The word ‘meritocracy’ was coined by Michael Young in his 1958 book, Rise of the Meritocracy. Wikipedia has the following to say about it: ‘The term was intended to be pejorative, and his book was set in a dystopian future in which one’s social place is determined by IQ plus effort.’ How unfortunate, then, that meritocracy is now deeply ingrained into the very fabric of Western society.
Meritocracy is supposedly a system which avoids privileges of wealth and ‘friends in high places’, by replacing these means of social mobility and success with that of talent, competence and ability. If you work hard enough and you have the requisite ‘skills’, so Brown, Sarkozy and Blair (that embodiment of meritocratic success, i.e. war criminal) inform us, then you’ll really be ‘getting on’ – you’ll be ‘going places’.
There are three responses to this. Firstly, who decides what counts as ‘success’? I don’t remember having had any say, for example, in the designation of the position of CEO at BAE Systems as being ‘successful’. It seems an odd sort of system that regards the chief of a global murder machine as offering anything valuable whatsoever. But then meritocracy is not democratic, and so what we may class as socially desirable is ignored.
Secondly, and less dramatically, meritocracy simply doesn’t do what it says on the tin. The assumption is that it avoids the inequalities which wealth and Old Boy contacts bring about, but this simply isn’t so. A child born into a middle-class family has infinitely more chances of ‘getting on’ in this world than a child born into a working class family. (As may now be clear, however, this in itself is not saying much). Middle-class families tend to have lots of books around, they teach their children to read before they go to school, they take them to museums, they teach them how to ‘talk properly’, they know how to play the system if their child is in trouble: they equip their child, that is to say, with the cultural equivalent of money because they have the money to do so in the first place.
Finally, and most importantly, meritocracy is a form of fascism. Its logic is as follows: the natural inequalities of body, race, ability, and so on are equated with what an individual deserves to receive from life in general. If you’re intelligent, white and ruthless, it’s likely you’ll go far in the world; if you’re black, disabled and have a low IQ, you deserve, the system tells us, to live a life of poverty. There is only one logical step between this and the Nazi approach to the Jews: meritocracy merely condemns to wretchedness people who fail to meet bureaucratic standards; the Nazis killed them.
The ‘social ladder’ doesn’t lead upwards; it descends into an inferno. The point is not to climb it, but to smash it to pieces.
Surely you jest?
Take care & God bless
WF
By: Weekend Fisher on August 10, 2009
at 3:37 am
Very inspiring stuff. Thanks for this!
By: Michael O'Connell on September 17, 2009
at 2:28 am
In former communist countries, in Eastern Europe, they had a different understanding of meritocracy: high ranking officials of the party were poor (eventually turned ostensibly rich) and preferably illiterate. If one came from a ‘burgeois’ family or was merely a poor (anti-communist) intellectual, the communist bureaucratic system would have condemned him to wretchedness. Or, as it often happened, they would have killed him (as the millions of people killed by the communist regimes across Eastern Europe testify to).
By: Elena Rapotan on September 17, 2009
at 7:11 pm
It seems as if communist Eastern Europe was a diabolical mirror image of the West. It’s a good example of what any radical politics worth its salt shouldn’t do: simply invert power relations. You don’t remove the social ladder by turning it upside down; like I said in the article, you need to destroy it.
By: Daniel Hartley on September 17, 2009
at 7:59 pm
But how could you do it? It just seems that in order to destroy the social ladder, you need a privileged class in charge with this process.
By: Elena Rapotan on September 17, 2009
at 8:17 pm
‘How?’ is a question I ask myself on a daily basis, and I have no real answer. Though, of course, there are good historical reasons for that: I’m in Western Europe – the last place on earth anything will ever change. So it’s only partly my stupidity that’s to blame.
But I don’t think you need a privileged class to do it. Generally, people are themselves aware of all this stuff, but are often unable to articulate it or to act upon it in a coherent manner. Chomsky, for example, says that you just need to explain to people why things are like they are, how things might otherwise be, and then let them decide what to do about it. People aren’t stupid. But in most cases I don’t even think you need to explain: the indigenous population of Bolivia, for example, were more than aware of their being exploited. So they organised themselves and did something about it. And now, under Morales, who I don’t think anyone could fairly call a member of a ‘privileged class’, they’re doing much, much better. Same as the poor in the shanty towns of Venezuela.
It’s hardly a rallying cry, but patient explanation – and every now and then some political manoeuvering – seems sensible to me.
By: Daniel Hartley on September 17, 2009
at 8:30 pm
Very Nietzschean
By: dan on October 11, 2009
at 3:33 pm