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli or his workshop (University of Virginia Art Museum)

Whatever its manifest injustices, say this for the pre-meritocracy: at its best, it recognized a plurality of merits. It saw “rich,” “talented,” and “productive,” for instance, as three independent categories — not, as Mankiw would have it, three names for the same thing. Now, though, the economic elect is the intellectual elect is the moral elect — or at least that’s how they are viewed. (The near-canonization of Steve Jobs serves as a handy Exhibit A in this regard.) The consequences of this shift, on both ends of the merit spectrum, have been profound. A liberal like Hayes sees the arrogance of the meritocracy in the self-serving culture of corruption that infested Countrywide and Enron. A libertarian like Charles Murray sees it in a culture of condescension: “The new upper class carries with it an unmistakable whiff of a ‘we’re better than the rabble’ mentality … People who are overweight are less admirable as people … Smokers are not to be worried about, but to be held in contempt.” And consider the reverse: could you be a target of that condescension for decades without internalizing at least a part of it?

Deadspin sportswriter Sam Page recently related a story from his grandfather, a union carpenter who worked on the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island — built and still owned by the Nassau County government — in the early ‘70s: “One day during construction, [county executive] Ralph Caso himself stood at the edge of the second deck, filming a commercial promoting the new arena. Every time he began to speak, the construction had to halt. After flubbing his lines three times, the head carpenter, Harry Rhodes, shouted, ‘Hey, Ralphie! You gonna get it right this time?’ Like a school teacher in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, the red-faced Caso circumnavigated the Coliseum’s second deck, confronting each worker, demanding he reveal the guilty party. No one snitched, of course.”

But that story — with a carpenter’s eagerness to heckle his boss like an equal — seems as much a relic of its time as a lava lamp. We can blame the collapse of the union movement, and the policies that sped the collapse along; but we should bear in mind that culture drives policy as much as policy shapes culture. And the culture behind that small incident from Long Island presumed that a man working with his hands on a construction site had as much dignity as a man filming a commercial in a suit.

Four decades later, we’ve been relentlessly informed that — thanks to equality of opportunity! — the failure to be a suit-able professional is a failure of merit. I can imagine few messages more alienating and more stigmatizing.

In a meritocracy, we all reap precisely what we sow, even in times of drought. The depth to which that moral has been taken to heart shows up in the spate of “crisis of masculinity” articles profiling underemployed young men consoling themselves with simulated Xbox gun violence, and in places as dry as Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi’s studies on family bankruptcy. In an economy in which nearly nine in ten bankruptcies are caused by job loss, medical bills, or divorce — bluntly, by what another age would have called the workings of fortune — insolvency is an object of literally unspeakable shame. In the course of their research for The Two-Income Trap, Warren and Tyagi found that “several mothers were willing to talk with us only on the condition that we not use the word ‘bankruptcy’ during the telephone interview for fear that a child might pick up the extension phone and hear the dreaded word. Some said that just hearing the word still makes them cry, and they asked us to refer simply to ‘the event.’”

I would suggest, then, that we have to be prepared to answer Young’s question, the more difficult question. Meritocracy claims to offer us unprecedented fairness and matchless efficiency at no cost — but in the voices of those women speaking haltingly about “the event,” we have an inkling that the bargain is more complicated. We have to be able to name the cost. It’s fitting, then, that perhaps the best resources for doing so come from two thinkers who are in a sense Michael Young’s descendants.

John Rawls and Friedrich Hayek, the liberal and the libertarian, had little in common aside from being two of the most influential political thinkers of the 20^th century. But both read The Rise of the Meritocracy and cited it favorably as an influence on their own political theories. Each shared Young’s skepticism of meritocracy’s desirability. And as a result of this common ancestry, both anti-elite movements of the left and the right own, at least somewhere deep among their philosophical roots, powerful language to address meritocracy’s moral limits.

For Rawls, the argument begins by clarifying what we mean when we talk about justice. There is no moral weight to our personal endowments, from our smarts to the accident of our birth into one social setting or another; “even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense, is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances.” None of these are moral qualities, because we do nothing to earn them. They are all the results of what Rawls called the “natural lottery,” and to label this distribution just or unjust makes as little sense as taking the weather to task. But the standard of justice does apply to the institutions we choose for ourselves, and a society whose distributive scheme replicates the results of the natural lottery is rightly called unjust, because it has willingly endorsed a groundless and random inequality. What we ought to seek instead, Rawls argues, is a system that “nullifies the accidents of natural endowment.”

But these accidents are in fact amplified by a “callous meritocratic society,” one that aims to maximize economic efficiency at any human cost, or one that uses formal equality of opportunity to paper over huge class disparities. Equal opportunity ought to mean more than the equal chance to leave our “inferiors” in the dust. Of course, that’s only the case if we value something more than the unending race for status. Do we? Questions of economic justice are often played out as a struggle between two of the core democratic principles, liberty on the one hand and equality on the other. Yet Rawls points out that the third part of the classic slogan is almost always overlooked: the value of fraternity.

We might dismiss this family of values — fraternity, brotherhood, or civic friendship — as a bit of sentimental sloganeering too vague to inform policy, but for Rawls, it had a precise meaning. It means that we are citizens of a democracy precisely because we “agree to share a common fate.” And it feels very different to leave our friend in the dust, or to mentally secede into a self-identified community of the elect. A society built on fraternity is still likely one of inequalities. It is also, however, a society in which the best-off are able to justify each inequality to the worst-off as something in the common interest, as something that benefits the commonwealth as a whole and increases the size of the societal pie. Some inequalities pass this test — Rawls was no radical, and he recognized capitalism’s potential to create broadly-shared wealth — but many, needless to say, fail it. So a society with any sense of shared purpose would be wary of meritocracy’s extremes, and conversely, it is only in a society whose sense of civic friendship has been deeply corroded that meritocracy can truly thrive.

Little of this would have appealed to Hayek, an avowed economic amoralist. But his attack on meritocracy begins in much the same place, with an appreciation of Young’s prescient satire. He couldn’t stand that so many of his fellow libertarians insisted on praising capitalism as the system that rewards us with just what we deserve. (This reads as something of a shot at Ayn Rand-style libertarianism, and it’s worth noting in passing that Hayek’s thoughts on merit and uncertainty bear little relation to Rand’s philosophy of selfishness.) Hayek hated claims about capitalism’s just deserts because they were so flimsy, and so bound to the unknowable, immeasurable X of merit, an idea whose familiarity has dulled its oddness.

Hayek, in other words, insisted that we need a theory of knowledge to talk about merit: what can we really claim to know about it? Like gravity, actual merit — or the quality that makes an action morally praiseworthy — is invisible. And so, if we want to build an economy on this invisibility, we have to develop means to capture and measure it; but the moment we do that, we’ve already taken a big step away from the reality of merit into the realm of a human construct, “assessable merit,” that’s distorted by the measuring tools and prejudices of the society doing the measuring. Even if one were to assume that we can define merit correctly, it gets worse.

Maybe we think merit has moral weight because it refers to effort, to the subjective pain and sacrifice that goes into work (hard as that position may be to maintain as monopoly rents edge out productive investment as a source of profits). But to measure merit accurately, to use it as a fair basis for deciding who deserves what, think of just how much we’d have to know. We would have to “possess all the knowledge which was at the disposal of the acting person, including a knowledge of his skill and confidence, his state of mind and his feelings, his capacity for attention, his energy and persistence, etc.,” as Hayek wrote. We’d need to know “whether people have made such use of their opportunities as they ought to have made.” And we’d need to “distinguish between that part of their achievement which is due to circumstances within their control and that part which is not.” Now imagine knowing all of that for every actor in an entire economy. To the extent that it gives itself a moral grounding, that is what meritocracy claims to know.

Of course, this is a deliberately provocative absurdity — but it is a telling one. Every time we make a claim about a person’s merit, Hayek is insisting, we are also claiming to be virtually omniscient. And a society capable of even approaching the kind of omniscience needed to make meritocracy moral would be impossibly intrusive, and destructive of the same freedom meritocracy claims to encourage. At the same time, it would have to promote a single, definitive standard of worth (echoes of Hayes’s “cult of smartness”), not the diversity of standards and ways of life that make a free society worthwhile. Nor is our self-portrayal as a moral meritocracy the kind of harmless lie that makes the trains run on time; rather, as Hayek put it, it makes society “unbearable to the unsuccessful.” It’s much better to acknowledge frankly the amorality of success, to think of success in the blunt terms of exchange value. So we might recognize that Mark Zuckerberg — through an insoluble mixture of work, wiliness, timing, and possible subterfuge — has created tens of thousands of times more wealth than his Harvard classmates, without jumping to the conclusion that he owns tens of thousands of times more merit.

There’s much in this line of thought that’s uncomfortable for progressives, from its high tolerance for inequality to Hayek’s claim that the very concept of “economic justice” is meaningless. But there’s also much to welcome: above all, his implication that merit is a refugee from the world of religion, smuggled somehow into the world of economics. As for value, which Hayek wants to be the cold solvent to this mass of superstition — that, too, is a contested concept. A liberal might ask, “Value for whom?” Why value for the individual alone?

In the end, the concept that matters most here is not merit or value, but identification. Who gets to live inside the halo of “us”? To what extent should our official winners and losers be strangers to one another, and is that extent going to be justified or ignored? Why was Hayek even bothered that meritocracy is unbearable to those it judges meritless?

Some of these are questions for another day. Yet they’re still worth asking: not because everyone camping out in Zuccotti Park or wearing a tri-corner hat to a town hall meeting had read up on 20^th century political theory, but because these questions suggest the extent to which the anti-elite moment can offer a considered and sophisticated critique of the meritocracy, not just a passing spasm of economic anger. My generation is the first in memory, after all, that widely expects to be worse off than its parents. To one of the earlier generations of the ever-expanding pie, talk of natural lotteries and civic friendships — of the idea that a community is something we build against the accidents of nature, just as a roof is something we build against the weather — might have sounded like a loser’s lament; talk of the radical uncertainty of merit might have sounded like a pointy-headed excuse. For us, to put it mildly, those concepts are a little more solid.

I’m finishing this at a Starbucks, and on the wall are pictures of a South American farmer’s hands sorting coffee beans. These are the kind of images that a coffee shop, twenty years ago, would have rushed to obscure; but here they are as decorations.

I’m thinking about the part of our culture that Starbucks is canny enough to appeal to. This is the part of our culture that wants to know where our food comes from; that is fascinated by the way things are made and the labor that makes them; that is cultivating a love for the concreteness of things in compensation for the immateriality of our screens; that has started to romanticize producing the way other generations romanticized consuming. Most likely, this doesn’t mean anything. Most likely, this is just our decade’s fad, another one of the infinitely subtle turns of the consumer society, and will only result in the sale of a few more lattes.

But what if it isn’t? Maybe we, who are going to have to make do with less in any case, are learning the value of the thousands of kinds of merit you can’t test for and the kind of work that doesn’t happen in front of a screen. Maybe we, living denser and simpler, by force if not by choice, are recovering something of the value of fraternity; and perhaps we’ll object the next time a politician celebrates himself, or a random constituent, just for rising up from parents who did unglamorous work with their hands, as if any work is something that deserves to be risen up from.

It’s fitting, in this light, that the protest movement of our time looks likely to be remembered not for some policy demand or other, but for a slogan about identification, and about who counts as “us.” For some time, I resented the idea that any movement could speak for 99% of us. It sounded like the kind of braggart claim to universality launched by any number of others, from the “silent majority” to the Moral Majority. I’ve realized that the idea bothered me on a deeper level, too: I’m a son of the meritocracy, and I was raised to recoil at the idea that I might ever be lumped in with the vast majority of anyone.

But I’ve begun to see the ways in which that is a narrow and grasping thought. I’m suspecting that it is also a deceiving thought: we live every day with inequalities so swollen that the space between the rest of us is always on the verge of vanishing by comparison, like details of a landscape seen from a distance. In this light, “the 99%” is not a fact, but an aspiration: that we could make more of our common fate if only we accept that it is common.