Tribune guest columnist Matthew Bowman on the fallacy that our society is a meritocracy. We often achieve and fail at many things not because of anything we do but rather because of circumstances outside our control.
Matthew Bowman is Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University.For four years I lived in an Arkansas town called Arkadelphia, because I taught history at a liberal arts college there. It was, in many ways, a lovely experience. The town could be charming when it tried. Every October, it held an “” celebration.
its faculty in the name of financial solvency. Were I still there — well, I wouldn’t actually be there. I would have been fired last year with around five dozen other professors, many of whom had devoted their lives to the place and genuinely loved the community. I’m lucky, and I know it. All of this is to say, I ended up in Arkansas because, despite the stories we tell ourselves, our society is not really a. There are innumerable factors beyond simple ability that go into every advantage, job, award any of us receives. It’s easy for us, as individualistic Americans, to commit the fundamental attribution error — a logical fallacy that leads us to overemphasize individual traits and deemphasize structural and environmental factors in just about everything.
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