Meritocracy – the meta-narrative of liberalism.

 

By: Andrew Wallace

‘Man’ does not live by bread alone; it seems human nature must draw sustenance from existential motivation that rises above the merely contingent. If pre-modern societies were characterised by metaphysical belief systems and religion, our secular age invokes the virtuous in the overarching meta-narrative of liberalism and the ideas of individual self-realisation. Individualism is held up as the repository of rationalism and the cradle of goodness.

In so far as collectivity is acknowledged as a dimension of human experience in terms of language and culture, these are tacitly conceded for the paradoxical cultivation of individualism. Liberal modernity was pronounced in the shift from ‘ascribed’ to ‘achieved’ status, whereby virtue is held to reside in individual performance rather than conferred by ancestral passage. Of course it has never proved to be the case that we can unproblematically distil merit from inherited advantage, although the allure of ‘meritocracy’ is officially observed in legislation that seeks to proscribe the most egregious prejudices when it comes to employment, access to basic amenities and civil rights. Meritocracy is encoded in the formal observation of equality of opportunity.

But while leftists recognised the importance of advancing formal equality of access before the law, they also understood its limitations by way of how powerful inequalities would continue to reproduce themselves down the generations. If social advancement was now predicated on rational criteria of achievement, then a canny middle class accordingly mentored and distinguished by credentials would still wield considerable cultural capital that puts itself ahead of its working class peers. Attempts to remove or redistribute these advantages would conceivably involve communal child rearing and inheritance taxes, all of which invariably prove politically unappealing and unacceptable with the partial exception of a few fringe bohemian communities.

If Britain envisages itself as a meritocracy it must also account for its tenacious monarchism, a rather incongruous edifice of hereditary. In order to swallow this piece of cognitive dissonance we tell ourselves that walling off a not inconsiderable chunk of heritage from modernity does indeed make sense as a kind of marketable living museum imbued with the collective symbolism of nationhood. This serves as a soothing balm against the rougher edges of secular disenchantment that inevitably present with meritocratic atomism. Hence the more telegenic upcoming members of the royal cult are able to renew their appeal whilst also neatly dovetailing into the prevailing culture of celebrity.