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.