Making the historical case for talent

MERITOCRACY has been having a tough time lately, exemplified in Harvard professor Michael J Sandel's indictment of it for having eroded the common good. His recent bestseller, The Tyranny Of Merit, attracted sympathetic attention in Singapore, which is trying to contain the inequality and elitism that some see as having been generated by the pursuit of meritocracy.

Adrian Wooldridge's admiring citation of Singapore as the "global capital of meritocracy" in The Aristocracy Of Talent: How Meritocracy Made The Modern World sets the tone for a combative rebuttal of critics of meritocracy.

Wooldridge defines meritocracy as the idea that "an individual's position in society should depend on his or her combination of ability and effort". The idea has faults, but they are fewer than those of alternative systems in "reconciling various goods that are inevitably in tension with each other - for example, social justice and economic efficiency and individual aspiration and limited opportunities".

Well, that is an assertion and not a fact. How can the assertion be justified? This book takes a historical approach to the lineage of meritocracy to argue convincingly that it is a progressive idea in essence.

Wooldridge ranges breathlessly across the intellectual terrains of Plato's quest for the philosopher king, China's "examination state", the Jewish investment in the idea that knowledge provides the key to the survival of the chosen people, and the medieval European Church's sponsorship of social mobility. His historical investigations lead to the three revolutions that created the modern world: the French, the American and British liberal revolution, the last of which "transferred power from a landed elite to the liberal intellectual aristocracy without a shot being fired".

What remains troubling is the message of the American experiment, which is that even equality of opportunity will lead to unequal outcomes as people find their place in the new order according to their abilities and efforts.

The testing of a person's Intelligence Quotient, the march of meritocracy after the Second World War, and the rise of ethnic and gender challenges to patriarchally ordained definitions of merit fill out the remaining chapters of this wide-ranging book. Its reminder of how the two (man-made) world wars of the last century made it necessary to incorporate women in the economic functioning of society beyond the home reveals the historical role of necessity in undermining inherited privilege and accustomed domination.

Two of the best chapters are the growth of the intellectual aristocracy in Britain, and America's self-definition as the republic of merit. The rise of the Liberals forced the British state to confront a crucial question: "How could you promote the rule of the able when the brilliant children of chimney sweeps left school at eleven and the dullest children of dukes went to Eton?" The book shows how the Liberal impulse towards the democratisation of education was aided by the Fabian Socialists who, incidentally, were brilliant products of Britain's pursuit of talent whose class features they wished to undermine.

America, on its part, "was a beacon to the world because it was engaged in a bold experiment: replacing artificial distinctions with natural distinctions". While compromised by its character as a "brutal slave-holding society", historical America nevertheless set the meritocratic ball rolling faster through its great experiment in "abolishing ancient privileges (such as primogeniture and the inheritance of offices)". Meritocracy becomes an instrument of a fading past without concern for equity, always a weapon of the future.

The Anglo-American meritocratic legacy is important because the West, even in its relative decline, remains a progressive force in world affairs today - much like meritocracy itself.

Nevertheless, the book's historical scope would have been amplified by an analysis of the geography of meritocracy lying beyond what might be called the Greater West, that is, those parts of the world that have risen and flourished under Euro-American aegis. Deserving examples of the non-Western meritocratic orders would have been the late-Ottoman Empire's administrative remit and the Soviet Union's success in creating a world-class scientific and military elite without recourse to the financial resources of the West.

Two chapters round off the historical analysis. The first is on the Leftist critique of meritocracy because of its eugenicist potential and its inegalitarian results in spite of affirmative action policies. The second is on the challenge from the Right, where a populist backlash has been occurring for years now against the political and economic power of a cognitive elite that is condescending at best and impervious at worst to the everyday tribulations of working-class mortals.

The concluding chapter draws all the preceding themes together. Acknowledging that meritocracy faces the very forces of nepotism, corruption and collusion of powerful interests against which it had risen, Wooldridge adopts an appropriately Hegelian position. Meritocracy is progressive (the thesis), its internal inconsistencies remain unresolved (the antithesis), and meritocracy will either disappear or be improved (the synthesis, the basis for the next thesis).

Wooldridge roots for more meritocracy: "We need to redouble our efforts to remove formal advantages for the rich while also developing better ways to distinguish between innate ability and mere learning". He complements that need with a call for a wiser meritocracy: "We need to civilise and direct the competitive principle." Winners must possess a greater sense of responsibility to society and make it possible for presumed losers to enjoy "alternative paths to dignity and self-fulfilment".

Honestly, this is a bit rich. No group that enjoys entrenched privileges is likely to give them up without a fight that it thinks it will lose.

However, if it does think so, it will behave accordingly.

The story goes that a landowner in the Indian state of Kerala lost 70 per cent of his ancestral inheritance in 1957 when the communists took power in the state assembly and implemented their land redistribution programme. The landlord went around his village smiling. The peasants thought that his loss had driven him mad. He assured them that it had not. "The parliamentary communists have taken seven-tenths of my land. Non-parliamentary communists would have taken it all."

Meritocracy remains a progressive force in global history, but its patrician future is not guaranteed unless its beneficiaries understand that they are subject to the vast impersonal forces of popular change. Singapore's commendable emphasis on compassionate meritocracy is not a plaintive call on the successful to be kind to lesser mortals: It is a warning for them to be kind to their own mortality.

• Asad Latif, a Singapore journalist, was a Chevening scholar at Cambridge and a Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard.

Adrian Wooldridge's The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World (Allen Lane, 2021, 482 pages, S$53.50)