On Meritocracy

Meritocracy has assumed an almost axiomatic stature in liberal democracy. The idea goes that those who are the most competent, wise and intelligent should have the most power. This sounds fairly unobjectionable, as these are the people who are best placed to improve society, and they should make more reasoned decisions than their gibbering coevals. Furthermore, advocates would say that the people who benefit society the most should receive the most remuneration. This also seems fair.

However, despite all this, and it may be due to my two-day abstention from sleep, I sense something quite repulsive in this doctrine. Those who uphold the virtues of a meritocratic system, and this seems to be most people in the 'public sphere', often brandish meritocracy as a weapon against birthrights - republicans tell us the royals are a load of useless fools, many others campaign against hereditary peerships and such. All of this is on the basis that your place in life should not be informed by mere accident of birth. You may already see the irony here - meritocracy values qualities which only occur through accidents of birth. In other words, the whole concept of meritocracy whiffs of the desire to realign birthrights that they might benefit those who so piously declare meritocracy's sanctity - namely, intellectuals. I have always housed, in the recesses of my mind, the unwelcome thought that politics might merely be a stage for greed - each side calling for a realignment of wealth in their favour. I have the same worry about meritocracy.

I do not suppose I would have embarked upon this blog post had I not had a practical interaction with this theory just now. The story is not a story at all, and so I will summarise: I have found I cannot look on cleaners without execrable pangs of empathy coiling round the throat. The idea that somebody can be consigned to a life of drudgery - most toil is drudgery, but relative drudgery even - on the basis that their genes were organised in a way so as to preclude more respectable work (or, more likely, that they have been deprived of all opportunity, but let us leave this for the moment) stirs in me a grand sense of injustice. I feel a ridiculous need to apologise, or to vow avengement, or to help them clean, yet none of these options uproots the system. I don't think my response is necessarily a common one, however. How often might one observe the rubbishing of someone who works at McDonald's or Burger King? A great deal of people seem to maintain a wicked, spiteful superiority on the whole matter. 'I was born more intelligent, more beautiful, more virtuous than you!' they seem to warble. How abominable. If the same person were to boast their vast inheritance, they would certainly be met with great odium. Accidents of birth are quite fine to broach if they are personal characteristics, and I think this is explained in part by the fact that intelligence can always be dismissed as hard work. Deeming a person lazy is far more acceptable than to deem them dimwitted. This, in turn, is acceptable because work is so deified and lionised in this perverse world of ours.

I'm not at all sure where I am going with this. I'm placing my thoughts upon the dais of bland, syntactic sterility, that I might engender some tranquility in this fucking mind of mine. The conscience is a terrible, but of course necessary, thing. The agony of the critic is that things are rarely amenable to change. To be against capitalism in this world is almost to be against humanity itself; it is so stained into everything around us that to question it requires a Herculean lurch in the mind. I feel bound by a punitive indolence at all times, and the horrors which flit before my eyes with such desolating energy remind me only of my powerlessness.

The fact of the world is that there are people who clean bins for forty hours per week, and simultaneously there are people who have so much money that they could drop £50 with every step and never notice. Under meritocracy, this is all quite fine. I recognise that incentives must be maintained, and we do need the boons the elite shower on the rabble, but I cannot support a system where such ferocious inequality is not only countenanced but actively encouraged. It is a function of the system, not a terrible aberration in its development. People accept things as 'the way the world works', but why? This is a gross abnegation of responsibility. It might be the way the world works, but that doesn't mean it should be. We look on the animal kingdom with horror at its indifference to life, but capitalism achieves much the same thing, if in a far more insidious way. We like to think of ourselves as quite separate from the barbarism of beasts, and you might call someone an animal if they were grotesque in their behaviour, but markets perfectly emulate the savagery of the animal kingdom (indeed, Keynes talked about 'animal spirits' as key in economic behaviour).

That's all. I think I've got that out of my system. What I cannot get out of my system is the guilt and empathy at others' woes and the simultaneous plaint over my own.