There’s a passage from Fareed Zakaria’s Washington Post op-ed on the roles of elitism and racism in the past election that I want to bring to your attention:
Over the past three or four decades, the United States has sorted itself into a highly efficient meritocracy, where people from all economic walks of life can move up the ladder of achievement and income (usually ending up in cities). It is better than using race, gender or bloodlines as the key to wealth and power, but it does create its own problems. As in any system, some people won’t ascend to the top, and because it is a meritocracy, it is easy to believe that that’s justified.
There’s a fundamental problem with his thesis. Whites in the ante-bellum American South thought they had a meritocracy, too. They justified slavery on the basis of the imagined inferiority of blacks.
Meritocracy inevitably becomes another word for tyranny. Keep in mind that “aristocracy” is the Greek word for “rule by the best”. “Meritocracy” quickly becomes a circumlocution for hereditary aristocracy.
I can understand why Joe Kennedy became the wealthiest man in the world by dint of acumen, guile, ruthlessness, and, well, merit by certain narrow definitions of the word. By what merit were his children ushered through the paths of the elite to positions of power? That wasn’t merit. It was wealth and brand loyalty.
Fareed Zakaria is the son of a politician who, through money and position, went to the right schools and met the right people. Merit?
Every single sitting justice of the Supreme Court is a graduate of either Harvard or Yale Law School. Does that tell us that only Harvard or Yale law graduates have the merit to become Supreme Court justices or in fact that the path to the Supreme Court runs through a cozy club of Harvard and Yale grads? Once again, that’s not merit. That’s brand loyalty.
To demonstrate merit you must have achieved and that means you’ve accomplished something other than getting a high score on a test, going to the right schools, or holding certain jobs by reason of getting high enough scores on a test or going to the right schools.
