You knew it was bound to happen. You knew, in your gut, that once David Brooks read Twilight of the Elites (Twilight), he’d have some fundamental quibble with Christopher Hayes’ latest. (Brooks’ piece is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/opinion/brooks-why-our-eli...)

In Why our Elites Stink, Brooks argues that our elites are failing to live up to a “self-conscious leadership code” that a now vanquished vanguard once had. Before we get to whether such a code even makes sense (I think it does, but not in Brooks' sense), consider Brooks’ general critique of Twilight:

It’s a challenging argument but wrong. I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

To invoke Seth Meyers from Saturday Night Live, really? I can see why this complaint might play well with a certain demographic. After all, successful Americans, especially members of the upper-middle class, do spend an inordinate amount of time shuttling their kids to piano lessons, ensuring that their children gain entry into the best high schools and colleges, and generally putting in serious hours at work. They also spend a lot of time ensuring that their own work product exceeds the prevailing standards of their respective fields. They are killing it, I can assure you. These folks are sweating blood everyday to ensure that they don’t lose their place in our economic biosphere, a system that perhaps has less in common with a biological environment – where ecological balance is at least possible – and more with an oil-soaked incline that very much prefers culling over cultivating.

What Brooks does not realize is that the elites Hayes has in mind are not the folks killing themselves to excel as line-contributors at management consulting firms, law firms, and technology companies. Hayes is talking about people who, through a mix of talent, political maneuvering and luck are able to ascend to the top of the mountain and defend it against those (i.e., the line-contributors) who desperately need access to capital and the other resources (political connections, e.g.) to climb further up the mountain. Yes, I am saying that Brooks’ has conflated (deliberately?) upper-middle class strivers with the real elite. And for that reason alone, his direct assault against Twilight fails.

But what of Brooks’ positive argument, the idea that elites today are sorely lacking a code of honor? Consider Brooks’ own words:

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

There is some “truthiness” here. It is true that if you read about the Libor scandal, you will get the sense that a bunch of immature brats are now playing skipper atop large vessels that they do not quite comprehend.

Yet it is also apparent that Brooks does not understand the preconditions to creating and maintaining a self-conscious code of stewardship and honor. That code is only possible where a number of preconditions have obtained. First, wealth and earning disparities between capital and labor have to be reasonable, a point that Hayes repeatedly makes in Twilight.

Second, such a code is possible only where the word “merit” does not mean something like “best able to enrich Zeus and his favored demigods.” Brooks in fact touches on this, but only obliquely. He observes that “Wall Street firms . . . now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character.” Presumably Brooks would agree that experience makes someone truly more meritorious in the world of banking, since experience would inculcate a broad sense of social responsibility.

I don’t know if this is true of executives in the banking world; it’s quite possible that senior bankers are just as prone to take huge risks as their younger counterparts, given the willingness of Congress to wash away billion-dollar gaffes through bail outs. Nonetheless, I would generally agree with Brooks that experience and character are characteristics relevant to a recruiting or hiring decision. But I digress. The point here is that merit must actually be something genuine and (wherever and whenever possible) immune from manipulation. Where such an immunity is impossible, merit must be something that ordinary people can fight to have reinstated, followed or respected within the key institutions that structure and reproduce society over time.

Defining genuineness is not easy. It doesn’t mean gauged by standardized tests, which are suspect as tools of exigency and manipulation (see the history of military recruiting, which I think of as the sordid incubator of modern standardized tests). Ensuring that merit is a “genuine” concept is simply a way of saying that this word should not become co-opted by an existing regime to justify its own immoral conduct. Put another, perhaps stronger, way: Merit must be defined independently of what happens to be beneficial for the existing elite. Is that hard to do? Absolutely. Should we strive to attain this lofty goal? Without a doubt.

The third precondition is related to the second: There must be mechanisms and institutions in place to prevent Zeus, as well as his favored demigods, from (1) controlling the very definition of “merit” – though controlling access to key institutions and capital and (2) living a distant life, a life immune to the fears, concerns, and hopes of those who do not live at the top. In Hayes’ parlance, we need to dismantle the “autocatalytic” infrastructure that allows elites to rig the game in their favor. We need less, not more, social distance.

In a nutshell, then, Brooks’ positive diagnosis fails because he hasn’t done any rigorous thinking about the core problem. Hayes is right: It’s not just that the people in power don’t happen to have a code of honor, it’s that our most important economic and political institutions are architected to reward only those people who are willing to forever flush that code of honor from their psyches. That dear friends, is, unfortunately, today’s price of admission to Mount Olympus.