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 democracyEarth 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)
4 comments:
Matthew Stewart
The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy
My note says:
Much, MUCH too long, but scores some points. Picks up some of Lasch’s points re: meritocracy thirty years later
"In his 2014 book, Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz, a former English professor at Yale, summed up the situation nicely: “Our new multiracial, gender-neutral meritocracy has figured out a way to make itself hereditary.”
...
"You see, when educated people with excellent credentials band together to advance their collective interest, it’s all part of serving the public good by ensuring a high quality of service, establishing fair working conditions, and giving merit its due. That’s why we do it through “associations,” and with the assistance of fellow professionals wearing white shoes. When working-class people do it—through unions—it’s a violation of the sacred principles of the free market. It’s thuggish and anti-modern. Imagine if workers hired consultants and “compensation committees,” consisting of their peers at other companies, to recommend how much they should be paid. The result would be—well, we know what it would be, because that’s what CEOs do.
...
"There is a page in the book of American political thought—Grandfather knew it by heart—that says we must choose between government and freedom. But if you read it twice, you’ll see that what it really offers is a choice between government you can see and government you can’t. Aristocrats always prefer the invisible kind of government. It leaves them free to exercise their privileges. We in the 9.9 percent have mastered the art of getting the government to work for us even while complaining loudly that it’s working for those other people.
...
"Today we like to think that the social-welfare programs that were planted by the New Deal and that blossomed in the postwar era were the principal drivers of a new equality. But the truth is that those efforts belong more to the category of effects than causes. Death and destruction were the real agents of change. The financial collapse knocked the wealthy back several steps, and war empowered labor—above all working women."
[emailed to self, 14 January 2022]
Paul Goodman
Growing Up Absurd
(1960)
[54] "...the difference in tone from such discussions [of poverty] in the Thirties. ...[now] they [labor leaders] were talking not political economy but philathropy. Partly, maybe, this tone crept in because they were talking about poor black and brown brothers. Mostly, however, it was because their attitude toward poverty is no
[55]
longer part of their fighting economic theory. As labor economists, they do not have solidarity with these poor.
"When poverty used to be discussed by socialists...the theory was that in the capitalist system labor as a whole must be at the bottom and must become poorer, because of the falling return on investment and its pressure on wages, because of the concentration of ownership and control and the increase of inequality, and the periodic crises and unemployment. Therefore the fight against poverty was solidary; it was the fight to improve the whole system in order to improve the position of labor. But now the rate of interest does not fall; the system cushions its crises; there is high employment (with significant exceptions) or insurance. There is certainly a concentration of monopolistic control, but either inequality is less (that is debatable) or, certainly, workers on a fairly high standard don't much bother who has million. Thus, nostalgic solidarity with poverty turns into philanthropy—and even into exclusion, on issues where the poor are unassimilable into the abundant system."
[57] "in a high-standard economy, there is a vast difference between having a little extra money and being accustomed to the well-paid standard. As our Manchester forefathers used to say, you do a disservice to the undeserving poor by giving them money, because they will get into trouble. Consider the concrete situation: Even if the parents are suddenly getting better pay, the young are getting merely a little extra spending money, and this, in a society in which there is suddenly a lot of money, must work out as follows: (1) The underprivileged kids get around more and are exposed to the expensive glamor, but (2) this is precisely not attainable by them unless they take short cuts. (3) Meantime, those who have the new money are more careless with it: they leave their cars unlocked, buy sex, drink too much. And (4) the spiteful feeling is increased, that those who are better off are squares, en-
[58]
emies, and fair victims of the gang. In boom time, that is, there is effectually more exclusion than ordinarily.
"During depression, contrariwise, there is more community because many others are in the same boat. The street is occupied by kids used to other mores, to whom the gang values are pointless. This leads to friction, but also to other friendships and other "things to do." But above all, as everybody knows who was unemployed during the Great Depression, it is easier to be decently poor when prices are low and the pressure to maintain appearances is diminished. Things get nearer to a human scale and life makes more sense. Likewise, at such times political activity is more common, an education that increases self-esteem in a worth-while way."
[65] "One striking trait [of Beat culture] is nonconformism and tolerance in sexual and racial questions and behavior. ... It is hard to be sure, but my impression is that the poor of other times, at the bottom but in society, were among the most tolerant. Hard knocks had taught them to live and let live; and they did not need to protect their repressions so much as the outcast poor. In this respect the Beats are more like the old-fashioned poor, and this of course makes it easier and more profitable for them to be poor."
Roger Caillois
trans. Meyer Barash
Man, Play and Games (1961)
"The reign of mimicry and ilinx as recognized, honored, and dominant cultural trends is indeed condemned as soon as the mind arrives at the concept of cosmos, i.e. a stable and orderly universe without miracles or transformations."
(p. 107)
"More and more, the recruitment of officials is accomplished through competitive examinations. ... Bureaucracy is thus a factor in a type of competition, in which agôn is the principle underlying any administrative, military, university, or judicial career. ... It is no doubt theoretically the case that acceptance is regulated by competition. However...,the highest grades in the army and important diplomatic or administrative posts often remain the monopoly of an ill-defined caste jealous of its esprit de corps and protective of its solidarity. And yet, democracy progresses precisely through fair competition and equality of law and opportunity, which is sometimes more nominal than real.
"In Ancient Greece, the first theorists of democracy resolved the difficulty in perhaps bizarre but impeccable and novel fashion. They maintained that selecting magistrates by lot was an absolutely equalitarian procedure. They viewed elections as a kind of subterfuge or makeshift inspired by aristocrats. Aristotle, especially, reasons in this way. ... In Athens, nearly all magistrates were drawn by lot, with the exception of generals and finance ministers, i.e. technicians. The members of the
[110]
Council were drawn by lot, after a qualifying examination, from candidates nominated by the demes. By way of compensation for this, the delegates to the Beotian League were elected. Elections were preferred whenever the territory involved was very large or where a large number of participants necessitated a representative government. The verdict of the lots, expressed by a white bean, was no less esteemed as an egalitarian system. At the same time, it may be regarded as a precaution against the intrigues, maneuvers, or conspiracies of the oligarchs who were difficult to replace. In its beginnings, democracy wavers very instructively between agôn and alea, the two opposing forms of justice."
(pp. 109-110)
(more)
Harold Innis
Minerva's Owl
(1947)
"Referring to the dangers of centralisation, Scott wrote over a century ago: "London licks the butter off our bread, by offering a better market for ambition. Were it not for the difference of the religion and laws, poor Scotland could hardly keep a man that is worth having". [24]"
(
[Footnote 24] The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1890) 11, 256.
)
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