Posted on 06/29/2009 3:05:19 PM PDT by Lorianne
The seemingly unassailable ideal of “equality of opportunity” demanded by the meritocratic regime has drawn scorn from thinkers such as those I have quoted in part because they have understood that in order for talent to triumph, it must be mobile. This, as we have seen, is precisely the aim of a meritocracy. It seeks to remove the barriers posed by tradition or culture — that is, barriers posed by institutions, texts, myths, habits, social forms, sensibilities, affections, characteristic practices, and the like — to the mobility of the intelligent. Thus, the more perfect the meritocracy, which we typically equate with justice itself, the more mobility — both geographic and social — is required, until talent is able to flow freely to where it can command the highest price. A perfect market for talent is the dream and goal of meritocracy: nothing must stand in the way of the rise of talent to primacy. Progress, understood both as the never-ending process of self-liberation and self-fulfillment, and as the indefinite expansion of our consumer economy, depends upon such mobility.
The historiography offered by Friedrich Hayek in his classic The Road to Serfdom exemplifies the rosy meritocratic view of the unleashing of talent, or as Hayek terms it, “human ingenuity.” “Wherever the barriers to the free exercise of human ingenuity were removed,” claims Hayek, “man became rapidly able to satisfy ever widening ranges of desire. . . . [B]y the beginning of the twentieth century the workingman in the Western world had reached a degree of material comfort, security, and personal independence which a hundred years before had seemed scarcely possible.”
But it is precisely from the perspective of the “workingman” that this lyrical, Whiggish view of progress has been challenged. Christopher Lasch’s indictment of meritocracy, best articulated in his final work, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995), is especially insightful.
One consequence of meritocracy, Lasch argues, is that the elites in such a system become “dangerously isolated” from their neighbors. Because meritocracy requires that populations-and especially elites-be exceptionally mobile, loyalty to community, region, and nation become severely attenuated.
It is no surprise, then, that what Lasch calls the “new aristocracy of brains,” more mobile than ever and indeed committed to a “migratory way of life” as “the price of getting ahead,” has little use for Middle America, which they imagine to be “technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy.” America’s meritocratic elites, Lasch claims, “are at home only in transit, en route to a high-level conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival, or to an undiscovered resort. Theirs is essentially a tourist’s view of the world-not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy.”
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Revolt of the Elites is excellent, and is even more germane today, 15 years after it was first published. Women and the Common Life and The True and Only Heaven are well worth reading, as well.
Meritocracy? Anyone who watches the presidential cabinet from Ideocracy will see art imitating life.
500 years earlier than expected, however...
Just another blogger with a plan for your life. Shallow article filled with strawmen....
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