The Tyranny of Meritocracy
12th November 2011
Megan McArdle looks at looks at our system where the cream is supposed to rise to the top, and discovers that there isn’t a lot of cream there to rise.
I don’t care about income inequality. I care about the absolute condition of the poor–whether they are hungry, cold, and sick. But I do not care about the gap between their incomes, and those of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Nor the ratio of Gates and Buffett’s incomes to mine. And I’m not sure why anyone should. Other than pure envy, it’s hard to see how I could somehow be made worse off if Bill Gates’ income suddenly doubled, but everything else remained the same.
Well, it is envy — envy deliberately stoked by ‘progressives’ because that is how they do their ‘community organizing’ and get the mob behind them to effect change — and the kind of change doesn’t matter, so long as it’s change, because ‘progressives’ believe that progress is inevitable, and therefore any change is good change because it will inevitably lead to progress. Unless things are changing, ‘progressives’ are unhappy.
Arguably, this is just what they’ve done. Rocked by the shattering forces of the Depression and World War II (and flush with the prosperity of the postwar years), the old moneyed elites of the Northeast and Midwest did something really remarkable: they voluntarily abdicated their position. Ivy League colleges threw open their doors to the bourgeois masses, and cut back on the Saint Grottlesex crowd. The old WASP bastions democratized or were swept away by nimbler competitors who didn’t scruple to sacrifice profits because it might look bad to the boys in the club. First Jews, Irish, and Italians, and then later blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, burst through doors that had once been reserved for the sort of people who got married and buried at St. Thomas Church. They were joined by the children of undistinguished WASP families from America’s small towns, suburbs, and tenements.
The architects of the transition envisioned a shift to a new meritocratic society in which the circumstances of one’s birth didn’t matter–only hard work and talent. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, we have a system that has less mobility than the old, forthrightly aristocratic version.
And the characteristics used to promote ‘diversity’ are often insane. Having a dark skin or being sexually abnormal or coming from a foreign background might make you more interesting but it doesn’t make you a better person — what the Crust calls ‘diversity’ is only diversity from the point of view of the Crust.
Who gets the benefit of ‘diversity’ having black kids at Harvard? Not the black kids — they see all the black kids they want to, every day, and if they want to see white kids they can just watch TV. It’s there to benefit the white kids. These ‘diversity’ quotas are play-toys for the offspring of the white liberal establishment, the way Irish and Scottish gentry used to send their children to be fostered by crofters until they were old enough to be useful.
The only ‘diversity’ that can’t get its foot in the door is diversity of ideas — because that’s threatening. After all, nobody is going to persuade your white kid to become a black kid (although they may be persuaded to act that way), nor persuade your American kid to become a Mexican kid, nor is your straight white kid going to be persuaded to become homosexual (probably). But they might be persuaded to become a Mormon, or an entrepreneur, or (God forbid) even a Republican — and that the Crust cannot allow. Hence all of the colors and all of the sexual preferences and all of the accents at college speak the same Party Line.
November 12th, 2011 at 14:15
You quite obviously have missed McArdle’s point.
She specifically asks that you not trot out the list of Usual Suspects as the culprits for a very real and troubling phenomenon, and you proceed to do just that. How predictable.
Since ‘diversity’ seems to be your Shiboleth-Of-The-Moment, let’s examine that. Your position is that admitting black students to Harvard is intended to benefit white students. Your assumption (as I can discern it, and I could be wrong; please correct me if I am) is that ‘diversity’ serves merely to expose the white elite to ‘common’ children–to what end, I’m unclear. But never mind.
Has it ever occurred to you that promoting ‘diversity’ is a way of promoting the assimilation of black students? We already know that they don’t think like us (white middle-class folks), don’t hold the same values, don’t want the same things. (Your recently past drum-beat of Blacks Behaving Badly postings established your bona fides in that department.) So maybe Somebody said, “You know what? Things might be a lot better if we brought them over to our way of thinking. What better way to do that than by immersion?” So they opened the doors, thinking that once they experience superior White Culture, they would be more amenable and tractable and we could all move forward. (Herman Cain comes to mind immediately, but that’s too low-hanging a fruit for this discussion.)
You suffer from the same myopia of which you accuse the ‘Crust’, whoever they are; you insist on seeing everything in terms of its effect on the white middle-class culture. Couldn’t it just possibly be that the Diversity Promotors are practicing good ol’ capitalism, in the sense that they do what they do in service to ‘enlightened self-interest’? I.e., Let’s help these folks along because in doing so we make our lives easier.
Just a thought. A ‘diverse’ thought, if you will…