The Pursuit of Excellence

To bring out the excellence and talent of individuals and benefit the community, we must rediscover and update a founding principle of modern society: meritocracy. The term, coined in 1958 by the sociologist Michael Young, indicates a principle of social organisation that favours equal opportunities, excludes discrimination on the basis of race or gender, and encourages fair competition that is not skewed by familism, nepotism, lobbies or vest- ed interests. Meritocracy is the key to social mobility, and over the centuries it has united ideologies, borders and social classes. Since its origination, however, it has been a controversial concept, and today it is in need of a major course correction. This is because, as argued by the political editor of The Economist, the British commentator Adrian Wooldridge, in recent decades a range of factors – from the advent of technocracy to globalisation – have provoked an insidious convergence between meritocracy and plutocracy. Having once been a mechanism for cultivating latent skills and allowing them to shine, as well as removing incompetent bunglers from positions of leadership, meritocracy has now crystallised into what Wooldridge describes as an Aristocracy of Talent (the title of his fascinating exploration of the centuries-old history of meritocratic thinking, published by Allen Lane). As a political system, it has morphed into a distorted version where those in power do all they can to strengthen their already privileged position and hand it on to their children. Aggressive action is needed to break the status quo, as Wooldridge explains in this interview.

Why is meritocracy a crucial factor in society?
Meritocracy guarantees two essential things: economic efficiency and social justice. It gives everyone an opportunity and a level playing field. It creates efficiency and treats people as individuals, not on the basis of the groups, families, parties or lobbies they belong to. The best countries and businesses are meritocratic. When they cease to be meritocratic, they start to decline. That’s true meritocracy.

When did the crisis begin?
In the 1980s. Merit and money have been wedded to each other ever since the emergence of a hitech society, and over time an almost indissoluble bond has been created between them. It’s a paradoxical meritocracy, because it has become an aristocracy – a way of passing on privileges from one generation to the next through education. There are some obvious reasons behind this shift, such as the triumph of the cognitive elite, and especially the technological elite, over everyone else. This rise to primacy coincided with the loss of the ethical conception inherent in meritocracy. Globalisation has separated the 1 per cent even further from the other 99 per cent of the population. It has created a caste made up of employees of global institutions, the UN, banks, multinationals and the major universities. It has become an updated version of familism and nepotism. In the old days, CEOs used to marry their secretaries, but now they marry people from the same academic background and want their children to follow in their footsteps. We need decisive action.

What kind?
We need to make meritocracy stronger and more effective. We need sophisticated methods to discover people with hidden outstanding abilities, using the most refined intelligence tests right from childhood to identify those who deserve a particular kind of education. Historically, whenever a careful survey has been carried out, a great many talents have been brought to light. We need a society that looks at potential more than results. In Israel, for instance, they go to video arcades and scout for talent among the kids who perform best in the games. There are new technologies that can be used in the search, without blindly relying on the criteria imposed by the data economy.

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Read the full interview by Michele Neri in the July issue of L'Uomo, on newsstands from June 29th

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