Meritocracy Means Be a Better Person

 
Whom would you hire?  

It's not a trick question.  At least, it didn't used to be.  If you were looking for somebody to fill an open position, would you look for the applicant who has the most qualifications for that job?  Or would you prefer someone who has average qualifications - but isn't a man, and isn't White?

These days, the hiring process has become fraught with complications regarding race and gender.  To a certain extent, considering the degree to which White men used to constitute the working class, expanding today's opportunities to applicants of various other characteristics is right and good.  Outside of specific religious-centric jobs (particularly in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), gender hardly matters for employment purposes.  And race doesn't matter for any job.

What should matter are one's qualifications:  The merits applicants possess.

Yet the more high-paying and high-profile a job becomes, the answer to who gets hired holds increasingly more sociopolitical baggage.  You see, as our society has come to grips with what "equality" means - and as different people have come to define equality differently - the concept of "merit" has become for some an unnecessary distinction.  For them, merit represents a lingering racist or sexist impediment to economic access.  

The dandy White male
can longer count his
race and gender
as meritorious.
That's a good thing,
right?

Some progressives suspect that conventional standards of merit are still used to deny rewards to those who've traditionally been denied them.  In the past, for example, women and non-Whites have not received the degree of access generally afforded White men to educational tools* that build skill sets that qualify people for the best jobs.  And since a primary way participants in a capitalist economic system secure rewards for themselves is through employment, metrics that are seen as impediments to better employment need to be discarded if they can be determined to be race-based.

And frankly, most of us would agree with that, right?  Race-based and gender-based saboteurs of employment access need to be eliminated to provide as much parity to our work-and-reward paradigm.  This isn't just for the sake of fairness, and respect for others.  Even if you're a selfish person, you should be able to recognize that the more people can participate profitably in capitalism, the better the economic prospects are for everybody.  So that means an individual's ability to build their personal merits for employment needs to be as open as possible.  Right?

Unfortunately, some folks don't think so.  For them, the fact that White men still tend to populate the best jobs stands as stark testament that the system continues to be rigged against everyone else.  Never mind that trends today show a broad erosion of White male dominance.  Some academics, journalists, and politicians believe such erosions haven't been eroding fast enough.  So they've begun questioning whether merit-based hiring, wages, raises, and other rewards really are beneficial to our society.

After all, if you remove "merit" from your hiring guidelines, you can open up jobs to a lot more people.

But aren't there valid reasons for keeping training, experience, and competency as important job considerations?

"Meritocracy" is the term describing a society that generally rewards people according to their talents, abilities, and proficiencies.  In other words, the people with the best skills for a job generally get that job - or, at least, are supposed to get that job.  And the better the job, the better the salary, and all the things that salary can buy.

It's how capitalism operates, as well as everything that contributes to it - our educational system, our recreational pursuits, our governance and laws, how we pick romantic partners, how we raise our children, and how we defend ourselves.  And yes, where we live - and how we live - depends largely on our merits.  Do everything right, check off all the key boxes, acquire successive assets and resources, and you will succeed... at least in terms of how our society broadly defines success.  Shucks, the career ladder doesn't climb itself.

Is it a perfect system?  No, at least not in terms how we operate it.  Some of us value the wrong things, or value the right things disproportionately.  But is that meritocracy's fault, or the fault of people who abuse it?

Elites among academia and journalism believe that merit is over-rated, and even "bad" for us.  However, these extremist views are themselves dangerous, because they fail to acknowledge the fundamental flaws in throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.  Decrying meritocracy is yet another knee-jerk reaction to issues, trends, and data points that are currently in flux, but still seen to primarily give the best results to White men. 

Can you see the irony?  Here they are, many of them White, many of them men, many of them already Ivy League educated, working in prestigious university and journalism jobs... jobs for which they had to compete based on - you guessed it, "merit" - saying that the system by which they've acquired a seat at the table doesn't work.  

So are their own lives proof that their ivory tower theory really is out of touch with reality?  Is merit really so bad and dangerous?  And if it is, why are they perpetrating it with their own personal careers?

Let me be clear:  I can hardly declare that Western societies are purged of racism, sexism, and other negative "ism's" that create unfortunate and unfair power imbalances in our world.  And to the extent that our employment markets themselves still need some work, then OK - maybe non-Whites and women still find themselves striving a bit harder to prove themselves these days.

But does that mean merit is wrong?  After all, plenty of White men hold lowly, low-paying jobs without power and prestige.  And merit stands as a far better metric for advancement than oligarchies, in which a society's wealth is held and guarded by a tenacious few, regardless of whether they're earning it.  Merit means - at least theoretically - that anybody with the drive, ambition, and access to the proper resources can rise to the top.  If our society is still in the process of distributing those proper resources, why stifle those with drive and ambition like just about any other system would?

Then there's this.  My brother is fond of asking the joke, "What do you call a person who graduates medical school dead last in their class?"  The answer, regrettably, is "doctor", isn't it?  

But given the choice, how many progressives would choose to be operated on by somebody with marginal medical skills, rather than somebody who is at or near the top of the meritorious medical ladder?

Some classical music pundits have been chattering recently about watering-down requirements for new musicians as they're auditioned for open seats in prestigious symphonies and orchestras.  To make this primarily White industry more diverse, they think skin color should trump musical ability when it comes to... demonstrating musical ability.  But who would pay money to hear average musicians of any skin color struggle with Bach or Shostakovich?  And isn't showcasing the race of prospective symphony members rather demeaning?  You mean some people don't have to be good enough musically to score a gig; they have to exploit their skin color instead?

What about Black audiences of music that isn't classical?  Wouldn't they howl in protest if an average White person was engaged to perform soul music or the blues?  "She sings the blues pretty good for a White woman" isn't exactly high praise, is it?  I would imagine most White blues singers don't want their skin color to "color" their reputation, so why should Black musicians be any different?  Perpetuating different standards for different races risks perpetuating racism itself.

So let's take race out of this, shall we?  When boarding an airplane, how many of us would willingly let the airline staff the cockpit with trainees?  Who do you want designing the bridges you cross and the skyscrapers you visit?  Engineers who are well-qualified, right?

Merit still means something.  It doesn't mean racism, sexism, or oppression.  It means somebody has not only barely met the requirements by the skin of their teeth, they have either met them with talent to spare, or they've decisively exceeded them.  That is not a bad thing.  In fact, that's how society progresses, because meritocracy clarifies problems to be solved, and encourages competencies to solve them.  Becoming better than good at something creates a process that helps create wealth, whereas being only adequate barely sustains wealth.  Not exactly a key to success - if success is what we're supposed to be spreading.

So beware:  The next time you hear somebody grousing about our meritocracy, consider whether they may actually be jealous of folks who have more money, a better education, or a nicer home.  Are they paying lip service to the virtue of diversity while using it as a smokescreen for envy?  Might they also be risking a disservice to everybody who isn't White, or a man?  Nobody wants to say non-Whites and women are intrinsically inferior because they can't make up for lost time, but isn't that an implication?  Equality is one thing, and a noble goal; however, the continuum of attaining equality's rewards operates apart from status for all of us, which makes it like a photo or a video of something that doesn't depict all surrounding context.  Remember, plenty of White men aren't fully vested in our meritocracy even now.

Still, don't you want to be the one deciding how far you even want to go, no matter who you are?  Without merit, however, practically anybody can qualify, and how fair is that when it comes to the effort required to gain skills?  Eliminating a meritocracy doesn't mean jobs won't require skills.  But it does mean there will likely be fewer skilled workers, because the incentive will be gone.

Of course, maybe as a good-will gesture, all the folks who deride meritocracy could make a start by giving up their own hard-won jobs and positions - after all, those apparently were obtained corruptly (through meritocracy).

But wouldn't the better option be this:  To be a better person instead?  

Not simply a statistic.

_____

*Then there's this:  From the Wall Street Journal, about the historic disparity between men and women graduating college these days - with graduation rates for men lagging far behind those for women.

Chris Columbus and Messy History

Columbus Statue in Syracuse, New York. Photo by Wil Snodgrass
Many statues of Columbus attract protests these days, and this one is no exception. For those who dislike this particular statue, I agree that it seems to take delight in portraying Native Americans - of which there were many in Upstate New York - as subservient to Columbus. In this case, wouldn't removing the figure of Columbus and leaving the plinth with the chiefs in headdress be appropriate for the statue's location? It's sited not near any of Christopher's beachheads, but in the foreground of the Onondaga County Courthouse. The Onondaga people were charter members of the Iroquois Confederacy, key allies against the British during the Revolutionary War. Alternatively, then, the statue could remain intact and be interpreted as a link between Colonists and Native Americans united against a common enemy. At any rate, the point is that messy history means simplistic conclusions may not be accurate.

 

History is messy.

Of all the things I learned in school growing up, that's one thing I didn't learn.  And you probably didn't either.  We were spoon-fed pre-packaged parcels of chock-a-block history lessons, with Colonial America in one box, European history in another box, and Texas history in a huge box (here in Texas, all 7th graders are taught how absolutely indebted the world is to the Lone Star State!).  

World history often gets broken up and tossed into various other boxes like geography and social studies.

When I got to college, I had a history professor who announced that his job was to re-teach us history.  Public school so corrupts our understanding of the world around us, he said, that it's a wonder our modern society isn't even more twisted than it already is.  While it is true that people who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, the vast majority of us have never been taught how individual bits of history correspond to the whole.

And increasingly, when Columbus Day rolls around every year, we're confronted with that unfortunate reality.

Not because "Indigenous Peoples Day" deserves to replace unfettered adulation of the White guy who "discovered" the "New" World.  But because even folks who champion the Western Hemisphere's "indigenous people" don't realize that the civilizations Columbus mocked and tortured weren't really all that civilized to begin with, either.

The more I learn about Christopher Columbus, the more convinced I am that he wasn't just a product of his time.  He was deeply ethnocentric, incredibly vainglorious, and wildly racist.  His writings, even watered down by all the caveats his modern defenders posit, stand as sad testament to his disdain for just about everybody he encountered over here.  Let's just go ahead and admit it.

The thing is, we can't stop there.  When I was in junior high, I took Spanish classes, and I learned about the Mayans, the Incas, and the Aztecs.  And while they were remarkably advanced cultures for Central and South America, they were not civilized.  No "indigenous people" champion today would want to live in any of those cultures.

Mayans, for example, believed in human sacrifices.  They fought vicious wars amongst themselves.  They were also ignorant regarding basic ecology - they caused epic deforestation that endangered their society.  For all the people today who complain about diseases Europeans brought to the Western Hemisphere, let's remember that there are many ways to die, and our indigenous peoples were already facing perils of their own making.

The Incas were colonizers - the dreaded "C" word that horrifies progressives today.  Through crude diplomacy and brutal warfare, they amassed a huge empire along the western coast of South America.  If Columbus hadn't shown up, who knows how much of the continent would have fallen under their control.  For all the people today who complain about imperialistic European colonizers, their posturing is mostly frustration that Whites tended to be more capable at it than indigenous societies like the Incas.

Aztec culture was based on warfare.  Their religion and economy depended on it.  Warfare was how the Aztecs survived - by expanding their empire - and how they pacified their deities.  The Aztecs had no standing army per say; every man was part of their army.

Don't believe me?  Do your own research.  It's not hard - I learned about their warfare when I was in the 7th grade.  But I learned it in the "Spanish Class" box, and I was not encouraged to compare the facts about ancient people groups in the Western Hemisphere to what happened on our side of this planet after Europeans arrived.  I suspect many people who revile Columbus weren't, either.

And what of the Native Americans here in the United States?  Think about it for a minute:  Why do we have the term "braves" in our lexicon today?  It's not because of white supremacy.  Native Americans tended to be quite fierce.  They scalped their enemies long before Europeans began docking their ships along the Atlantic Coast.  Not every tribe possessed such brutality, but generally speaking, the conquest of their world attributed as beginning with Columbus was just an extension of the warfare that was their existence before Europeans set foot on these shores.

There was no placid, bucolic "kumbaya" utopia going on here before Columbus.  In fact, there was no real government, and no rule of law.  Societies here were ruled by autocrats and perpetuated by warfare.  So, how was that so different than what Columbus introduced, you might ask?  Maybe not a lot - except that Columbus was an emissary of a government that was governed to a certain extent by laws.  

The rule of law is not natural to humanity - it was invented by the Greeks.  White Europeans (oh no!).  Ever heard of Aristotle?  He's the guy generally credited with formalizing the philosophy of authority by civil code rather than individual power.

While the rule of law may have been wholly ignored during Columbus' explorations, the concept's evolution made its way to the "New" World not by osmosis, but after the European conquest of this hemisphere.  Was it pretty, and neat and clean, and pure?  Of course not.  It was ugly.  People did bad things.  All kinds of really bad, awful things.  And yes, you and I are living with the messy consequences today of those messy things.

But how does denying reality of this hemisphere before, during, and after Columbus help clean up the messes from history?

Sure, let Christopher's dirty laundry hang out in the fresh air of freedom for all to see.  Should we celebrate him because of how he acted?  No, but is there anything in his sheer passion for discovery that is at all meaningful and relevant to our progress today?

And at the same time, let's not canonize indigenous peoples.  Did they deserve to be treated the way Columbus treated them?  No, but was the world in which they lived deserving of preservation?  Again, the answer would be a resounding "NO", right?  At least, if you value the rule of law and human rights.  Those things may have been absent from the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, but they did follow.  Eventually.

Would values like the rule of law and human rights have eventually come to the Western Hemisphere had Europeans not?  We don't know, and how can we speculate?  Perhaps Asians would have found the western coast of our hemisphere, but remember, the indigenous folks who were already here had come from Asia across the Bering Strait, right?  Might nomads from the "West" have trickled down through North America over the centuries by land, bringing concepts like the rule of law and human rights with them?  Maybe, and maybe they'd have met the same warrior tribes that the Pilgrims and other colonists encountered on the East Coast.

Suffice it to say that the history we're supposedly acknowledging today is messy.  Very messy.  But making villains out of each other, and Italians, and indigenous peoples today misses that point.  What would be so wrong with using this day as a reminder that none of us is perfect?  That daily life is made up of six billion people making mistakes and (hopefully) learning from them?

Maybe you don't appreciate what we have today, compared with what ancient civilizations had - or didn't.  That's the bigger problem with folks who grouse about Columbus, isn't it?  Would you want to risk being alive today in any of the ancient cultures Columbus' arrival helped extinguish?  

Maybe Columbus isn't the person who should have a day named after him (or an uber-liberal university in New York City *cough* *cough*).  But if we're going to start naming holidays after people groups, what's so special about folks who slaughtered each other because they were the more dominant?

Isn't that what you dislike about the Europeans?  Or are you just upset that Europeans had more lethal weapons?

What happens when we don't learn from history?