Meritocracy is not a good thing

Meritocracy Part I: Defining the beast

The idea that meritocracy is not a good thing will strike many as absurd. Should we not assign jobs to the best people for them?

And yet: a historical view forces us to recognize that the notion that people should do jobs that they are good at is not new. This, at least, is not an idea original to whatever it is we mean by ‘meritocracy’.

For liberal societies to uniquely pride themselves on their embrace of meritocracy, it must mean something specific, new, and revolutionary.

And, indeed, a study of the origins of the term bears this out. The word ‘meritocracy’ was coined comparatively recently, in 1956, by sociologist Alan Fox (writing for the journal Socialist Commentary).

Another interesting discovery is that for the first few decades of its use it was a pejorative, popularized by Michael Young’s 1958 satirical essay The Rise of the Meritocracy. And yet, since then, the term has not only been rehabilitated; it has been embraced as a self-evident virtue.

So what does it actually mean?

Jose David Morales

Meritocracy is the notion that our entire political and economic system should be arranged according to a measurable quality known as ‘merit’.

Within this system, merit is typically defined by formal examinations and evaluations of performance. Meritocracy is therefore characterized by tests, reviews, qualifications, competitions, structured interviews, and the quantification of performance and ability.

The term ‘meritocracy’ is the combination of the Latin-origin "merit" (from mereō meaning earn) and the Greek suffix "-cracy" (power, rule). In other words, it is rule by those who are understood to have earned it, as opposed to rule by those who derive their legitimacy from traditional sources.

It is often celebrated as the replacement of a class-based (aristocratic) system. This claim has emerged as not entirely true: meritocracies evidently retain class structures, but these class structures are now advertised and justified as the expression of ‘merit’, rather than deriving from hereditary institutions.

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Advocates for meritocracy typically imply that a ‘merit’-based system increases social mobility (although the notion that one can move up or down the social hierarchy is itself a tacit admission that class structures survive). This claim of increased mobility is also questionable, as we shall see.

Meritocracy necessitates and idealizes the destruction of traditional boundaries. This began with the attack on class structures, but after the moral primacy of ‘merit’ is accepted, it must also be conceded that other structures which impede the centering of ‘merit’ should be questioned: national borders, gender divides, insular communities, and prejudices of all kinds.

The seeds of meritocratic thought arose in the West with the broader Enlightenment, which held that the scientific process - with its advocacy of quantification and objectivity - could be turned upon politics and human affairs more generally, in order to progress society towards utopia.

A provable meritocracy thus demands that all achievement must be explicit, documented, legible, and acceptable. Meritocracy can only be conducted on the basis of what we can measure; this thing we call 'merit’.

Of course, distilling the ineffable qualities of human existence into quanta has always proved challenging for the social sciences, which is why they have strayed while the hard sciences have progressed.

The central question at hand is: “What is the definition of this thing we recognize as ‘merit’ within a meritocracy?” How is it measured, by whom, and when? Is the ‘good’ we are attempting to capture an intrinsic quality of the human subject or an objective outcome we are trying to engineer? What scale and timescale do we care about?

The richness of human existence and goodness naturally evades distillation down to a measurable factor. In practical terms, everywhere where the merit criterion is now applied within liberal capitalism, it has come to mean a single factor: “relative economic productivity”. The best person for the job is the person we expect to generate the most capital in the role, based on measurable factors which we know are correlated (educational attainment and so forth).

Unfortunately, making ‘merit’ synonymous with ‘maximally economically productive’ also makes merit synonymous with a range of less desirable factors: a lack of inconvenient moral values, a lack of desire for a distracting family life, and an absence of ties to a particular locality. Merit as economic productivity preferences a bias towards tolerance for inhuman working hours, a subservient and predictable personality type, and compliance over criticism or revolt.

Meritocratic institutions embrace those subjects who are transparent rather than complex; those whose achievements are easily summarized on a paper resume, and those who are willing to devote their lives to filling that paper in.

Meritocratic selection processes renounce qualities traditionally recognized as valuable, like family, beliefs, local ties, relationships, traditions, reputations, and history.

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The quality naively implied by the term ‘merit’ and the qualities which are selected for in practice thus diverge widely. In fact, precisely because it subjects elites to Darwinian pressures while not selecting for virtue, meritocracy has the consistent effect of corrupting elites. Careerism is a poor teacher of morality. We shall explore this at length in a future piece.

[Meritocrats lack] the pride characteristic of aristocratic classes, which rests on the inheritance of an ancient lineage and on the obligation to defend its honor. Neither valor and chivalry nor the code of courtly, romantic love, with which these values are closely associated, has any place in the world view of the best and brightest… Although hereditary advantages play an important part in the attainment of professional or managerial status, the new class has to maintain the fiction that its power rests on intelligence alone. Hence it has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts…

Meritocratic elites find it difficult to imagine a community, even a community of the intellect, that reaches into both the past and the future and is constituted by an awareness of intergenerational obligation.

— Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

What then, are the effects of the civilizational embrace of meritocracy? That shall be the subject of this series. We shall find an increase in economic productivity and the pace of technological development; but also a collapse in fertility, the destruction of tradition, the erosion of nationhood, countless lives consumed by toil, the eradication of childhood, and the corruption of elites.

This series will ultimately inform my forthcoming book, Leaving a Legacy, which charts a course for the patriarch who wishes to guide his own family out of this destructive practice and into greatness. Stay tuned.

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Sic transit imperium,

Johann