- Young, Michael.
The Rise of the Meritocracy.
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, [1958] 1994.
ISBN 1-56000-704-4.
-
The word “meritocracy” has become so commonplace
in discussions of modern competitive organisations and societies
that you may be surprised to learn the word did not exist before
1958—a year after Sputnik—when the publication of
this most curious book introduced the word and concept into the
English language. This is one of the oddest works of serious
social commentary ever written—so odd, in fact, its author
despaired of its ever seeing print after the manuscript was
rejected by eleven publishers before finally appearing, whereupon
it was quickly republished by Penguin and has been in print ever since,
selling hundreds of thousands of copies and being translated into
seven different languages.
Even though the author was a quintessential “policy wonk”:
he wrote the first postwar manifesto for the British Labour Party,
founded the Open University and the Consumer Association, and
sat in the House of Lords as Lord Young of Dartington, this is
a work of…what shall we call it…utopia? dystopia?
future history? alternative history? satire? ironic social
commentary? science fiction?…beats me. It has also
perplexed many others, including one of the publishers
who rejected it on the grounds that “they never published
Ph.D. theses” without having observed that the book is
cast as a thesis written in the year 2034! Young's dry irony and
understated humour has gone right past many readers, especially
those unacquainted with English satire, moving them to outrage,
as if George Orwell were thought to be advocating Big Brother.
(I am well attuned to this phenomenon, having experienced it myself
with the Unicard
and
Digital
Imprimatur
papers; no matter how obvious you make the irony, somebody,
usually in what passes for universities these days, will take
it seriously and explode in rage and vituperation.)
The meritocracy of this book is nothing like what politicians and
business leaders mean when they parrot the word today (one hopes,
anyway)! In the future envisioned here, psychology and the social
sciences advance to the point that it becomes possible to determine
the IQ of individuals at a young age, and that this IQ, combined with
motivation and effort of the person, is an almost perfect predictor of
their potential achievement in intellectual work. Given this, Britain
is seen evolving from a class system based on heredity and inherited
wealth to a caste system sorted by intelligence, with the
high-intelligence élite “streamed” through special state
schools with their peers, while the lesser endowed are directed toward
manual labour, and the sorry side of the bell curve find employment as
personal servants to the élite, sparing their precious time for the
life of the mind and the leisure and recreation it requires.
And yet the meritocracy is a thoroughly socialist society:
the crème de la crème become the wise civil
servants who direct the deployment of scarce human and financial
capital to the needs of the nation in a highly-competitive global
environment. Inheritance of wealth has been completely abolished,
existing accumulations of wealth confiscated by “capital
levies”, and all salaries made equal (although the
élite, naturally, benefit from a wide variety of employer-provided
perquisites—so is it always, even in merito-egalitopias). The
benevolent state provides special schools for the intelligent progeny
of working class parents, to rescue them from the intellectual damage
their dull families might do, and prepare them for their shining
destiny, while at the same time it provides sports, recreation, and
entertainment to amuse the mentally modest masses when they finish
their daily (yet satisfying, to dullards such as they) toil.
Young's meritocracy is a society where equality of opportunity
has completely triumphed: test scores trump breeding, money,
connections, seniority, ethnicity, accent, religion, and
all of the other ways in which earlier societies sorted
people into classes. The result, inevitably, is drastic
inequality of results—but, hey, everybody gets
paid the same, so it's cool, right? Well, for a while anyway…. As
anybody who isn't afraid to look at the data knows perfectly
well, there is a strong
hereditary component to intelligence.
Sorting people into social classes by intelligence will, over the
generations, cause the mean intelligence of the largely
non-interbreeding classes to drift apart (although there will be
regression to the mean among outliers on each side, mobility among the
classes due to individual variation will preserve or widen the gap).
After a few generations this will result, despite perfect social
mobility in theory, in a segregated caste system almost as rigid as
that of England at the apogee of aristocracy. Just because “the
masses” actually are benighted in this society doesn't
mean they can't cause a lot of trouble, especially if incited by
rabble-rousing bored women from the élite class. (I warned you this
book will enrage those who don't see the irony.) Toward the end of
the book, this conflict is building toward a crisis. Anybody who can
guess the ending ought to be writing satirical future history
themselves.
Actually, I wonder how many of those who missed the satire
didn't actually finish the book or simply judged it by
the title. It is difficult to read a passage like this
one on p. 134 and mistake it for anything else.
Contrast the present — think how different was
a meeting in the 2020s of the National Joint Council, which
has been retained for form's sake. On the one side
sit the I.Q.s of 140, on the other the I.Q.s of 99.
On the one side the intellectual magnates of our day,
on the other honest, horny-handed workmen more at home
with dusters than documents. On the one side the solid
confidence born of hard-won achievement; on the other
the consciousness of a just inferiority.
Seriously, anybody who doesn't see the satire in this must
be none too
Swift.
Although the book is cast as a retrospective
from 2038, and there passing references to atomic stations,
home entertainment centres, school trips to the Moon and
the like, technologically the world seems very much like
that of 1950s. There is one truly frightening innovation,
however. On p. 110, discussing the shrinking job market
for shop attendants, we're told, “The large shop
with its more economical use of staff had supplanted many
smaller ones, the speedy spread of self-service in something
like its modern form had reduced the number of assistants
needed, and piped distribution of milk, tea, and beer was
extending rapidly.” To anybody with personal experience
with British plumbing and English beer, the mere thought of
the latter being delivered through the former is enough to
induce dystopic shivers of
1984 magnitude.
Looking backward from almost fifty years on,
this book can be read as an alternative history of the last
half-century. In the eyes of many with a libertarian or conservative
inclination, just when the centuries-long battle against privilege and
prejudice was finally being won: in the 1950s and early 60s when
Young's book appeared, the dream of equal opportunity so eloquently
embodied in Dr. Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream”
speech began to evaporate in favour of equality of results (by forced
levelling and dumbing down if that's what it took), group identity and
entitlements, and the creation of a permanently dependent underclass
from which escape was virtually impossible. The best works of
alternative history are those which change just one thing in the past
and then let the ripples spread outward over the years. You can read
this story as a possible future in which equal opportunity really did
completely triumph over egalitarianism in the sixties. For those who
assume that would have been an unqualifiedly good thing, here is a
cautionary tale well worth some serious reflexion.
January 2006 