We are often told that the Chinese are much more community minded than we are in the west, but creating a dog-eats-dog society inevitably produces dogs that eat dogs – it is hardly surprising. What I found particularly interesting in this – well, interesting in a deeply depressing way – was the discussion on Chinese students who felt those with more merit ought to be able to buy organs from those with less merit because the lives of the merit-full are worth more than those of life’s losers. Meritocracy matches the excessive individualism of our age. How we use ‘meritocracy’ today would be as if people took up Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal by setting up a butcher shop selling “A young healthy child well nursed … (as) a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food.” But then, if history does one thing particularly well, it is irony.Ī large part of the problem with ‘merit’ (and its appeal, too, I guess) is that it encourages us to believe we are autochthony – that we belong were we have sprouted and have sprung fully formed without ancestors or obligations. In fact, he was so annoyed that the term was being used for the opposite of his intention that he wrote this article for The Guardian in 2001, pointedly directed at Tony Blair.
That’s because the guy who coined the term in 1958, Michael Young, did so as the premise for his novel on a future dystopia. The warnings about the dangers of meritocracy are literally (and I mean literally, not figuratively) as old as the term itself. I’ve read a few books on merit now – they should come up if you search my shelves – and I would recommend any of them, but this is a particularly good telling of the ‘anti-merit’ argument.
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