Once upon a time, white male Protestants ruled the roost. You got into a fancy school if your father had gone to the fancy school. You got a job at a white-shoe law firm or climbed the corporate ladder if you golfed at the right club.

Then we smashed all that. We replaced a system based on birth with a fairer system based on talent. We opened up the universities and the workplace to Jews, women and minorities. University attendance surged, creating the most educated generation in history. We created a new boomer ethos, which was egalitarian (blue jeans everywhere!), socially conscious (recycling!) and deeply committed to ending bigotry.

What happened?

A narrative is emerging. It is that the new meritocratic aristocracy has come to look like every other aristocracy. The members of the educated class use their intellectual, financial and social advantages to pass down privilege to their children, creating a hereditary elite that is ever more insulated from the rest of society. But the narrative is insufficient. The real problem with the modern meritocracy can be found in the ideology of meritocracy itself. Meritocracy is a system built on the maximization of individual talent, and that system unwittingly encourages several ruinous beliefs:

Exaggerated faith in intelligence

Today's educated establishment is still basically selected on the basis of IQ. High IQ correlates with career success but is not the crucial quality required for civic leadership.

Misplaced faith in autonomy

The meritocracy is based on the metaphor that life is a journey. On graduation days, members for the educated class give their young Dr. Seuss' "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" which shows "you," who goes on a solitary, unencumbered journey through life toward success. If you build a society upon this metaphor you will wind up with a society high in narcissism and low in social connection.

Misplaced notion of the self

If you base a society on a conception of self that is about achievement, not character, you will wind up with a society that puts little emphasis on the sorts of moral systems that create harmony within people, harmony between people, and harmony between people and their ultimate purpose.

Inability to think institutionally

The current generation sees institutions as things they pass through on the way to individual success. Some institutions, like Congress and the political parties, have decayed to the point of uselessness, while others, like corporations, lose their generational consciousness and become obsessed with the short term.

Misplaced idolization of diversity

The great achievement of the meritocracy is that it has widened opportunities to those who were formerly oppressed. Just as a mind has to be opened so that it can close on something, an organization has to be diverse so that different perspectives can serve some end. Diversity for its own sake leads to social fragmentation.

The meritocracy is here to stay, but we need a new ethos to redefine how people are seen, how applicants are selected, how social roles are understood and how we narrate a common national purpose.