“Meritocracy” by Sydney Williams
“They should all live together on an equal footing; merit to be their only road to eminence,and the disgrace of evil and credit of worthy acts their one measure of difference between man and man. Plutarch (c.47AD – c.119AD)
“I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University”
William Buckley (1925-2008)
The word meritocracy has Latin and Greek roots. It is a system where economic goods and political power are vested in individuals on the basis of talent, effort and achievement, rather than on wealth or social class. The word was popularized in 1958 by Michael Young, a British sociologist and politician in a book The Rise of Meritocracy, which satirized the tripartite school system in England that put children, at age eleven, onto one of three paths toward future education opportunities: Grammar schools for those heading to university; technical training for those with mechanical skills, and secondary schooling for all others. Forty-three years later, Mr. Young wrote an article for The Guardian in which he said his satire had been stripped of its meaning and had been embraced by an elite to justify their status.
Meritocracy is under attack. In a piece for The New Yorker last September, “Is Meritocracy Making Everyone Miserable?”, Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club, wrote: “In recent years, we have been focused on two problems, social mobility and income inequality…” Mr. Menand cited Daniel Markovits, author of The Meritocracy Trap who concluded “that the whole system is a Frankenstein’s monster. We created meritocracy with good intentions, and now we are its victims.” Meritocracy, it is true and like free-market capitalism, does create inequalities – a natural process. Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford’s Hoover Institute went further. “Merit,” he wrote earlier this month, “will soon become a dirty, counterrevolutionary word.” When it no longer works to the advantage of elites, it is renounced.
Ross Douthat, in an op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times, “The Real White Fragility,” wrote that if white privilege is a result of meritocracy then “good” liberals will abandon it. Doing so, Mr. Douthat noted, will fit with stresses in their lives, like expensive housing and fewer well-paying jobs. Competition is fierce and rewards less. We have, he wrote, “a surplus of smart young Americans pursuing admission to a narrow list of elite colleges whose enrollment does not expand with population.” Visiting students near his home in Hamden, Connecticut, he noted a “disappearance of serenity, the evaporation of contentment and the spread of anxiety,” which he had experienced in his years at Harvard twenty years earlier. The discarding of SAT requirements and with some charter schools de-emphasizing hard work, discipline and “being nice” meshes with “woke” liberals’ perceptions and created Mr. Markovits’ Frankenstein-like meritocracy.
Through the mid 1950s elite eastern colleges depended on a small number of private “feeder” schools, populated with sons and daughters of wealthy, white and mostly Protestant families. Jewish students were discriminated against then, just as Asian students are today. Affirmative action, in the mid 1960s was an attempt at meritocracy, in that it helped underrepresented minorities, especially blacks and women. In his New Yorker piece, Mr. Menand wrote: “In 1965, the student population in American colleges was ninety-four percent white and sixty-one percent male…Today, fifty-six percent of students are classified as non-Hispanic whites and forty-two percent of students are male.” Where meritocracy does exist in universities is in the field of sports. A college that denies acceptance to the most qualified history student because he or she is Asian or white will seek the best athlete regardless of race, especially when abilities enhance sports that bring in the most money – football and basketball. Diversity helps as long as it does not interfere with success on the gridiron or the basketball court.
Merit, from the Latin, is the quality of excellence and “cracy,” from the Greek, means strength and power. A meritocracy, then, is a system where the best lead. Over time, however, meritocrats learn to work the system for personal benefit; so, meritocracy develops flaws from within. As well, power breeds elitism and contempt. Like George Orwell’s ‘Napoleon,’ yesterday’s beneficiaries of meritocracy become tomorrow’s dictators. As William Buckley suggested in the rubric quoted above, meritocracy breeds its own demise through a supercilious intolerance on the part of leaders for those who oppose them. Position and power make them enemies of policies they once supported.
Yet a true meritocracy is what flushes the swamps filled with administrators and bureaucrats found in the halls of universities and in the corridors of Washington, D.C. True meritocracy means fresh blood, individuals with independent ideas, something impossible when the elites that lead our universities and run government bureaucracies come from the same schools, the same socio-economic backgrounds and bear the same political philosophies. Yet, with all its faults, what system is better than a meritocracy? It allows the able and tenacious to succeed, no matter their race, creed or sex. Today, critics of meritocracy blame it for social and economic inequalities, yet it champions a fundamental aspect of democracy – regardless of background, anyone with effort and talent can succeed. It is not meritocracy; it is abuse of power that is the problem.
Are the best qualified students deprived of the best education because a university administrator fears his or her job is at risk if an incoming class does not reflect the country’s population? Are publicly held companies held hostage to political correctness and concerns about “social justice?” These are questions that deserve consideration. Meritocracy is nature’s process of natural selection in its rawest form. Ironically, one of the few meritocratic businesses is professional sports – where minorities represent the largest percentage of the successful. Survival goes to the quickest, the strongest, the smartest, the fittest. It seems unlikely that the NFL, NBA, NHL or major league baseball will ever prioritize egalitarianism when filling their rosters. Why should they? Would fans prefer to watch the most diverse baseball team or the best?
From my own experience, a true meritocracy in business is rare. One exception was the Wall Street trading desk. In those tense, high-pressure rooms ability was valued higher than any other trait – old school ties or family connections made no difference. What counted was one’s skill in executing a profitable trade. I once sat next to Letitia Baldridge at dinner at the ‘21’ Club. Without asking where I worked, she told me the worse business manners in America were on the trading floor at Salomon Brothers, which was where I then worked as a salesman – not as a trader, I hasten to add. Amused by her comment, I explained that on the trading floor, civility and manners were suspended, at least until the market closed.
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