View source for Meritocracy is an appalling idea that no one believes in even though everyone claims to

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[[Category:Andrew Lilico]]
[[Category:Meritocracy]]
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{{DES | des = "In a meritocracy, all that counts for your success or failure is your biological merits. [...]" | show=}}
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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has caused some ripples with his address a couple of days ago at Princeton. In his speech he offered 10 "suggestions", mirroring the Ten Commandments. One of these concerned "meritocracy", about which he said the following:
We have been taught that meritocratic institutions and societies are fair. Putting aside the reality that no system, including our own, is really entirely meritocratic, meritocracies may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives. But fair in an absolute sense? Think about it. A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate – these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.
This led to a rather peculiar exchange on the Today programme yesterday between Toby Young, whose father originally coined the term "meritocracy" (to disagree with it), and Helen Lewis. What I found particularly odd about the Radio 4 interview was that it centred around the idea of how those that flourished most in a meritocracy, on account of their biological advantages, might have duties to assist the less genetically endowed. The reason that it's a peculiar debate is that if the less genetically endowed are permitted to be assisted to do better than their pure genetic inheritance implies, by definition we do not have a "meritocracy".
I shan't beat around the bush. In my view, a meritocracy (or, if you prefer the terminology, a system of "equal opportunity") is one of the worst, most wicked conceptions of society ever devised. In a meritocracy, all that counts for your success or failure is your biological merits. If you are beautiful. clever, healthy, good-tempered and naturally hard-working, you will (and you ought to) succeed, and if you are ugly, stupid, unhealthy, bad-tempered and naturally lazy you will fail, and no one is allowed to help you. In a world of equal opportunity, all the usual systems and social bonds that help the less biologically advantaged to get ahead – family connections, church, charitable patronage, pity, brute good fortune – are stripped away and called wicked. In the morally inverted world of equal opportunity, helping your children to get their first job is what bad parents do. In such a land, policymakers regard an educational system as having weaknesses if it facilitates loving parents getting their children a head start on those children whose parents neglect them. In such a world, inheriting good looks is perfect; but inheriting bad looks and money means your wealth must be confiscated by death duties and you left to fend and fail for yourself.
No one actually believes in the Nietzschean dystopia that a world of truly equal opportunity would represent. All of us, in practice, believe we should be able to teach our children what we know, or give that blinded solider a part in the village play whether or not he's the best actor, or fund that eager-but-poor Tanzanian youth's investment scheme even though other investments nearer to home might yield higher returns. But even though none of us actually believes in equal opportunity, and would be appalled if we witnessed it in practice, we still mouth an attachment to it and because of that it infects policymaking. Just this week we have seen the government's social mobility tsar tell us we should not try to organise jobs for our children. Nick Clegg said something similar about internships a couple of years ago. In a notorious speech in 2007 David Willetts argued that a weakness of the current system — which he considered particularly amplified in the case of grammar schools — was the scope it gives for middle-class parents to enable their children to do better by focusing more effort and resources on them. (He did not, as some commentators at the time implied, criticise the parents themselves for doing this. But he did, squarely and unambiguously, consider the education system weaker to the extent that it granted more opportunity for this.)
It is just as foolish and wrong to reduce aggregate opportunity in the name of making opportunity more equal as it is to reduce aggregate income in the name of making income more equal. We want a society in which there is an abundance of opportunity. But what must be understood is that the creation of opportunity typically makes opportunity less equal. If a wealthy person picks out a poor person for patronage, the beneficiary of that patronage has a huge boost in her opportunity relative to others. If I love my children and help them to flourish, part of their flourishing comes from my love, not from their merit, and that means my children's opportunity is boosted relative to other children that might have greater biological gifts.
That opportunity is not equal is not a weakness of our world – it is not a problem to be solved, or even an area for us to "make progress in". Meritocracy is not a sadly unattainable ideal. It is a monstrous idea that has attained the status of shibboleth.
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