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. 

 

On spines and meditation

Is there anything more meditative than organising a bookshelf? My child loves to arrange her books by colour. The red spined ones first, then the orange, all the way upto violet to make a rainbow of book spines. Sometimes she makes mountains, alternating the tiny valleys of baby board books with the peaks of the thicker nighttime books, some plateaus thrown in here and there for good measure. 

I myself like to mix it up. Some days I would obsessively organise books by genre. Those are the days when I would take a dim view of a Wodehouse nestling against Wolfhall (Alphabetic justice, but ludicrous). On other days, when no one is looking, I turn whimsical about my bookshelf. My prized Calvin and Hobbes can snuggle up with The Clash of Civilisations. The Principal Upanishads are standing shoulder to shoulder with Principles of Corporate Finance. Zia Mody’s little tome of key judgements is quietly leaning in to What the Ladybird heard. Feeling particularly impish, I even let Piketty’s Capital rub shoulders with Liar’s Poker. 

Then I carefully reorganise it before anyone can see me - a bookshelf that’s not severely and painstakingly organised by subject is shockingly out of character, bound to startle those who (think they) know me. It’s a secret, guilty meditative pleasure that I share only with my books. Don’t tell anyone 😉 📕

How do you meditate? 

Pandemics and POTUS

It’s the start of an eventful century.

 Barely two decades into the century, sweeping changes have taken place in technology and connectivity. Asian heft is on the rise. The world has witnessed many wars and a global upsurge of nationalism. And then, a pandemic rages through the world, affecting people across continents. Even the most powerful man in the world is not spared.

Sounds familiar? It is strange that it does, for the year I am talking about is 1918.

The Great War is about to come to an end. The US President Woodrow Wilson’s famous “Fourteen Points” speech convinced Germany to put an end to the War and come to the negotiating table, raising hopes of an enduring peace, and a Treaty without punitive clauses.

Germany’s traditional rival, France was baying for blood… but it was widely thought that Wilson would prevail over France’s Clemenceau and broker a fair Treaty.

The Fourteen Points were widely circulated and this cartoon of Wilson (from Punch) moving with a sense of purpose, exuding firmness and capability, captures how he managed to infuse hope for a just peace, projecting the image of the American warrior arriving in Paris to settle the knotty problems of the warring Europeans.

And so, the Fourteen Points became the basis of Armistice in 1918.

But then came the twist in the tale…

Woodrow Wilson came down with the then-raging pandemic, the Spanish Flu. He was never the same again. He was left physically weak and disoriented. He was no longer the man of purpose that Punch so hopefully portrayed. He lost the ability to argue with Clemenceau and he gave in to the French demands, resulting in a Treaty that sought to punish and humiliate, rather than set the tone for a new, peaceful world order.

The heavy reparations, the insertion of a clause on War Guilt, French occupation of German territory… and the sense of betrayal and outrage that the Germans were left with… the consequent rise of National Socialism…these are only too well-documented.

And we all know how badly it ended.

History throws up villains and we rush, often rightly so, to be outraged by their actions and seek to ensure that villainy of that sort doesn’t rear its head again. But those villains are the product of the circumstances that came together to create them. We may choose to believe that no circumstances extenuate what followed, in this case. But we must not forget those circumstances either.

We fixate on and are appalled by the hideousness of the actions of the villains produced by history, and not so much on the events that led to the rise of such a persona. If only we could learn more from the milieu of history than from personalities of history, we may achieve more success in ensuring that kind of history doesn’t repeat itself.

Would there have been no WW2 if Woodrow Wilson had not been affected by the ‘flu? Would there have been a just and enduring peace? Would the League of Nations have been an institution to reckon with rather than the toothless one it turned out to be?

Hard to say.

But a compelling counter factual to consider.

Book Review: Pachinko

 

 

 

Pachinko: a Japanese pinball game that is wildly popular, that spawned an economic behemoth to rival any major industry. An industry that is dominated by ethnic Koreans in Japan. And when the Pachinko parlours are frowned upon because of (real or imagined) links to the yakuza gangsters, it taints all the ethnic Koreans by association. Yet they cannot escape this spiral: they got in to this business because other avenues of employment were not open to people of their ethnicity. Pachinko: a metaphor for the “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” predicament of immigrants who are treated as second class citizens. This metaphor is uniquely applicable in this case, but the inescapable tragedy is that parallels abound around the world.  

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko is a well-researched saga of immigration, exile and hyphenated identities. The tales of Korea’s annexation by Japan and the excesses of the world wars, the division of Korea, and the subsequent wars: these are all well-known to students of history. But what of the stories of ordinary people caught in these times of great upheaval?

The author has woven this novel seamlessly into the fabric of the 20^th century: starting from a humble fishing family in Busan in the South of unified Korea, a chance encounter with a Korean wholesale trader which ties their fortunes to a family from the North, and a resulting immigration to Osaka. This cements the family’s identity as Korean-Japanese, a hyphenation that proves definitive to the course of the story. Persecution and discrimination are constant, though they change garb as generations shift; but just as constant and is the will to survive and thrive. The female characters are found saying more than once, “A woman’s lot is to suffer. We must suffer.” Yet, these women are no damsels-in-distress; they in fact are the prime movers of this tale: whether it is finding a way out of financial ruin by sheer enterprise and dogged determination or making critical decisions whenever the men, bogged down by the weight of tradition are found wanting. Not all of them are martyrs either, and the book stands out in the way it deftly projects changing social mores, building an appreciation for the rapidly evolving role of women across generations.

This novel has a rich and well-crafted cast of characters across four generations, covering the breadth of ideology, religion, aptitude and aspirations.  Take the case of Solomon, the son of a second-generation Korean immigrant in Japan.  His father Moazasu rose from debilitating poverty and crushing life events, going on to build a fortune in the Pachinko business, managing to realise a much-cherished dream of educating his son in the United States. But does education help Solomon make a clean break from his Pachinko-linked past, making the question of immigrant identity a thing of the past? Even when he seems to have lost all he worked for to petty racist stereotyping, Solomon refuses to paint all members of the oppressor community with the same brush, even as he demands the same for his own community.

Then there his uncle Noa, who makes a startling realization about those who claim to accept him despite his background and origins:  “…seeing him as only Korean—good or bad—was the same as seeing him only as a bad Korean. She could not see his humanity, and Noa realized that this was what he wanted most of all: to be seen as human.”

I will carry this moment of Noa’s realization with me: isn’t this what our struggles are ultimately about? To be free from stereotypes of gender, race, religion... To be seen as human.

 

 

Book Review: Three Daughters of Eve

Three Daughters of Eve  by Elif Shafak

Book Review

Not very often does it happen that a book set in a completely different cultural milieu manages to feel so close to one’s heart. This is the story of a bored upper-middle class socialite: in some ways it’s a ‘coming-of-age’ story, except that the usual elements that define a classic coming-of-age setup are displaced in time: the elements start to come together during the globally accepted norm of adolescence, but find their culmination only in the protagonist’s 30s.

Growing up in a middling Istanbul family in the 80s and 90s turns out to be not too different from an equivalent Indian experience. At the centre is Peri, a girl who is sensitive ‘to the point of self-effacement’, growing up in a household where battle lines are drawn between father and mother,  between disparaging atheism and dauntless faith, between a longing for a better future and a hankering for the past. She develops her own credo, but is torn apart internally by her efforts to maintain external peace.

 A life-defining move to a university another country exposes her to a different kind of life. Yet, the battlelines are absurdly similar. The liberals, she discovers, are as prone to stereotyping and intolerance as are the conservatives.  The debates here are couched in sophisticated language, but the simmering tensions are the same.

 Of the eponymous ‘three daughters’ , she is the ‘Confused’, playing the thankless role of peacemaker between the ‘Believer’ and the ‘Sinner’. There is a mentor who could have helped her recognise her unique ability of being able to empathise with both sides. However, things take an unexpected turn, and it is only years later, in a day in bustling Istanbul involving a party for the elites, a mugging, a photograph from the past and armed robbery, that she experiences catharsis.

The story seems to end too soon, and I expected a stronger finish; but I’m not complaining. The book more than made up for it by its richness in its descriptions, in capturing the sights, sounds and flavours of Istanbul and Oxford, and in its ability to turn old arguments over into an entirely new light.

In an age when ‘taking offence’ has turned rampant, and when debates only cause positions to turn more intractable than ever, we need more of the wisdom that Shafak showcases in this book.

As the Professor puts it in the book, “… participating in an open debate is a bit like falling in love. You are a different person by the time it comes to an end.” Did the three daughters of Eve find this out for themselves in an experiment designed by their professor? I leave it to you to find out.