Lasch—Meritocracy

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

Meritocracy is a parody of democracy. It offers opportunities for advancement, in theory at least, to anyone with the talent to seize them, but "opportunities to rise," as R.H. Tawney points out in Equality, "are no substitute for a general diffusion of the means of civilization," of the "dignity and culture" that are needed by all "whether they rise or not." Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites; if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit. It merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognize so few obligations to their predecessors or to the communities they profess to lead. Their lack of gratitude disqualifies meritocratic elites from the burden of leadership, and in any case, they are less interested in leadership than in escaping from the common lot—the very definition of meritocratic success.
(p. 41)

The educational reforms of the twentieth century "enabled the clever child to leave the lower class . . . and to enter into a higher class into which he was fitted to climb." Those who were left behind, knowing that "they have had every chance," cannot legitimately complain about their lot. "For the first time in human history, the inferior man has no ready buttress for his self-regard."

(quotes from Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033)

If memory serves, Richard Sennett has said something very similar.

It should not surprise us, then, that meritocracy also generates an obsessive concern with "self-esteem." The new therapies...seek to counter the oppressive sense of failure..while leaving the existing structure of elite recruitment...intact. ... As Young observes, people on the left (like their opponents on the right) are happiest when attacking hereditary privilege. They ignore the real objection to meritocracy—that it drains talent away from the lower classes and thus deprives them of effective leadership—and content themselves with dubious arguments to the effect that education does not live up to its promise of fostering social mobility. If it did, they seem to imply, no one would presumably have any reason to complain.
(pp. 43-44)

[For James Bryant Conant,] Democracy did not require a "uniform distribution of the world's goods," a "radical equalization of wealth." What it required was a "continuous process by which power and privilege may be automatically redistributed at the end of each generation.

...

The only way of "restoring social mobility" was to make the school system a substitute for the frontier.

...

It would be hard to find a better example than Conant's essay ["Education for a Classless Society: The Jeffersonian Tradition"] of the paltry view of democracy that has come to prevail in our time. In the name of the "Jeffersonian tradition," which envisioned a community of intelligent, resourceful, responsible, and self-governing citizens, Conant proposed merely to ensure the circulation of elites. ... His program...contained the additional irony that although it presupposed a rigorous separation of manual and mental labor and a hierarchy of social status in which those who worked with their hands ranked at the bottom, it was conceived as a way of achieving a classless society. ...

Historically the concept of social mobility was clearly articulated only when people could no longer deny the existence of a degraded class of wage earners tied to that condition for life—only when the possibility of a classless society, in other words, was decisevely abandoned. The notion that egalitarian purposes could be served by the "restoration" of upward mobility betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding. High rates of mobility are by no means inconsistent with a system of stratification that concentrates power and privilege in a ruling elite. Indeed, the circulation of elites strengthens the principle of hierarchy, furnishing elites with fresh talent and legitimating their ascendancy as a function of merit rather than birth.

The truth is that our society is at once "highly stratified and highly mobile," in the words of Wendell Berry. There is little evidence that rates of vertical mobility have declined. On the contrary, a vast body of social research points fairly consistently to the conclusion that rates of mobility have remained more or less constant ever since the Civil War. ...
(pp. 75-77)

Berry's interrogation of [Justin Smith] Morrill defines the most important choice a democratic society has to make: whether to raise the general level of competence, energy, and devotion...or merely to promote a broader recruitment of elites. Our society has clearly chosen the second course. It has identified opportunity with upward mobility and made upward mobility the overriding goal of social policy. The debate about affirmative action shows how deeply this pathetically restricted notion of opportunity has entered public discourse. A policy designed to recruit minorities into the professional and managerial class is opposed not on the grounds that it strengthens the dominant position of this class but that it weakens the principle of meritocracy. Both sides argue on the same grounds. Both see careers open to talent as the be-all and end-all of democracy

Earth to Hanna Rosin...

when in fact, careerism tends to undermine democracy by divorcing knowledge from practical experience,

Word...

devaluing the kind of knowledge that is gained from experience,

...but be careful here, anti-positivists, because no one's "experience" is comprehensive. Of course it would be great to have BOTH both book- and street-smarts, in whatever proportion depending on the field. What's stopping us?

Anyway, earth to both the positivists and the anti-positivists.

and generating social conditions in which ordinary people are not expected to know anything at all. The reign of specialized expertise—the logical result [of all this]...—is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the "last, best hope on earth."
(pp. 78-79)



Racial integration might have been conceived as a policy designed to give everyone equal access to a common civic culture. Instead it has come to be conceived largely as a strategy for assuring educational mobility. ... The misplaced emphasis on professional careers, as opposed to jobs and participation in a common culture, helps to explain the curious coexistence, in the postsixties politics of race, of a virulent form of cultural particularism with strategies having the practical effect of undermining particularism in its concrete expression in neighborhoods.
(p. 135)

Basketball, Bodies, and The Meritocracy

If you play enough pick up basketball in enough different regions of this country, you will see and hear quite a few remarkable things, and perhaps contribute a few yourself. But you will also see a lot of the same thing: people whose bodies simply won't permit them high-level athleticism or purely physical advantages over opponents who nonetheless have developed some very strong fundamental skills. Individualized fundamental skills, if the oxymoronic overtones of that turn of phrase can be massaged just a bit. (I want to argue that they can, and must.) Most striking to me these days as someone who received a great body for basketball but whose limited natural athleticism is only becoming more limited with advancing age is to watch and play against people who were dealt the opposite hand. On Friday a much shorter co-worker joked to me about investigating all manner of PEDs and black-magic stuff so he could get taller and be able to dunk. When I told him I'd been dunked on a few times by people his height he was incredulous; I was telling the truth, though.

There are even quite a few people out there who have neither the size nor the athleticism but who nonetheless, whether through sheer force of will or some other intangible, undeniably "got game," at least as far as the average pick-up game goes. And this is to say that they have, probably unwittingly, scrapped the "fundamentals" and instead "just played" until it felt right. In music, meanwhile, I fear that even though "success" truly is a much more subjective notion than it is in basketball, too often it is treated in the opposite fashion. We tend to look around at everyone who has two eyes, two ears, two arms, and two legs and think to ourselves that if they want to work hard enough at it, they too can master the very specific gauntlet of fundamentals that a given musical tradition demands of any and all adherents. It is far easier to see someone's arms and legs flailing about on the basketball court than it is to see through the cup of a trumpet mouthpiece to those two tiny strips of flesh resting against it, or further yet to the precise position of the jaw, teeth, tongue, and throat. As any trumpet student knows, though, there's a whole lot going on up inside that airway, and there are a whole lot of people (I was one of them) who for whatever reason just don't have physical rapport with the instrument as it is traditionally conceived, even in spite of substantial general musical aptitude. We make unrealistic expectations in this way, and we do it at yet greater expense here than in athletics, since "winning" at art may or may not have anything to do with traditional technique and everything to do with becoming yourself. With that last turn of phrase, we are apt to think of what's on the inside; but what's on the outside has a lot to do with it too, more probably than we've given adequate thought to in most musico-pedagocial traditions.

Scrabble, Ethics, and The Meritocracy

Another confession: over the last several years I have allowed myself to get sucked into the strange and beautiful world of more-than-casual Scrabble playing, and I like it a little more than is probably good for me. Yes, I have become "that guy" who thinks nothing of playing words like UVEA, COOEE, and AENEOUS whether he's at a Scrabble club (yes, it has gone that far) or with a bunch of drunk friends, and who, when inevitably accused by said drunk friends of "cheating" in the moral sense (if hardly in the legal sense), thinks nothing of pointing out that (1) these words in fact appear on a widely available list of "vowel dumps" that anyone with an internet connection can easily seek out and learn if they care enough to do so, and (2) though these words seem pretty random, Scrabble vocabulary is hardly an anything-goes proposition, specifically because there is an international organization of people who really care about this stuff and whose administration of the rules and their application reflects said high degree of caringness. In contemporary terms now: don't hate the player, hate the game.

Having thus passed from being someone who only thought he was good at Scrabble to being someone who knows he's nowhere near an "expert" (and there is, as with the words themselves, a finite definition of experthood), I have also made the concurrent transition from being someone who viewed studying such lists of meaningless words as "cheating" to being someone who understands that access to such lists or the willingness to make them oneself represents so much less than half the battle. To compete on the highest levels of this game, you still need a steel trap mind, a killer instinct, and an iron poker face; if you lack any of these, experienced players will summarily devour you. You do, admittedly, also need to know a lot of words that you're highly unlikely to encounter anywhere else. Even so, "knowing" them is one thing, "finding" them in crucial moments of a game is another; and that throws the whole proposition back on to familiar territory: practice.

As professor Jerry Luckhardt at the U of MN would always say, "Practice is not a sign of weakness or insecurity." It certainly is not cheating either. Get a bunch of drunk music majors together some weekend and they will unite behind this battlecry concerning their own metier, then decry it in the next breath once someone grabs the Scrabble board off of a nearby bookshelf and deals them a death by a thousand cuts using some of the over 1,000 permissible 2- and 3-letter words. The truth is that the two pursuits are overwhelmingly similar in their Gladwellian dimensions: the intuitive genius and the hapless grinder are, while not unheard of, exceedingly rare birds both in Scrabble and in music. There is also this: given a modicum of discipline and motivation (the afterburn of having one of those vowel dumps played on you for the first time and then losing your challenge seems to provide an adequate, if temporary, dose of both for most drunk music majors), there's no reason virtually any fully developed adult couldn't grasp the most basic elements of high-level Scrabble in one sitting, thereby becoming nearly unbeatable in occasional drunk living room games against less enterprising friends while expending a disproportionately paltry amount of effort. Similarly, I have often found it both maddening and heartbreaking when my adult students seem unable or unwilling to solidify foundational skills and knowledge that would open up the world for them. Too many hobbyists look at professionals with the same mixture of awe and contempt that my music major friends point in my direction when I take the rack AICNNRT and drop down TYRANNIC through a Y for 80-some points. The truth of the matter, though, is that while I've put in only a fraction of the time the experts have, I have made an investment, I have put some thought into prioritizing certain tasks over others in the limited time I am willing to devote specifically to Scrabble, and it has been sufficient to deliver a much more enjoyable and satisfying Scrabble experience. Some find it off-putting simply that you can be capable of plays like the one described above and not yet be near the experts. They should not feel this way: you get out of it what you put into it, and there is plenty of fulfilling, even exhilarating grey area to be inhabited without jeopardizing prior commitments to other life-dominating pursuits.

If you have an iOS device and a Facebook account, let's play Scrabble over the interwebs sometime. I promise I won't go easy on you.

The Social Network as Anti-Aesthetic

It is in one sense quite odd to me, and in another not at all, that the prescription for musicians to make friends with their audience tends to go unremarked upon from a critical perspective. It wasn't that long ago that the composerly world was rocked, riven, scandalized, some would say self-imploded by the suggestion that writing music only for other specialists was a good idea. I myself have never thought it was a particularly good idea, but I will tell you why a Babbitt-ian audience comprised exclusively of colleagues appeals to me more than one comprised exclusively of friends. (They are both, it bears mentioning, social networks, which points to the absurdity of privileging one so decisively over the other.)

The socially networked audience theory takes the hackneyed pop-cultural adage that true friends are the ones who tell you the truth even when it hurts and turns it on its head. Instead, you now must make friends with as many potential listeners as possible in order to insulate yourself from judgment, since your friends will never tell you what they really think of your music as long as your show makes for a good hang. But of course these must be your true friends, since they make time to come to your shows, hence allowing you to have a career, perhaps even to make a living.

I see this dynamic as the dark matter lurking unseen behind the more visible movement, especially within the contemporary art world, towards post/anti-aesthetic art. Musicians, especially the kind most inclined toward what I am calling the socially networked audience theory, seem to me to be as a group still very much interested in aesthetics, at least as far as how their work is made. Music being "the social art," as some have called it, our "anti-aesthetic" takes hold in the public presentation of our work instead of (perhaps despite) its mode of conception.

There is also a distinctly meritocractic tinge to all of this. (And make no mistake, meritocracy is a whole category of anti-aesthetic unto itself.) Whereas the opportunity to become an aesthetic success has historically been tied to privilege (leisure time for taking up music and the money to pay for instruments and instruction), it seems more in keeping with good American values that the people with the most friends should have the privilege of making art for a living, since this would suggest that they are far more legitimately meritorious than those who had the good fortune of being born into money, and perhaps even more so than those who fought their way into music without the benefits of privilege, since a lot of those people, though we respect the heck out of them for their dedication, are jerks nonetheless.

“Overdetermination,” says the Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, "comes closer to its postmodern connotation when Althusser, a Marxist philosopher, borrows the term to describe the complex whole of a social formation as it is constituted by a multiplicity of determining contradictions." Sorry for going there, Modernists, but doesn't that describe the socially networked audience theory pretty well? In a closed musical culture with a high degree of aesthetic consensus, friends and family hardly count for an audience any more than they do for references on a job application. Conversely, in a fragmented, postmodern musical culture where one has the freedom to make and consume any of a number of different kinds of music, they do not merely become the core of one's audience by default, but in fact (and this is where you can practically smell the overdetermination) they are vociferously annointed as the necessary core of one's audience by the most prominent tastemakers and cultural theorists in the musical profession itself, the only explanation being "The world has changed! Don't be left behind!"

There is a too-obvious, if not entirely incorrect, interpretation to be made here, namely that as times have gotten tougher for musicians, we have merely stooped lower and lower just to get by, and that only once the downturn had touched everyone more or less equally (even the fat cats) did it become socially acceptable to avowedly rely on friends and family for an audience, and indeed to advocate openly for doing so from positions of respect and/or authority. If that were the whole story, however, I believe we would nonetheless detect no small amount of regret in these proclamations, and also that it would be malcontents like me more so than those occupying said "positions of respect and/or authority" who would be glumly relating our plight to an imaginary readership. What in fact we have are commentators in high places who, to the extent it is possible to ascertain as much through a written medium, can barely contain their glee.

Many (myself occasionally included) have lamented the low standing of the arts in contemporary American society. And yet the present discussion makes clear how destructive the ongoing excessive romanticization of the arts remains to the arts themselves. It is this romanticization which provides the elusive other half of the primary "determining contradiction" in the social pathway to a post/anti-aesthetic. Or, in plain English, we recognize that art is in one sense a right and in another a privilege. The socially networked audience theory is one futile attempt among many to square these two realizations with each other when in fact both are permanent and irreconcilable, a good old fashioned dialectic which the postmodern revolution only thinks it has resolved.