I find it a little jarring to have come up with a thought that I figure hasn’t been discussed much, sit on it for a while, consider incorporating into a story, and then have someone else pop out an entire book on the subject.
Such are the wages of sloth, eh?
As very imperfect as our American system may be, it is at least nominally grounded in the idea of merit: that those who do better, whether they work harder or more cleverly, providing more value than their competitors, end up with greater rewards. My highly informal understanding of history tells me that this system succeeded the prior system of mercantilism, a system in which yesterday’s winners would automatically be tomorrow’s winners in the arena of commerce; people born at the bottom of the heap stayed there, and those born at the top stayed there.
Right up until the folks with the pitchforks and bad tempers showed up.
But something I’ve never seen discussed – until last night, at least – is the down side of meritocracy: the losers of the great economic competition.
Certainly, some folks don’t mind being a little frog in the pond, regardless of size. To some extent, religion can function to ameliorate feelings of inadequacy, particular in mainline sects which emphasize unconditional love from the Divine. Indeed, speaking as an agnostic, this may be one of the more important, if underappreciated, benefits to religion – although, since it’s an evolved rather than designed part of religion, it is also … vulnerable to manipulation.
I ran across this last night reading the latest missive from Andrew Sullivan. He, in turn, is reviewing, or perhaps riffing on, a new book by school teacher, researcher, and former blogger Frederik DeBoer, The Cult of Smart. I don’t have it yet, and I’m all excited to write about it, so I’ll let Sullivan give an introduction, rather than more properly wait around:
There aren’t many books out there these days by revolutionary communists who are into the genetics of intelligence. But then there aren’t many writers like Freddie DeBoer. He’s an insistently quirky thinker who has managed to resist the snark, cynicism and moral preening of so many others in his generation — and write from his often-broken heart. And the core of his new book, “The Cult of Smart,” is a moral case for those with less natural intelligence than others — the ultimate losers in our democratic meritocracy, a system both the mainstream right and left have defended for decades now, and that, DeBoer argues, gives short shrift to far too many.
This isn’t a merely abstract question for him. He has grappled with it directly. As a school teacher he encountered the simple, unavoidable fact that some humans are more academically gifted than others, and there’s nothing much anyone can do about it. He recalls his effort to teach long division to a boy who had managed to come a long way socially (he’d gone from being a hell-raiser to a good student) but who still struggled with something as elemental as long division: “At one point he broke into tears, as he had several times before … I exhaled slowly and felt myself give up, though of course I would never tell him so. I tried to console him, once again, and he said, ‘I just can’t do it.’ And it struck me, with unusual force, that he was right.”
I, very briefly, worked as a GED tutor in a group situation, and one of the adult students really seemed to be innumerate. He had learned some tricks to get by, but doing anything beyond addition and subtraction seemed to leave him completely baffled, at least until he reverted to his tricks. My point?
In a society based on competition, there are inevitably losers. And some won’t accept it.
So let’s do a reset. Let’s review societies, in the abstract.
What is the purpose of societies? Societies, at their most basic, and like most human organizations, exist in order to continue existing. That is, in order to accomplish any higher order goals, they must continue to exist.
Because of this, they must take care of their members. I use the phrase take care of in a rough sense: existential protection from threats both natural and human-based, i.e., aggression; provision of leadership or equivalent coordination service; guides to behaviors in order to secure the society from self-destruction; etc.
Within this web of responsibilities there are many approaches to implementation, such as capitalism, communism, monarchies, etc etc, each based on its own set of principles. In an ideal world – which we’re not – members of societies could and would move between them in accordance to their perceptions of how they meet their needs. By their feet, societies would live and die. Because of the messiness of human nature and the limitations of geography, emigration does not happen to that extent.
And so when American society chooses a meritocracy, and as DeBoer and Sullivan are pointing out, not taking good care of everyone, we can start to see how unfettered capitalism and its companion, meritocracy, besides their fault of often leading to monopolies, also cause American society to falter and fail at one of its most important tasks: taking care of all of those it claims.
Now, Sullivan and, apparently, DeBoer use this to beat up on Sullivan’s current preoccupation, the politically far left approach to reality called critical theory, and is propensity of ignoring genetic realities in favor of a tabula rasa approach to humanity, but that doesn’t interest me here.
What does interest me, without any real facts but just impressions of the third-raters who make up the GOP these days, is how those who have lost out badly in the meritocratic scheme of society are distributed across the political spectrum. I shan’t go into it, but it does seem to call out for someone to look at it: properly embittered, fed false information, told their failures is a scheme by others, rather than their own failings. It’s a fascinating hypothesis, and yet I hope it’s false.
Back to DeBoer and my ad hoc theory of society, it’s an interesting approach to justifying a number of projects currently considered anathema by the conservative side of the country, such as single payer healthcare, UBI, and etc – although the two I mention are not necessarily bugaboos of the entire conservative movement, but of conservative leaders who, for reasons of self-interest or rigid ideology, reject them. The increasing popularity of the ACA, and some comments I’ve seen online concerning UBI from rural Americans, suggest more flexibility in these areas than conservative leaders might care to admit. I mention them to suggest change, given the proper argument and setting such as this provided by DeBoer, may be a lot closer than we think – and more acceptable than might be thought of at one time.
The trick, I think, is not to confuse the primary system chosen by society for the complete ends of society itself. That may be the key intellectual error of American society and its leaders.
