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What is the case against meritocracy?
One has to separate ‘primordial’ meritocracy from the structured, deliberate, extreme meritocracy that exists in the modern west.
It has always been true, under every socioeconomic system man has ever devised, that smart young people have worked their way up the ladder. Historic royal courts (say those of the Tudors in England) often had a surprising number of people of low birth (at least in the second generation) who had worked their way to some kind of power. It was possible and even common for fortunes to radically shift for a family in a single generation. In a few decades families of no historical presence (who had maybe been peasants, then small time landholders, then gotten involved in regional politics) made it to court, to the king or queen’s ear. The current American system of deliberate meritocracy, open job applications, slander against ‘legacy’ applicants, criticism of “nepo babies”, the surging of second generation immigrants into the establishment at rates unseen even in the early 20th century is what is comparatively new. The worship of meritocracy, in other words.
Modern American meritocracy is bad because I see no reason why the child of two Brahmins deserves vastly more wealth and power than the child of two average Mayflower descendants just because the former is “more intelligent”. Though I have a reputation as something of a Jewish chauvinist on this board, I actually sympathize with the Ivy League admissions committees of the 1920s that capped us at 10% or 20% of a student population. Simple IQ is not enough to justify your rule. Tell a Hausa or Fulani or Yoruba that the Igbo deserve to rule Nigeria because they’re smarter and richer and they have every right to laugh you out of the room. Mere intelligence does not by default grant you the right to power over other men.
Meritocracy breeds the most extreme, most perverse form of entitlement. The entitlement that having a big boy IQ means you are owed a significantly greater money-making capacity (and thus comfort, power and prestige) by society than someone of more modest intelligence. I reject this notion. Perhaps it is particularly intelligent people who themselves owe a duty to society. I recall a comment by a regular user on a previous account (possibly @Esperanza) about how, growing up in Ireland in the 1980s, almost the entire graduating class (in engineering at the country’s most prestigious university) left for the United States, for fortune. What could Ireland have become had they decided to stay, to force change, to build things at home even if it was hard, to serve instead of to seek to merely enrich themselves, again and again?
I am relatively intelligent. But I despise the vanity of IQ meritocracy, the narcissism of it, the dweeb superman, the programmer ubermensch who believes not only that the arbitrariness of fate entitles him to rule (this is true, obviously, of any system), but that he owes nobody for it. Silicon Valley, America’s IQ meritocracy headquarters, is so devoid of duty, of nobility, that it has allowed San Francisco to collapse into shithole status. All the tech men can do is either defend it, whine without doing anything or flee to Texas, which is arguably even more pathetic. Bill Gates’ only noblesse oblige is funding third world mosquito nets and attempting to design a better toilet for India, his philanthropic service to his own people is limited or nonexistent.
I have found in my life that ‘strivers’ of humble birth often have pathological character flaws that make them extremely dangerous. These include mild sociopathy, lack of gratitude, poor etiquette and manners, rudeness, a belief that their success is entirely their own doing, deep-seated jealousy of those they perceive as doing better, and immense, insatiable greed. Often, they do not even particularly enjoy life, they just try to min-max it, like a video game theory-crafter. They seek power and so ought, quite rationally, to be denied it or at least to be handed it very, very slowly.
Obviously baseline intelligence in positions of power is necessary for the successful functioning of society. But how much? Must they be the most intelligent people from all the land, or can they merely be quite intelligent people who also have other things about them that should be valued in a ruling class?
Why would we grant an exception and compromise the efficiency of the system at all ? I don’t recognize the supposed higher value or altruism of your class. Even if some individuals in that group had those traits, we wouldn’t reward entire bloodlines. In theory, you’re making an argument about ‘personality’ versus ‘IQ’, but what you actually propose is blood versus everything else, because hereditary classes are not subject to any assessment of their worth to society, whether personality or IQ.
I can understand why most people would want their (high) status to be unalterable, but this being a zero-sum game, their interest diverges heavily from everyone else’s. This is little more than pining for the sweet life of the aristocrat who never has to justify himself.
I don’t think you can be absolved of this sin either.
What gratitude? I thought you were here to serve the common folk. Hereditary ruling classes do not feel any obligation towards their lessers – like you, they expect adulation.
My class (at least as far as the American half of my family go) is ‘new money’, if anything. Or maybe, if I had to be granular, a yo-yo between rich and poor dating back to our arrival in the country. I’m certainly not a Mayflower descendant. But I like what they did. The Harvard Club is nice. I enjoy the architecture out on Cape Cod. The true, true WASPs I’ve known have exactly the nice-but-middling intellectual energy I like to see in political leaders, who tend to get dangerous if they get too smart, rare exceptions like LKY notwithstanding.
I don’t think there’s any magic in bloodlines. But I think there’s great value in an elite raised with a certain sense of duty and a great sense of luck - that is, with the knowledge that what they have is not the result of their own hard work. This is the critical element, the worst part of the ‘self made man’, that he attributes to ability and skill what should usually be attributed to good fortune. It’s this that Freddie is writing about, because of course ability is luck too.
Strivers who believe that the universe owes them something for their intelligence are often at the heart of culture war debates, they’re the angry journalists at Vice (most of whom aren’t of particularly high birth, contrary to some claims) upset that being a journalist pays so poorly even though they’re smart and graduated from Brown. Compare to me, then, if you want and are interested as you seem to be. I believe that nothing I have is the result of my hard work (though I am in fact in my own right somewhat professionally successful), I have a healthy respect for luck, and I believe it is the duty of people with valuable things (money and talent) to support prosocial causes. To that end I advocate more redistribution from rich to poor, higher taxes on people like me, an end to mass immigration (which pressures working class pay), more police on the streets (disproportionately benefiting the poor), the locking up of the mentally ill homeless (see previous), more discipline in schools (see previous) and the overall beautification of society (benefiting everyone).
Are you trying to butter up your audience, dude? Is it campaigning season for nobility seats already? Your motte-approved opinions, appreciation for wholesome americana, and humble family beginnings are besides the point. No configuration of these parameters would justify that privilege.
You say you want to recognize luck and ‘a sense of duty’(applause), but your method is to recognize blood instead of merit, both subject to luck. Luck is tangential to your argument. If luck was our primary concern, we should forget blood and merit, and draw lots for membership in the ruling class.
The angry journalist at vice also believes he is helping society by supporting opposite causes to your own. In his defense, his self-interest is hidden, he doesn’t nakedly request aristocratic status for his prosocial efforts.
I don't really see a better proxy for judging a sense of duty to others than blood/nobility. Anecdotally, the people in my family who have inherited their wealth generationally have significantly more sense of responsibility to the community and those around them than the ones on the other side of my family who believe they've earned their wealth and refuse to take care of their homes and barely invest their resources to help themselves, let alone the people in their families or the broader community. I suspect this stems from the sense of fear that those born into no money feel toward money, whereas the family members who always had money were much less fearful about it and happier to spread the wealth around. Frankly I want to be ruled by people who are secure in their wealth and are willing to spend it to improve their lives and the lives of those around them rather than by people who want to hoard their resources out of learned apprehension and fear. Family history of wealth tracks the former better than any other metric I can imagine.
I have a hard time thinking of a worse one. The history of "nobility" is largely one of forcefully looting as much wealth as possible from what are effectively slaves, held in place with military force. What was the nobility's reaction to the peasantry being able to demand higher wages after the Black Death, or move to cities for the same end? Was it to encourage this natural economic development which improved productivity even at their own cost? Of course not, they passed laws prohibiting peasants from leaving so that they could not get those higher wages.
The feeling of societal obligation you're talking about--and in particular, a feeling of societal obligation that actually helps other people and does not consider the rigid maintenance of the existing order for the sake of "stability" to be the primary obligation--is extremely rare.
Communism. Like, it's not even close.
For most of that history, wealth as we understand the term effectively didn't exist, because there wasn't a workable way to create it. Most people were subsistence farmers, and the military force was necessary to prevent the next guy over from rolling through and looting all the portable goods. Anything better than that required a level of structure and coordination that no one involved could maintain.
You understand that food has to be made, a process that takes a lot of work with a lag-time of several months to a year? If everyone abandons the fields to go chase better wages in the cities, where does the next harvest come from? What happens to the people in those newly crowded cities?
In a hypothetical world where this happens, they go hungry and head back to where they were born to work the land. Of course, this didn't happen, because they never got the chance: they were reduced to serfs by their nominal betters anyhow. We needn't pretend that medieval aristocrats were enlightened despots when we can very much see they were no such thing.
By the time serious hunger arrives, it seems to me that it's too late to do that. By contrast, it is not hard to imagine the authorities getting reports of people abandoning their farms to flood the cities, doing the simple math, and trying to prevent what seems like an obvious crisis in the making. Serious famine is very, very bad. Or maybe I'm wrong and they totally did it just to be dicks. I stand by to be educated.
Neither do we need to claim that the miseries of existence are imposed by human design, or that a human action being unpleasant proves that there was a better option available, and that the people involved should have known about it. If you want to claim that the laws were pointless and evil, make the argument, don't just assume it.
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