Hildegarde

Several years ago–I don’t really remember when–a short article ran in the National Review magazine that argued that an old-fashioned aristocracy by birth was much better than an aristocracy by merit, because the aristocrats of the first always felt as if they didn’t quite deserve what they had, while the aristocrats of the second always felt as if they’d earned their position and were objectively better than everybody else, and therefore had the right to run everybody else’s lives.

I probably should have taken more than a single sentence to outline that premise.

Whatever.

For those of you who don’t know–National Review is not just a conservative magazine, but the grand daddy of all American conservative magazines.  It was founded in the Fifties by William F. Buckley, Jr, as his first shot in his war to make Conservatism once again a considerable force in American politics. 

Obviously, he won.

The other thing about NR, though is that it is definitely in the “elitist” strain of conservatism.  It promoted higher standards for education, high culture over popular culture, decorum and following the rules over rioting in the streets against the war in Vietnam.

At any rate, when I first read this article I did a lot of eye rolling.  If there has been one thing about the changes in American culture over the past century that I have definitely always been in favor of, it has been the relentless movement from inherited status to status based on “merit.”

I’ve got the scare quotes over merit for two reasons. The first is that Thomas Sowell is right.  We do not have a system based on merit.  We have a system based on performance. 

It’s an important distinction that we ought to pay more attention to.  It’s the reason why I do not support “equal pay for ‘comparable’ work.”  Equal pay for equal work, yes, but the other thing assumes that there is some mysterious intrinsic quality that we can discern from the outside (“merit”) and then forcably apply to everybody and everything. 

Usually, of course, feminists who want the world to move to a “comparable worth” standard want to install those standards they think everybody else OUGHT to value–usually those standards they meet easily (women get far more college degrees than men, but significantly more often in “soft” fields than “hard” ones) but that are not rewarded highly in the real world.

In a world where “merit” decided who got rewarded and  how much, almost any fiction would make more money than those endless Twilight novels.  In a world where performance decides, more people are willing to spend $7.99 on a Twilight novel than are willing to spend it on something by Cynthia Ozick, and that takes care of that.

I’m not trying to be deliberately snarky here.  I’m just trying to point out that we don’t really have a firm idea of what we mean by “merit,” while we do have a very firm idea of what we mean by performance. 

One of the more interesting things about rereading Too Big To Fail, the nonfiction book about the 2008 financial crash I’ve touted here before, is the recognition of just how many of these guys started out in no better than the middle class.  One of the big guns at Treasury had a father who worked servicing jukeboxes.  At least two of the big names at Goldman Sachs grew up on farms in the midwest–and family farms, not agribusiness ones. 

Virtually all of these people got where they were going because they were able to deliver exceptional performance–to get the firm to a certain earnings level, to handle crises when they happened, to do what needed to be done to keep the clients happy and the firms healthy.

To the extent that there were objective measures of what constituted success–to the extent that there are such measures in the real world–I don’t think we have much of a problem calling what we’re doing a “meritocracy.”

Where the problem comes in is in those areas where the definition of “success” is largely arbitrary.

Eck.  Maybe that’s not the way I should put it.

Defining “success” as “getting a college degree” is certainly to give that definition an objective criteria by which it can be judged, but that criteria has very little to do with anything solid in the real world.

For one thing, there are all kinds of colleges and all kind of degrees, and they are not all equal.  For another, the college degree per se doesn’t connect to anything solid except in some very particular instances–and then it’s not the degree that matters, but the content of it.

Getting a medical degree certainly correlates to some very solid things, but that’s because what we want is not the degree, but the specific knowledge the degree symbolizes.

We have, however, erected a huge edifice of degrees whose entire purpose is to indicate that the holders of them are “smart.” 

I’m looking, now, not at the low end of the educational totem pole, but at the high one.  What graduation from an Ivy League/Seven Sisters/Little Three/Public Ivy/Top Twenty school does for its graduates is to stamp them as “smart,” with the unstated implication that the graduates of lesser places, or the people who have not graduated at all, are…stupid.

Or at least stupider.

And it is this, I think, this assumption that some people are being official labeled “smart” and others “not” that causes all the trouble, from all the quarters from which it comes.

On the part of the people who do not so qualify, there is natural resentment on a number of counts.  Not least of these is the implication that some people are simply born better than others. 

“Smart” is not the same thing as having done well at school.  Having done well at school is a matter of performance, and even people not born into the very top percentale of the IQ chart can do better than those who were, by working harder. 

“Smart” is something you’re born with, or not.  And to brand some people officially “smart” is to return to the idea of a natural aristocracy.

What’s more, if you look at the behavior of the people who DO qualify by this criteria–okay, by a minority of them, but a significant minority–what you see is the kind of thing that is most clearly explained by a sense of their own natural aristocracy.

They do not only think that their fellow citizens are wrong in what they think or want or do, they think their fellow citizens are incapable of being right if left to their own devices.

Their fellow citizens are not “smart.”  They know that because their fellow  citizens did not go to a Top Twenty school.   People who are not smart cannot think well.  Therefore, it’s not only justifiable, but imperative, that smart people think for them.

We need, I think, to begin to insist on the distinction–this is not a meritocracy, but a performance-ocracy.

Okay, that was a terrible word coinage.  Egregious.

But I think we need to divest the entire country of the idea that we are operating on something called a “meritocracy,” where some people possess inborn, inherent superiority over everybody else, and being rewarded for it by both money and power.

Performance is a much better standard, for more reasons than I can count.

It is inherently democratic, where the “merit” idea is not.

It is much more in tune with the reality of the world.  In the real world, beauty is as beauty does–and so is smart.

And it will be less likely to give people the idea that they’ve got a right to tell the rest of us what to do.

It’s actually cold here.

And I’ve got work to do.