Editor’s Note: This essay is part of the Texas Horn’s 2026 Inaugural Journal, “The Soul of the University.” Contact us here to request a hard copy of the journal.
“Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other” – Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees
In the aftermath of the Students for Fair Admission V. UNC case, many on the Right celebrated the landmark decision to abolish affirmative action efforts and instead turn toward a ‘merit-based’ system. They celebrated rightly, for there are numerous reasons to laud the riddance of this policy, namely the fact that it fails to support the students it claims to support, it harms the average college student, it upholds racist standards of measurement, and it fails to address the upstream issues that many claim made affirmative action necessary and implemented in the first place. Yet in celebrating its demise, many on the Right have rushed to embrace its supposed replacement: the “meritocracy.” These meritocratic admissions appear to be the perfect solution to the previous racial engineering—an unbiased, unpreferential system that evaluates purely on GPA, test scores, and general academic performance. However, to defend and celebrate this replacement is to reveal a deeper problem in the conservative ethos: the confusion between technological efficiency and output, and human excellence.
It would be incorrect and absurd to propose a system that isn’t structured on some measure of merit. However, what is the system of merit we must use, and toward what end does it point? Justice Clarence Thomas advocates for the merit that utilizes objectivity, neutrality, and productivity. Under this system, the student with the highest SAT and ACT scores, the highest GPA from the most competitive school, and the longest list of academic successes and awards should be offered a spot in every single top university in the nation. What this system misses entirely and fails to account for is an understanding of what the university is meant for. This meritocratic university is not a cultivator of human souls or virtue, but rather a well-oiled dynamo aimed straight for technological progress, or perhaps technological slavery.
In the Medieval period, higher education was an institution of the church created for theological and civil education. The university was not the home of inventors and scientists, but cultural engineers, statesmen, and the clergy. The university was structured around the seven liberal arts: the trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. The trivium is the initial part of the education, placing the human goods before the goods of technical knowledge. Even in the quadrivium, their methodology of science was entirely for the pursuit of knowledge, not the practical application of technical development. The modern meritocratic system inverts this: it places the ‘hard sciences’ as the primary purpose of the university, leaving the liberal arts for the confused students and future professors. The skills that are upheld as the greatest indicators of a student’s success were formally excluded from the university and left for trade schools and apprenticeships. The perfect student at this modern university prizes production and success above community, virtue, or even the rules of the university itself. This is the student the Right has turned to praise, rather than the sage, saint, or statesman.
If the Right wants to critique the moral relativism and value neutrality of progressives and seculars alike, it would seem absurd to base our entire system of education on those principles. The meritocratic university prizes its system for its neutrality and equality, failing to place any value on quality of character, virtue, or excellence. The Right even wants to abolish legacy admissions from our university in the push toward neutrality, despite the fact that hereditary aristocracy has always been the primary class of scholars, writers, statesmen, and philosophers. An apparent contradiction emerges: members of the Right want to defend Christian Truth and ethics, while at the same time undermining the groundwork for said ethics through the destruction of the university. They ruthlessly critique our public education systems (especially at the high school level) while implementing systems of nihilism that perpetuate the very problems.
To claim that these meritocratic systems are inherently nihilistic is a brazen claim, but one that must be taken seriously by the right. Almost every residue of nihilism in the American ethos—especially among members of the post-Christian right—can be traced back to Friedrich Nietzsche, the main proponent of nihilism. Nietzsche understood nihilism as an annihilation of all historical values and a re-positing of a new set of values derived from the will, or the will to power, to use his own words. Nietzsche writes that “Genuine philosophers…are commanders and legislators”; they derive their authority from their own strength (BGE §211). Nihilism at its core, then, is the destruction of understood values and assertion of new values derived from no authority beyond oneself. Following this definition, it would be reasonable to conclude that our systems of meritocracy uphold that very standard: annihilating a standard of value that is known through revelation, and positing a new system of neutrality with no basis other than strength, or technological advancement and output.
The Right has responded to this apparent challenge with two different approaches. Members of the secular right, or tech-right, have advocated for this meritocratic approach with adjustments to compensate for the naturally disadvantaged. In an article titled How to Help the Left Half of the Bell Curve, controversial journalist Steve Sailer concedes the meritocratic approach to admissions, placing value on technological output, but recognizes a certain moral responsibility for those on the right side of the “IQ Bell Curve” to serve the left half. More simply, if we recognize that IQ is a natural faculty derived from a number of factors outside of one’s control, then there is an equal moral responsibility to assist disadvantaged populations. Sailer evaluates this disadvantage on a cultural basis, but that isn’t necessary to take his suggestion seriously. If our universities are for technological output, shouldn’t we have some moral responsibility for the disadvantaged? Under a true meritocratic system, this answer always has to be no.
The better response and solution, then, involves a much larger transformation of the American university: cultivate souls, not machines. Ernst Jünger rings true here, for if we strive for technological perfection, we must necessarily forget human perfection. To restore our culture and our civilization, we must restore our universities and what it means to be human. Our university must not exist as a bloated trade school; our university must strive for true human greatness and excellence of the soul. In order to preserve the West and the future of the Conservative movement, we must flee from the dynamo and race toward human excellence; we must flee from the Tower of Babel we have constructed before we build too high. We have killed the sage and replaced him with the podcaster; we have killed the saint and replaced him with the medical guru; and most significantly, we have killed the statesman and replaced him with the data analyst.
