The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Who could object to meritocracy?
It’s the antidote to nepotism – yet the idea of social mobility based on merit has become oddly vilified
THE ARISTOCRACY OF TALENT Adrian Wooldridge
496pp, Allen Lane, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £12.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Who could possibly be anti-merit? That would be absurd, like being against justice or virtue. But if you ask who could be anti-meritocracy, the answer is: lots of people. Michael Sandel, the avuncular American philosopher granted guru status by BBC Radio 4, has written a book denouncing it; and in the United States, hostility to meritocracy unites the rabble-rousers of Fox News with the ideologues of Black Lives Matter. Even the person who coined the term in the 1950s, the Left-wing sociologist Michael Young (father of Toby, by the way), did so in order to attack it.
Young’s view was that letting people rise to the top on merit would destroy proper socialist equality. The Fox News complaint is that it creates an arrogant elite who are unlike ordinary people. BLM thinks “equality of opportunity” is a fraud, because black people are always systematically disadvantaged. And Sandel thinks a bit of all of the above.
Some of this may sound plausible, until you try to picture a world where people do not rise on merit.
And there’s no need to strain your imagination; the world has been like that for most of its history.
In the early chapters of this hugely stimulating book, Adrian Wooldridge describes what things were like when heredity and nepotism ruled – when job appointments were favours, and many jobs were sinecures. (I liked the story of Mrs Scott, who in 1783 was still receiving a huge salary as wet nurse to the Prince of Wales; he was then aged 21.) He sketches some of the ways in which clever people could still climb the ladder: showing talent in royal service – like Thomas Cromwell – or in the Church. But in the UK the big changes began only in the mid-19th century, with meritocratic reforms to the Army, the universities and the Civil Service.
Then the story gets more complex. For many on the Left, meritocracy was about rational state planning, not equality or fairness; indeed, it got mixed up with the eugenics movement, which was a “progressive” cause. Bertrand Russell thought the government should give people colour-coded “procreation certificates”, and fine those who procreated with holders of incompatible tickets.
Still, it was state planning concerns that launched what Wooldridge sees as a vital development; the use of intelligence tests to measure mental talent, independent of educational privilege. The first big testing programme involved US Army recruits in 1917: alarmingly, the average soldier had a mental age of 13. More recently, fierce campaigns against IQ testing have spread the idea that the whole theory of IQ is discredited. But Wooldridge mounts a spirited defence, arguing that this is still the best way of cutting through the advantages of schooling to identify raw talent underneath.
That forms part of a larger defence of meritocracy itself, made with cogent arguments, thoughtful suggestions, and a welcome reassurance that this doesn’t mean developing an exam-factory society à la Singapore or China. I have only two criticisms. The first is that he often blurs the meaning of “meritocracy”: the “-cracy” should imply actually ruling, but he talks mostly about attaining high status and wealth.
And the second is about his caricature version of Brexit. This, apparently, was a populist revolt against the meritocratic elite, expressing the resentment of the uneducated against those who benefited from “intellectual achievement”. But if the less educated and the more educated voted differently (which they did, to some extent), why not accept the obvious explanation, which is that they thought differently about the issue itself? Why invent a story in which benighted Leave voters were not really voting about Brexit at all, but about their dislike of other people?
Then again, we are told that a vote for Brexit was a vote against globalisation. But the EU is not the globe; it is both a unique experiment in supranational government and a protectionist bloc. And when Wooldridge writes that the Leave campaign “promised to ‘take back control’ from foreign bureaucrats and global forces”, he is simply making that last bit up.
Boris Johnson is portrayed insistently as the British Trump, the embodiment of populist “fury” against the (meritocratic) Establishment. A simple thought experiment: imagine that the Establishment had been pro-Brexit all along; would Brexiteers have adopted any anti-Establishment rhetoric then? Of course not. Hostility to the Establishment was a consequence of being pro-Brexit, not the cause. But it suits a certain sort of Remainer argument to put this upside-down.
And so Boris emerges, absurdly, as the greatest threat to meritocracy in this country. Here is the impeccably meritocratic credo printed in his election manifesto of 2019: “Talent and genius are uniformly distributed throughout the country. Opportunity is not. Now is the time to close that gap. We Conservatives believe passionately that every child should have the same opportunity to express their talents and make the most of their lives.”
It’s a pity that such a valuable, thought-provoking book should contain, on this one issue, an inverted pyramid of piffle.