On the aristocracy of merit
Why meritocracy is forever worthy of satire
This is a companion piece to my interview with Kathryn Paige Harden, author of The Genetic Lottery, a brilliant rumination on genetics and its implications for our ‘meritocratic’ economy. Due to the complexity of the subject (or my amateurish interviewing and a considerable esprit de l’escalier), I’m appending a commentary on the interview here.
O me! for why is all around us here,
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Idylls of the King’
It’s fairly common for words to go from having a positive or neutral connotation to a negative one. Take the very appropriate example of ‘smug’: it once meant ‘trim, smartly dressed, neat’, and eventually came to mean someone too enamored of their own achievements or stature. The reverse is rarer: we don’t often imbue positive meaning to something that was once a pejorative. A prime example of this linguistic retrofitting is ‘meritocracy’: once a neologism coined in a political dystopia novel meant to satirize the class which it described (a portmanteau of ‘merit’ and ‘aristocracy’), it’s now proudly bandied about by everyone from elites to educators.
Who could possibly be against ‘merit’? It would be like opposing happiness or security. But that’s the genius of this new gloss to the original term: you’re doing all sorts of introductory throat-clearing before you even get to the main point about what ‘merit’ even is, and how our our current conception of it might be lacking.
Take the retrospective comments by Michael Dunlop Young, author of the original The Rise of the Meritocracy, on observing meritocracy be enshrined as the summum bonum in the Blairite politics of his final years:
It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.
Or to put it more bluntly, picking someone from the Andover-Harvard-McKinsey assembly line isn’t going to help you deal with Pasthun tribesmen in Afghanistan (or anything outside of the elite bubble really), because they’re just hoop-jumping gunners with little in the way of civic virtue or intellectual breadth. To elevate a certain kind of analytical smarts, which happen to work well in a technologically-enabled society of consumerism and transactionalism, as the absolute measuring stick of merit is one-dimensional and, frankly, obtuse.
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Πηγή: thepullrequest.com
