A decade after World War II, while the Labour Party was in the early throes of an electoral drought that would keep it out of power from 1951 through 1964, a socialist sociologist named Michael Young (later Baron Young of Dartington), draftsman of Labour’s 1945 election manifesto but somewhat disillusioned with the party’s intellectual stagnation, wrote a satirical novel titled The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033: An Essay on Education and Equality. The word “meritocracy” was his coinage, and he meant it as a pejorative.
Baron Young’s concept of a “meritocracy” was a society in which men were rigidly classified by intelligence, for which they were tested in childhood. The results of the test (conducted as early as age three at the time of the book’s notional date of writing, early 2034) determined the future course of each child’s life. The outcome was a drastically unequal society, which the baron saw as worse than the old aristocrat-dominated era. Like many a radical (vide William Cobbett’s The Reformation in England and William Morris’s medieval romances), his condemnation of the present led to as sentimentalized a view of the past as any reactionary ever entertained. In the era before meritocracy gained power –
A sort of egalitarianism flourished then because two contradictory principles for legitimizing power were struggling for mastery – the principle of kinship and the principle of merit – and nearly everyone, in his heart of hearts, believed in both. . . .
Many people were catapulted forward by their parents’ riches and influence; not only did they benefit from the culture festooning their homes, they were sent to the best schools and colleges, dispatched on trips abroad and given expensive training for Bar, countinghouse, or surgery – all the advantages, in short, which we in our day try to keep for the deserving. But since such treatment was sanctioned by only half the moral code, the beneficiaries were only half at home in their station in life. They could not say to themselves with complete conviction ‘I am the best man for the job’ because they knew that they had not won their place in open competition and, if they were honest, had to recognize that a dozen of their subordinates would have been as good, or perhaps better. Although they sometimes sought to deny self-doubt by too brassy an assertion of self-confidence, such denial was hard to sustain when it plainly ran against the facts. The upper-class man had to be insensitive indeed not to have noticed, at some time in his life, that a private in his regiment, a butler or ‘charlady’ in his home, a driver of taxi or bus, or the humble workman with lined face and sharp eyes in the railway carriage or country pub – not to have noticed that amongst such people was intelligence, wit, and wisdom at least equal to his own, not to have noticed that every village had its Jude the Obscure. If he had so observed, if he had so recognized that his social inferiors were sometimes his biological superiors, if the great variety of people in all social classes had made him think in some dim way that ‘a man’s a man for a’ that’, was he not likely to respond by treating them with a kind of respect?
Charles Murray takes up the same theme in a review (illustrated by a scene drawn from Animal Farm) of The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by political philosopher Michael J. Sandel. Professor Sandel quotes Baron Young favorably, and Mr. Murray concurs in a large part of the critique:
As Young predicted, far too many members of today’s elites really do believe that they deserve their place in the world. They have gotten too big for their britches. They are unseemly, albeit in different ways. The billionaire’s 30,000-square-foot home is visibly unseemly. But so is a faculty lounge of academics making snide remarks about rednecks – meaning the people without whom the academics would have no working mechanical transportation, be in the dark after sundown, have to use chamber pots, and, literally, starve. Today’s elites have a remarkable obliviousness about the lives and contributions of ordinary people that bespeaks an unseemly indifference – not to mention disdain – for those people.
True enough, but is the triumph of “meritocracy” the cause of that disdain? And, whatever the cause, is there any cure?
In Baron Young’s and Charles Murray’s view (and perhaps in Professor Sandel’s, though I know his opinions only as mediated through Murray), the “merit” in “meritocracy” is intelligence – the ability to absorb information rapidly and accurately and then recombine it in enlightening ways. Mr. Murray has elsewhere labeled the possessors of that merit the “cognitive elite”. As a marker of elite status, intelligence has largely superseded older markers, such as ancestry and wealth. More precisely, it has assimilated them: The cognitive elite are not merely smart; they are rich, and they intermarry, forming a social class that functions in much the same way way as hoi kaloi kai agathoi (“the beautiful and the good”) of ancient Greece or the pre-Great War European aristocracies.
Were those past elites in fact less disdainful of the thetes and the “commoners” than today’s elite is of the “rednecks”? That isn’t the impression that one garners from the history and literature of those times. It is also quite possible for disdain to be accompanied by acknowledgement that the lower orders are essential to the elite’s own comforts. The patrician fable of the revolt of the other bodily parts against the stomach, recounted by Livy, Aesop, Plutarch and Shakespeare, concedes as much but concludes that the elite’s superiority is justified; the inferior parts are simply doing their duty by making it possible for their betters to carry on their far more important work.
Condescension and snobbery are elements of the human condition. Political reform and lectures on their irrationality won’t banish them. Universal and whole-hearted acceptance of the Sermon on the Mount might make a start.
The Young/Murray critique of meritocracy isn’t the only one. It is a “soft” critique, ultimately asking only that the members of the cognitive elite be mindful of their limitations and appreciative of the vital role of those outside their circle. Moreover, the elite whose attitudes it criticizes may already be dissolving. College education has played a major role in creating the cognitive elite (a point that Mr. Murray has often made). Co-education made it easy for men and women on the right-hand side of the intelligence Bell Curve to meet and marry their intellectual peers, then beget children who could gain admission to the parents’ almae matres without relying on alumni preferences, thus setting in motion a self-reinforcing cycle.
Now the cycle seems to be stuttering, as colleges transform themselves into ideology-obsessed credentialing factories that are decreasingly attractive to one of the halves of the human species that is essential to reproduction. When the men whom cognitively elite women would prefer to marry are scattered throughout the population rather than conveniently concentrated on campus, the segments of the Bell Curve will intermingle, as they did in the past. Highly intelligent people will still be born (and many of them will still become billionaires), but they will be less of an identifiable, self-conscious social grouping.
Side by side with the “soft” critique is a “harder” version: that allowing people to gain wealth by exercising their talents is unjust, because those talents owe their existence to factors – genetics, upbringing, education, luck – that were bestowed on them by others. The nub of that argument is that there is no such thing as “merit”.
Since this post has already meandered long enough, I’ll reserve discussion of the “hard” critique for a later day. It “merits” extended examination, for its premise is that there are no such entities as individual human beings with responsibility for their own lives, a version of what C. S. Lewis called “the abolition of man”. It thus goes beyond denigration of the role of merit to rejection of the reasoning intellect.
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