It has been just over a year since I wrote “A responsible meritocracy“. My view was that meritocracy had indeed played a huge role in dislodging systemic inequalities (e.g. ethnicity, religion, even economic background) but not only is it not an ideal system, it is now widening the gulf between the haves and have-nots, and even creating entry barriers to prosperity. To use an adage from pop culture, it’s a hero which has lived long enough to see itself become a villain. Arguable, yes.
Every system is bound to create two sets of people – those who benefit from it, and those who do not. I’d rate the success of a system on two counts – the ability of its beneficiaries to see the other side, and what they do about it. The merit in a meritocracy is accrued courtesy intelligence/smartness. Intelligence is a means to creating the universally acknowledged currency – money. In that respect, I’d say that Silicon Valley has been a big beneficiary, and probably the most visible.
Are the people who are not benefiting from the system on their radar? I came across at least two articles recently that would suggest otherwise – Nick Bolton’s “My Dinner with Peter Thiel” and “Silicon Valley has a “Problem” problem“. The underlying themes in both are the kind of problems Silicon Valley is trying to solve, and the worldview that drives that. They’re not really things like poverty, disease etc. To be fair, some are making an attempt though.
If the beneficiaries of the system are not even able to see the other side, the second question – what they are doing about it – is rather redundant. But let’s look at some related issues anyway. To quote from Bolton’s post, The actions of these tech elite are only going to become more brazen as they morph society into the world they believe we should live in. To put it in another way, the world will be optimised for the privileged. Even something for the less privileged, like the Universal Basic Income, would be part of this framework, as The Guardian points out superbly.
To continue, if intelligence is the currency by which the haves and have-nots of the meritocracy are decided, how is the lack of intelligence being tackled? The Atlantic’s “The War on Stupid People” (thanks @shefaly) has a perspective in the title of its article! Quoting from it – We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity. nymag has a critique on this article arguing the connection between society’s attitudes towards the less intelligent, and inequality, and going on to state that intelligence might be the least-bad version of discrimination.
My take on that stems from what I wrote earlier in the post – systems will have skews, but it’s the attitude of the privileged towards the others that define the system’s success. As the first article points out, Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not be permitted to reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.
Systems inherit the inequities from preceding systems.(remember?) There is no blank slate. It is up to the dominant system not to aggravate them, and to not create a different system of inequity that is insurmountable. A class of people who are defeated even before they start. It’s less of equality, and more of access (irrespective of one’s starting point) that is asked of a new system. Something that has been succinctly shown in the image below. (via)
A certain level of empathy is required not just to understand the lack of access, but the factors that make it insurmountable. It is difficult, but at least some of us are supposed to be an intelligent species. We’re in the early stages of creating what could potentially be a new species altogether – through the manifestations of AI. It would be a good time to define intelligence, and its worth in the world we all inhabit.