Meritocracy
When your toilet overflows who do you call? After the handyman fails you call a certified plumber. Meritocracy is like that - we need to give jobs to those who are most capable.
Once I managed a 3 floor apartment building and a wrought iron pipe burst in the basement. I staunched the flow with marvelous aluminum tape. Plumber came and said - can't do better than that without replacing all the pipes.
At about that time I had just graduated from a technical school as a printer. The good jobs were all union ones and I went to the union applying to be an apprentice. I was asked if I had relatives in the union. I said no. The guy across the desk almost smirked and said that there were no openings.
My merit wasn't what I could do - my merit was whether I was part of the family. And unless I was part of the family there was no way I could demonstrate my merit. I wasn't allowed to try.
Long ago when affirmative action was first accepted I saw the problem right away - it was a direct attack on the meritocracy. Suddenly factors like gender and race became factors in consideration for scholarships and university acceptance. Outrage ensued. What about merit!!!!
But what is merit? Is it any sort of objective measure of value? The affirmative action movement was based on the idea that if educationally disadvantaged students are given the same opportunities as the privileged ones that they will flourish. The privileged were horrified - competition! - what a communist idea.
I learned years ago from Psychology Today that merit was attributed to good looking tall people as a kind of cognitive bias.
Lately the idea of affirmative action expanded into Diversty, Equity and Inclusion. (DEI) In some circles it is assumed that if you are not white or male that you are a DEI hire - a person hired to fill some kind of quota rather than on merit. I'm looking at you MAGA.
I would take the military as being a place where people advance according to merit. I've never been a member but I understand that the tests are very tough. People who make it through the courses and advance up the ranks demonstrate objective merit again and again. In the USA officers are being denied promotion because of their gender or race.
One of the ironies of meritocracy is that it rewards the attribution of merit more than the actual demonstration of merit. That is, meritocrats actually diminish merit by rewarding appearance more than performance.
The charge against DEI is that it diminishes the performance of an organization. Of course we should act in a way that improves performance. Thing is - organizations take on DEI because it has been shown to improve performance. Morale is better and problem solving and innovation improves.
A trap when thinking about merit is to think of who is the best - who has the most merit? Sports exemplifies this. We've just witnessed the World Cup in soccer. Spain won!!! Does that mean they are the best? Not really. Everyone knows that next time they may lose. That kind of merit has a sort of plateau - I'd bet all of the players in the World Cup are on the same plateau.
I've lived on the edge of the art world all my life. It's a weird world when it comes to merit. Once I was documenting the work of a renowned potter named Cris. Her place was a counter-culture dream - hand built on a mountainside with a house and horses and a studio and kiln. A few times I brought her loads of clay from Vancouver with my truck
I really liked all the work I saw and was talking about this plateau idea. Earlier in the day I'd been taking pictures of her apprentice Michael as he worked on the wheel. He'd spin up a pot and go nah and scooped it back into the clay bucket. Once in a while he'd accept one. I couldn't see the difference. We talked about it.
Over supper one night Cris drew my attention to the tea bowl in my hand. She said you always pick that one. (I still remember that cup fondly) She said that that cup had been made by Hamada - a potter recognized in Japan as a national treasure. Worth maybe $10000. I was both abashed and pleased. Abashed that my argument had been so easily refuted but also pleased at my taste. I said Wow.
I do recognize merit.
But Cris's case is instructive too. She was born into a rich family. She could buy property and develop it into a bit of paradise. She studied around the world with pottery masters. She was wonderful to boot. Lots of merit that came from her having the time and resources to develop them.
Which brings us back to affirmative action. It's based on the optimistic idea that everyone can bloom and develop if given the opportunity and that is good for everyone.
What do you think
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.