Philosophical Perspectives on Sex and Love Book

Meritocracy, what a great idea! Surely it's a good thing that people advance based on talent, instead of who their parents were.

We just have to make sure that everyone has equality of opportunity to do so and we'll have a fundamentally fair society, right?

The unnamed author of this book, writing in the distant year 2033 certainly believes that. He's the product of an age where comprehensive education reform has channelled unprecedented levels of funding into identifying the most adept students and bringing them to their full potential. The system is publicly-funded, rigorously screened against nepotism, its tests impeccably scientific and open to all applicants and re-applicants. Similarly, the employment market is ruthlessly focused on hiring and promoting the highest-scoring, regardless of race, class or gender (sorta, feminism is acknowledged but doesn't get a big run in this world). This focus on the best has produced a dynamic and vibrant creative class has ushered in a new golden age of innovation in science and culture, whose great achievements have restored the nation to prominence on a competitive global stage.

But something is amiss: in the past year, the government and education system have been wracked by violence against people and property. The Populists, a movement of disaffected heirs of the old, privileged order and disgruntled unskilled labourers and service workers swell in numbers and threaten to bring down the system itself. What is happening? Where does this unrest spring from? Our plucky author believes the answer lies in the origins of the system and proceeds to outline the history of meritocracy, starting in Victorian England.

Through this history, the reader starts to get at the basic problems posed by the idea of meritocracy. As the meritocrat author freely admits, the idea of equality of opportunity is limited by the need to apportion scarce resources, which ultimately requires the prioritisation of efficiency over equality if the potential of the brightest is to be maximised. There is no meritocracy unless the best rise, which requires that they should not be held back by those less able. The social mobility of a true meritocracy also requires that others fall. Initially, this doesn't sound too bad. As the meritocrat explains, this means turfing the elites and their idiotic children out of their offices and elite boarding schools in favour of those who genuinely deserve to be there. Really, what's so wrong with that?

The sting in the tail isn't immediately visible, but as the book unfolds it emerges in full view: in the feudal and capitalist societies of the past, idiots and geniuses any everyone in-between had been roughly evenly distributed across the class system, and class itself was a product of birth as well as education. This meant that there was a realisation amongst some members of all levels that their status in life wasn't a reflection of their individual merit, occasioning guilt and unease amongst the ruling class and anger and unrest amongst those beneath them. Meritocracy, fully realised does away with any such uncertainty: status is merit, merit is status. As the system is scrupulously fair in identifying and rewarding talent the new meritocratic class can have no doubt that they are the best placed to wisely govern society and those beneath them can have no complaint. This is a true aristocracy, rule by the best.

As the complexity of governance increase with technological advances parliament has become increasingly irrelevant, incapable of keeping up with the demands of the creative and technological revolutions unleashed by the creative elite. Democratic representatives of the lower classes are so unfit to grasp the nature of these developments that they may as well be speaking a different language to the creative class, and in fact, increasingly they are. At the time of the meritocrat's writing there are demands circulating within the academies that parliament either be abolished or an IQ qualification be introduced,while moderates still find the lower house a useful sounding-board and remain confident that the merit-appointed upper house, with its lock on the Ministry of Education and working in tandem with the civil service remains capable of steering the lower chamber to the right decisions. Similarly neutered, political parties and trade unions have been weaned off egalitarianism and no longer try and claw back national income with wage rises to lowly technicians when national competitiveness requires relentless investment in productivity to keep pace with China (yes, not a bad intuition for 1958).

Oddly, this hasn't been popular with the lower classes, who denied a voice in the governance of the nation and faced with an endless horizon of austerity and menial service are responding with agitation and violence.

Does any of that sound familiar? A little bit?

Young, writing from the high point of Britain's post-war settlement envisages a future that's bureaucratic, institutional and mass-mobilized to a degree that is comes across as deeply weird to us kids of Ronnie and Maggie (or Keato) - amusingly, in his 2033 the law and finance are dead-end career paths - but his insights and intuitions are nonetheless impressive, ranging from the anticipation of the creative class in their brattish, disruptive glory to an eerily accurate description of present debates on the aged workforce and entitlement reform. Interestingly for a Labour policy wonk of the Attlee era he identifies the seeds of the hyper-aristocratic Meritocracy of 2033 in the egalitarian socialist reforms of Crosland, Benn and Bevin, whose single-minded focus on tearing down the hereditary pillars of the British Establishment rebounds against them by creating a new aspirational class without any attachment to the cause of labour and egalitarian politics - which is more or less the electoral coalition that brought Thatcher to power (again, not a bad call from 1958).

What stops the Rise of the Meritocracy from being better known? Well, leaving aside that it cuts right against the zeitgeist - later Young would rail against the political class's championing of a term he coined in order to discredit - it is just a little too soaked in its time and place. In-jokes about Fabians and education policy disputes of the Attlee ministry don't have the longest half-life, and the book is packed with them. The middle section, comprised of a detailed policy history of an education reform that didn't happen is quite a slog, requiring a solid grasp on mid-century UK education policy, something of a rarefied topic. I found it worth the effort but I can see why sci-fi dystopias tend to focus on the simstim tapes and datajacking.

Still, this is a very short book and rarely have I read something that demolishes a big and powerful idea so thoroughly, its dry academic prose concealing an argument rich with irony and humanity.