The question of Merit

Who should receive the top rank in your class? The best performing student. Right.

What is the best way to fill a job opening? With the candidate who has the perfect qualifications and experience. Right.

What is the right way to organise our society, our businesses, our government? On the basis of merit. Right?
Not really, as the person who coined the word ‘meritocracy’ would have us believe. Not least because he, Michael Young, created the word in a satirical novel about a merit-rewarding dystopia.

According to him:

It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.

I encountered Mr. Young in Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit. At this point, one may attempt to guess that Sandel’s book is about the failure of meritocracy to live up to the ideal. That it is prone to be captured by the well-to-do who scheme to perpetuate their privilege.

But what Sandel does is to take the fight well beyond the surface, right down to the fundamental questions. Such as the very definition of merit. Why should it be linked to academic credentials? Why is talent more prized than moral worth? Why is a college education even necessary for gaining practical wisdom or an instinct for the common good? Are we losing our shared humanity in our rush to reward merit?

He has dealt with these questions in great detail, with plenty of philosophical and historical backdrop. 

The premise is this: Developed countries like the US that embraced globalization have promoted ‘equality of opportunity’ as a remedy for rising inequality in society. But this has not succeeded in curbing the resentment of the working class. He believes that the meritocracy project, at its very essence, is a flawed one. While I found some views rather extreme, I did derive some useful lessons from the American experience, and insights for devising welfare systems.

Here are my top 3 takeaways (includes quotes from the book)

1. The ‘winners’ in a meritocratic society cannot claim full credit for their success.

“That I live in a society that prizes the talents I happen to have is also not something for which I can claim credit. This too is a matter of good fortune.”

 

2. The ‘losers’ in a meritocratic society need more than distributive justice

This is particularly relevant in the US, where he believes the working class displaced by globalization has been short-charged by the technocratic elite.

“Proposals to compensate for inequality focus on increasing the purchasing power of working- class families, or to shore up the safety net. But what these families really want is to reclaim their status as producers.”

Welfare schemes do them a disservice by not helping them keep their status as worthwhile contributors to society (Contributive justice)

 

3. We need general diffusion of intelligence and learning across all classes and vocations

The system of merit as it stands now rewards one’s learning in a tertiary (college) education setup. What we need, instead, is to cultivate the ability to reason and deliberate about fundamental moral and civic questions across all kinds of educational settings.

 

“Civic education can flourish in community colleges, job training sites, and union halls as well as on ivy-strewn campuses. There is no reason to suppose that aspiring nurses and plumbers are less suited to the art of democratic argument than aspiring management consultants.”

I don’t agree entirely with his radical rethinking of the concept of merit. For instance, he believes that college admissions should be based on a lottery system, with merit being only a gating criterion.

My scepticism about such ideas notwithstanding, I came away with much fodder for thought. And I’ll certainly be wary of taking anyone’s standing in a meritocracy for granted.

 

The learning of art … and the art of learning

I watch as the teacher’s brush flicks and glides gracefully across the canvas. “Use confident brushstrokes for the wash,” she says, “… Be generous with the viridian, and add a drop of cobalt”

I peel my eyes off the dance of that brush, and proceed to slash my own paintbrush across my canvas, willing my strokes to look confident. Having “washed” the canvas in teetering strokes, I now set my sights on the “still” that has been arranged for me. A lamp that is too treacherously symmetric for my untrained hand. And a brass ornament that sits sedately, challenging me to glean the secrets of its complex structure.

I groan inwardly at my luck, and stare at my neighbour with a twinge of envy. Her still is an overgrown plant, so reassuring to a novice in its absolute lack of shape or symmetry.

To call myself an amateur in most things art is to understate the case… an affront of sorts to amateurs of any standing. Pencils have been known to whimper in protest at my attempts at sketching. As for recreating life-like colours out of the 12 standard tubes in a box, it was, or so I thought, firmly beyond the perimeter of my ken.

Yet, there I was, blind-contouring and palette-creating… and plodding along, even when at times the perfect colour tone or that right brush stroke seemed just out of reach.

But how do I explain the exhilaration that I felt? The sheer joy of discovering that I could learn how to make tertiary and even quaternary and other derivative colours. The way time warps as I become engrossed in learning. The calm that envelopes me when I lean in to my novicehood and seek help, letting go of my fear of being judged. The sense of accomplishment when I finally manage to coax symmetry into my pencil strokes.

The small but satisfying feats that can be accomplished when one leaves the burden of perfectionism behind…and embraces the act of learning something utterly, liberatingly new.

A liminal state of mind

She mooned about the house listlessly. She had lain awake most of the previous night, shifting on the sheets, unable to sleep. A snatch of a memory and a few oh-so-perfect phrases lit up her mind and led her to smile inwardly. Then she would feel the anticipation that she had felt every day of the past week, of what was to play out the following day. And then with a finality as irrevocable as the banging of a gavel or a shutting of a door, she would remember that it was... finally... over. Those times of bonding and eager anticipation of what was to come, how it was to all turn out... were over.

Her flatmate looked at her keenly, noting all the tell-tale signs. No words exchanged, she  understood the situation. That faraway look, the reliving, the state of being in a liminal- it was all too easy to guess.

"The next one is just round the corner, chin up!" she beamed encouragingly.

After all, she had seen it play out so many times:

The heaviness that sets in when a book is closed down on its rear cover, the reader still under its thrall. That awkward stage after a memorable read when one is still living in its world.

Feeling too vulnerable, too fragile to break out of its hold and face the strange world outside of its familiar scent, its characters who have become one's closest friends, and the comforting rustle of its pages.

Dreading talking to people who seem alien because they do not belong to or understand the world she had been inhabiting these past days.

She was between books. Awaiting a new love, a new delight to hold and read and cherish.