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| A Distant Elite: How Meritocracy Went Wrong |
| 2016-08-01 |
| [HedgehogReview] We need to find ways to restore and preserve a less regimented, less class- and status-stratified, less school-sorted, more open-ended America, one more respectful of men and women of all stations and educational levels. We need an economy and legal structures that are as open as possible to enterprise and innovation. We need an educational system that is open to all, and geared not to the manufacturing of credentials (or artificial and dysfunctional rites of passage) but to the empowering of individuals. We need a society that concerns itself with the knowledge and skills a person can acquire, not where or how they were acquired. Why could we not restore the practice of bringing talented and ambitious young people into professions such as the law through apprenticeships, as was done in the era of the founders, instead of insisting that they expend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a law school credential that means less and less with each passing year, and only serves to delay their entrance into the work force and the productive life of the community? Why could we not do the same with engineers, accountants, teachers, health-care professionals, and the like? Would not such changes move us back in the direction of a restoration of essential merit? So that these statements not take on an air of wistful abstraction, let me conclude with a flesh-and-blood example from the American past. Consider Abraham Lincoln, a common man born in a log cabin to humble circumstances, whose character and outlook were molded not by the advantages of birth or pedigree but by his own relentless striving toward self-betterment, and his labor to wring a better life out the hard opportunities presented to him. We see, and rightly so, a considerable portion of our national ethos bound up in his story. We see an image of meritocracy rightly understood. Lincoln was not particularly proud of his humble origins, and did not like to go into detail about them. His early life, he once said, could be summarized in a single phrase: “the short and simple annals of the poor.”11 Hence, our knowledge of his early life is scrappy. We know that he moved from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois, a typical pioneer farm boy, burdened with the tasks of hauling water, chopping wood, plowing, harvesting. We know that he hated farm work so much that he would seize the opportunity to do almost anything else. We know that he had little educational opportunity yet was a voracious reader, with a great love of language and oratory. When young Lincoln arrived in New Salem, Illinois, as, by his own description, “a piece of floating driftwood,” he was an uncredentialed nobody.12 But he soon found employment as a clerk, insinuated himself into the life of the community, became well known and well regarded by all, was appointed postmaster, ran for and on the second try was elected to the Illinois General Assembly, borrowed money to buy a suit, then found himself thinking about a career in the law. And from then on, there was no holding him back. You could say that this was a rather unpromisingly hand-to-mouth pattern of development. Or you could say that Lincoln benefited from the looseness and easygoing disorder of frontier society, with its fluidity and absence of confining rules and regulations, its steady succession of fresh challenges demanding a fresh response. He did not live in a world where all of life hinged on his parents getting him into the “right” kindergarten so that he would have a plausible path into the ruling class. He could come to a town like New Salem and, in a matter of weeks, persuade his neighbors that he was a plausible candidate for office. He did not have to be defined as his father’s son. He could begin over again, and again. Not everything about this frontier world was good, and Lincoln especially regretted the absence of educational opportunities in his own life. But one cannot separate the resourcefulness of his character from the fact of his frontier origins. Nor can one separate those humble origins from his iconic and enduring meaning in American life. There was nothing ordinary about Lincoln. But his ascension to the presidency was a clear example of the common man’s potential in a land open to men of merit. As Lincoln said in announcing his candidacy for the General Assembly in 1832, he “was born, and [had] ever remained, in the most humble walks of life,” without “wealthy or popular relatives or friends to recommend me.”13 But he had been given unprecedented opportunity to realize his potential by the right set of conditions. We would do well to leave room for the Lincolns among us—especially if they are as raw and uncredentialed as the man who would become our sixteenth president was. Think of his great speech at the dedication of the cemetery in Gettysburg in November 1863. As many know, there were two notable speeches that day. The first, and the longest and most learned and most florid, was given by the supremely well-pedigreed Edward Everett, former president of Harvard—and the first American to receive a German PhD. But it was the self-educated frontiersman president who gave the speech whose accents ring down through the ages. Perhaps there is a pattern here to learn from. |
| Posted by:Pappy |
| #5 "How Meritocracy Went Wrong", it stopped being on merit... |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2016-08-01 20:18 |
| #4 Once merit went out of the window... |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2016-08-01 08:21 |
| #3 Excellent article! Lincoln sought a "new birth." Those in power today seek a final burial and global utopia. But it was the self-educated frontiersman president who gave the speech whose accents ring down through the ages. Perhaps there is a pattern here to learn from. Gettysburg Address: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Emphasis added. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2016-08-01 07:52 |
| #2 Part of the problem is that they separated the implied link of militia duty and the franchise. The potential to face the need to give the "last full measure of devotion" that had always been part of the 'contract' was abolished by extending the power of the vote to those who would never face the requirement involuntarily. It stop being a right and became a privilege. You reap what you sow. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2016-08-01 06:52 |
| #1 A class and status society is preferred by exactly the sort of amoral, postmodern, post-Christian women that populate much of America and the decaying West. They will fight to prevent the reversal. The kind of up-by the bootstrap society that allowed regular guys to prosper and have access to women and a happy family life is not what pampered women who each think of themselves as a goddess deserving of only the very best man want for a social system. A society with Judeo-Christian social norms and which values lifelong monogamy promotes regular guys having access to women for companionship, sex, and procreation. But to a woman who operates on basic primate mating strategy, this is the worst possible world. It means that it is very difficult to choose between alpha and lesser males. It means she must settle for someone who doesn't have the most alpha of alpha genes. In a highly classist society, even the lowest serving maid has a chance for 15 minutes with the lord of the manor and his genes, and the lord is easily identified. DNA analysis of some of the first city building agricultural societies indicates that only about one in fifteen or so men ever got to pass on their genes. Monopolization of the women by a well identified ruling class is the reason. Undoubtedly some women protested. Also undoubtedly, many if not most loved this arrangement. To the sort of amoral, self-absorbed woman who can't rise above our baboon-troop ancestors, the arrangement was awesome. Alpha genes to mix with her own for offspring, the material means to raise those kids, and never having to deal with those horrible regular guys who would make great lifelong companions. If this sounds cynical or overstated to you, perhaps you should open your eyes. The divorce industry is huge in no small way due to this dynamic. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2016-08-01 05:56 |