Meritocracy as Social-Darwinist Dystopia

If you haven’t yet read Charles Murray’s piece on “educational romanticism”, do read it now. You might also be interested in Rod Dreher’s commentary on it here and here.

Dreher points out — citing Christopher Lasch – that Murray’s ideas really mean that a “meritocracy” is a social-Darwinist nightmare for many. The leaders in a meritocracy, Lasch has written, “retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues.” I might be able to make it fine in a meritocracy, but the way I’ve been raised, I just think it would be deeply wrong to leave the less intelligent members of my family behind.

Earlier this week, a hit-and-run commenter left an obscene and snarky comment on my thread on “Jewish Power and Fairness”, which I deleted. Such an uncivil comment didn’t deserve to see the light of day, even if it had not violated my policy on profanity. But basically the question was, “Why don’t you just get educated and stop complaining about people who out-compete you?”

Well, first of all, I don’t know why anyone would take me as totally uneducated, but one reason is that I would like to enjoy life more than I ever would if I just made life into a ruthless competition. But more than that, I just identify with the people who don’t like the rat race, and who just want to make a decent living without being brutally competitive. My mother’s side of the family tends to be conservative, but uncompetitive and politically quietist. In a sense it continues to be agrarian in outlook, even though most of it is no longer on the farm. Many still do things like sewing their own clothes. My father’s side (with the notable partial exception of my father himself) tends to be liberal, aggressive, and competitive. My mother’s family preserves my basic values; my father’s family doesn’t. If only people like my father’s family prosper, then my values tend to die out. If society is a social-Darwinist competition, a type of person with whom I have nothing in common is going to win out.

The rat race is morally degrading, too. It legitimizes all kinds of social aggression, whereas I prefer to deal with people who aren’t constantly trying to take advantage of each other. Every social relationship is brutalized. Instead of that, I’d like to see a world where people like I can continue to live in dignity even if I lived as simply as my grandfather. Dreher’s Crunchy Cons inspired me because I saw my own family in it, as somewhat the perfect family from that kind of perspective before it became uprooted from its home. From the perspective of “simple living”, there were tens of millions of conservative Middle Americans living that way all the time, whereas few liberals made of “simple living” anything other than a romantic fantasy. One of the biggest liberal lies was that conservatives were consumerist and liberals weren’t. It was in part my realization of that lie, from reading Lasch among others, that drove me to be a traditionalist.

Hopefully that will explain why I’m not a big fan of total meritocracy, though if “meritocracy” can be used as a weapon against racial preferences, I suppose I understand why many conservatives find it appealing.

Update: More at What’s Wrong with the World.