its been apriori for me with doubts and now slowly aposteriori too . will try to collect similar articles
July 19, 2010, 9:36 AM[h=1]The Trouble With Meritocracy[/h]For anyone with an appropriate skepticism toward meritocracy and its works, there’s an obvious critique of my suggestion, in today’s column, that America might be better off if our top-flight colleges welcomed more students from demographics — the white working class, rural America, evangelical Christians, etc. — that are currently viewed with suspicion and hostility by the highly-educated elite. Part of the problem with meritocracy is that it homogenizes in the name of diversity: It skims the cream from every race and class and population, puts all of the best and brightest through the same educational conveyor belt, and comes out with a ruling class that’s cosmetically diverse but intellectually conformist, and that tends to huddle together rather than spreading out to enrich the country as a whole. This is Christopher Lasch’s lament in “The Revolt of the Elites” — that meritocracy co-opts people who might otherwise become its critics, sapping local communities of their intellectual vitality and preventing any kind of rival power centers from emerging. And it’s something that Angelo Codevilla gets right (while getting a number of other things wrong) in his recent blast against the American elite:
My only rebuttal to this argument would be the somewhat pessimistic point that centralization is very difficult to roll back, that some sort of broad national elite is probably here to stay, and that given those premises it may make more sense to create more room for real diversity within that elite — by holding meritocracy to its professed ideals — than to hope vainly for a localist revolution that undercuts the ruling class’s political and cultural authority. But good intentions often go awry, and I concede the possibility that this prescription could only end up making America’s current divisions even worse.
Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another … Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed … Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.
With this in mind, one could easily argue that it would be terrible for America if the meritocratic elite admitted more members of what Codevilla calls the “country party” to its ranks, because that would represent the final victory of centralization and homogenization over local allegiances and competing power centers. Once inside the machinery of meritocracy, aspiring farmers would become bureaucrats, R.O.T.C. cadets would enter investment banks, and evangelicals and Mormons would join the ranks of purely secular do-gooders. Better for such young people, and for the country, if they’re educated locally and stay local, rather than ascending and leaving their communities behind.
My only rebuttal to this argument would be the somewhat pessimistic point that centralization is very difficult to roll back, that some sort of broad national elite is probably here to stay, and that given those premises it may make more sense to create more room for real diversity within that elite — by holding meritocracy to its professed ideals — than to hope vainly for a localist revolution that undercuts the ruling class’s political and cultural authority. But good intentions often go awry, and I concede the possibility that this prescription could only end up making America’s current divisions even worse.
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