Intressant kritik av meritokrati

Is Meritocracy A Sham? | Via Meadia: ”But, and this is what Hayes is pointing out, there are a couple of problems with meritocracy in practice. The first is, evidently, that it doesn’t always work as advertised. The ‘best and the brightest’ organized the financial market reforms of the Clinton years that led to the Bush bubbles and the Obama doldrums, and neither the wars in Vietnam by the Kennedy era Great Meritocrats nor the Bush and Obama era wars were triumphs of social engineering.

The second problem is that in the end, meritocracy doesn’t promote democracy. The meritocrats may have won their positions through an open competition and their kids (with some advantages to be sure) are still going to have to struggle to make it into top colleges and so on, but once they win — they’re an elite. And their perceptions about how hard they competed and how fair the competition was makes them more smug and more entitled than the old elites ever were.

The new elites don’t feel guilty about their power; they didn’t inherit it. They earned it. They are smarter than everybody else and they deserve to rule — and in their own minds at least, they also deserve the perks that power brings. Money, fame, access: bring it on.

Wealth and entitlement corrupts the meritocratic elite. Members of this elite can no longer see society easily from the perspective of ordinary people and so their decisions increasingly reflect their own interests rather than those of the people they are supposed to represent. They lose the ability and perhaps also the will to be impartial arbiters between the masses and power; they identify with power and start to use their own influence to tilt the system farther and farther away from the populists and toward the old power centers.

I’m not of course doing justice to Hayes’ book here; if I could it would have been a blog post not a book. But this critique of the meritocratic ideal from the left speaks also to the populism of the right; indeed, while Hayes loathes what he understands of the ideology and political program of the Tea Party as much as any left intellectual in America, he has far more emotional sympathy for its hatred of the überclass than many writers on his side of the spectrum.”

Walter Russell Mead kommenterar på sin blogg Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy av Christopher Haye. Fram till det ovan citerade stycket är det riktigt intressant, sedan förlorar sig Mead i ett resonemang som går ut på att ateister löper större risk än religiösa att utvecka den arrogans och andra meritokratins fallgropar som Hayes beskriver i sin bok. Denna senare del lämnar jag helt därhän.

Poängen är att meritokratin som uttryck för en teknokratisk samhällssyn står i viss motsättning till en (vad Meads kallar social populism) demokratisk sådan baserad på jämlikhetsbegreppet. Skulle kunna ses som lite förvirrande då just meritokrati ofta framställs som ett sätt att komma ifrån åtminstone ärvda privilegier men den teknokratiska samhällssynen såsom den beskrivs av Mead undergräver definitivt demokratin.

Såhär i sommartider känns det lite skönt att kunna ägna lite tid åt denna typ av diskussion – liksom om fascism som jag kommenterade häromdagen. Under Almedalsveckan då man hör våra ledande politiker hålla visionslösa tama tal där det mest uppmärksammade blir korporativistiska förslag om jobbpakt bekräftas ju att det åtminstone behövs en väsentligt fördjupad diskussion om hur vi vill forma vårt samhälle baserat på en lika fördjupad analys av hur det nuvarande faktiskt ser ut i termer av verklig demokrati, verklig frihet och verklig jämlikhet.

Mer om vad sossar och andra progressiva tycker på Netroots, s-bloggar och Socialdemokraterna.

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Aftonbladet, demokrati, Elit, Elitism, Fascism, Frihet, Netroots, Politik, s-bloggar, Socialdemokratiska Arbetarepartiet, Staten, Tekonokrati, Meritokrati

Is Meritocracy A Sham? | Via Meadia: ”But, and this is what Hayes is pointing out, there are a couple of problems with meritocracy in practice. The first is, evidently,...