The Rise of the Mediocrity

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I occasionally write essays about a wide range of different subjects. I might as well post a few of them here every now and again. This short essay is from April 2019 and is about the ever-contentious subject of 'meritocracy', and will do nicely as a starting point:

The Rise of the Mediocrity

The Patrician Socialist tradition which held such a profound sway over public policy and political discourse during the postwar decades had a simple credo. Technical experts, its adherents held, ought to run the State on behalf of and for the benefit of the toiling masses, who were, alas, not nearly bright enough to conduct this important task themselves. The result would be the creation of a cohesive and egalitarian society, rationally planned and organised rationally. All would benefit, particularly the toiling masses, bless them. Strangely enough, this tradition turned out to be rather less keen on the brighter children of toiling masses leaving behind the class of their birth to become technical experts.

Michael Young, the most brilliant of a new wave of British Fabians, was particularly outspoken on this matter, and saw it as a deeply troubling social development. His argument was phrased in the most earnest of socialist language: merit, he insisted, was an inherently exclusionary and elitist concept, and that, as such, the ‘Rise of the Meritocracy’ would damage the prospects of the overwhelming majority of the toiling masses who who lacked the requisite merit, and who therefore would be pinned down in their inferior social position by any merit-driven system of rewards in education or social life. Young even went so far as to suggest that formerly working class technical experts would treat the meritless masses with greater disdain than the old upper and middle classes, a rather curious argument that presumably derives from the popularity of Freudian theories at the time. So if it would be wrong to fill the ranks of the technical experts needed to run society on behalf of the toiling masses with people drawn from the toiling masses, then who exactly should fill these critical positions? Oh.

Thus we must conclude that when Michael Young corruptly used his connections to fix a place at Oxford for his indolent son,* he was not being in the slightest bit hypocritical. His actions were entirely in keeping with his political principles, with his analysis of society, and with his fears for the future: a future in which the feckless spray of his loins would have to compete against overwhelming hosts of motivated and intelligent former proletarians, a future in which his spoilt progeny would have no future.

Those fears were quite groundless, of course. The meritocracy never rose particularly far, and the velocity of its rise was abating even as Young’s famous polemic was published. By the beginning of the 1970s deference was gone, and public discourse began to be dominated by an aggressively demotic tone, yet the rich man remained in his castle, and the poor man continued to loiter hopelessly, helplessly, at its gate. Subsequent political developments and social changes have had the effect of progressively intensifying all of these trends. Consequentially, the educational and social barriers that poorer children in Britain must negotiate if they wish to make something of their lives are now more formidable than they were before the 1944 Education Act. Many of these barriers are informal, the creation of upper and upper middle class parents doing what Young did and looking after the interests of their children, and of children like their children. Some of these barriers are ideological, the product of a view – one commonly espoused by elements within the teaching professions, endorsed by those who teach teachers, and distributed quite evenly across the political spectrum – that the very idea of education in the old sense is elitist and to be treated with suspicion. Barriers for some, of course, mean opportunities for others, and in an age without merit there can be only one result: the Rise of the Mediocrity.

_{*A fact that has somehow never prevented this self-same son from denouncing the privileged backgrounds of others when his political agenda demands, which is often.}

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

I doubt it'll surprise you to hear that I'm much more sympathetic to the critique of "merit" than you are, although I'm of course approaching it from the social and spiritual context of American liberalism rather than British socialism, a context in which "meritocracy" is used as an argument not only about who should hold leading positions in society and government but who should have access to any comfortable social position at all. "Merit" in this context is what in other situations people just refer to as "intelligence", or even just "being good at school", and I don't think there's any reason that isn't internal to the elite-liberal ideology itself to believe that this is an attribute that makes someone a better person or more deserving of a decent standard of living.

So as applied to being one of the "elites" (sic), sure, I think your rejection of Young's argument--and of his personality, yeesh, what a prick--has, well, merit, but I would only be willing to entirely let go of the anti-meritocratic position in a society where it was taken for granted that not being "elite" shouldn't be tantamount to permanent quasi-penury.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I think that's fair. Context is very important and the American experience of education as a political issue is wildly different from the British. The denigration of people who work in manual occupations and this idea that 'merit' in an academic sense is the same as someone's total worth as a human being that Young feared (or claimed to fear) would be the inevitable result of the brighter children of manual workers gaining access to university education and managerial/professional employment (and which, of course, did not occur: such snobbery remained, and remains, concentrated amongst those parts of society where it always existed) is something that exists, is mainstream and increasingly orthodox, in contemporary American liberal circles. Where there is maybe a slight parallel is over the growing suspicion towards standardised testing and the view that things like personal statements and extra-curricular records etc. ought to matter - which, again, is presented as concern for the marginalised (in this case as expressed in terms of race and ethnicity, the language of class simply not existing in this discourse at all) but is in reality motivated by self-interest. And yet this highlights another difference as this happily sits alongside the idea of academic merit as someone's whole worth as, of course, the claim is usually that this sort of thing provides a better measurement of true merit, not that the latter is a dubious concept.