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The War on Stupid People
Jun. 25th, 2016 10:24 pmOne of my friends linked this article on Facebook, and I thought it was fascinating: The War on Stupid People, about the downside of meritocracy - I almost want to put the word meritocracy into scare quotes, given that one of the article's main points is that meritocracies define merit as intelligence and intelligence as academic success, which is a limited and distorting (and sneakily classist) definition.
The whole article is worth reading, but I think the final paragraph sums up the gist of it:
When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched. Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous. That can’t be right. Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not be permitted to reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.
I think perhaps Michael Young erred in calling his dystopian system a meritocracy. Doesn't the rule of the most meritorious sound like a good thing? Don't we all want to be ruled by people who are smart and good and just?
But meritocracy in practice generally means "the rule of people who got straight As," which may measure smartness but certainly doesn't measure goodness or justice. And surely a good and just society wouldn't hoard all the fulfilling and decently-paying jobs for people who won the intelligence lottery, anyway.
The whole article is worth reading, but I think the final paragraph sums up the gist of it:
When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched. Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous. That can’t be right. Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not be permitted to reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.
I think perhaps Michael Young erred in calling his dystopian system a meritocracy. Doesn't the rule of the most meritorious sound like a good thing? Don't we all want to be ruled by people who are smart and good and just?
But meritocracy in practice generally means "the rule of people who got straight As," which may measure smartness but certainly doesn't measure goodness or justice. And surely a good and just society wouldn't hoard all the fulfilling and decently-paying jobs for people who won the intelligence lottery, anyway.
