THE CITY
mate democracy: every human being approaches God on the same terms. A Nobel economic laureate or a Fortune 500 CEO who spends time on his or her knees in honest prayer and spiritual struggle every day is keeping it green; for those few minutes that person isn’t a successful meritocrat whose meteoric career streaks across the sky. Christopher Hayes is not wrong that American meritocracy as it exists today is both a symptom and a cause of a society losing its footing and in danger of a real fall. And I do not say that a “Christian” or theistic meritocracy would work where a secular one must fail. (We had a Christian meritocracy in Puritan New England. The best, brightest and godliest hanged Quakers and witches.) And I repeat what I wrote earlier, to avoid misunderstanding: Christianity is not the only religious or other source of the kind of moral insight and spiritual depth that can mitigate the problems of a meritocratic society. It is the one I understand best and the one that, historically, has played the most important role in American life. I leave to others the task of describing other resources and traditions by which other Americans whose talents have brought them into important and powerful positions in our society can be guided and checked. But with those appropriate reservations appropriately taken, I do say that the fading of serious Christian commitment in the sleek and successful ranks of America’s meritocracy plays a significant and damaging role in our national life. The renewal of Christian commitment among a significant sector of America’s elite is, I think, a necessary condition of continued American progress and success. If we get this, we will still need social reforms and social change— much of it, I suspect, not what Hayes wants, but that is another story. But if we don’t get that kind of renewal and commitment, no program of reform, however wisely engineered, can keep our liberty, our prosperity and our democracy safe, much less transform them into something richer, deeper, greater and more widely and fairly shared than anything we have yet seen.
Walter Russell Mead is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest magazine. One of the foremost voices on foreign policy in America, h e blogs at “Via Meadia” at the-american-interest.com, from which this piece is adapted. 84