Some Simple Thoughts On Meritocracy

Paul Barter, Ups and Downs in Plaza Singapura. Edited. http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulbarter/2878161851/in/photostream/

Meritocracy: Look at the method, not the substance
(Kent Ridge Common).

Another piece at Kent Ridge Common. This was a relatively fast piece done on Tuesday. It stated out pretty slow as I tried to get a good introduction. I’m still not entirely happy with it because I’m not sure if its catchy enough for the first paragraph. I’m also quite afraid that the debate has been there before, and I’m just independently arriving at the same conclusions as everyone else.

It was also written in response to Kelvin Teo’s article, “Multiple Intelligences and A Redefinition of Meritocracy”, also at the Kent Ridge Common. I’ve had more recent thoughts on meritocracy, and I wanted to bring that to the table. With my humble photoshop skills, I did some photo manipulation of a creative commons piece to show some people going faster and slower on a walkalator. Not terribly happy with that either but its not worth spending that kind of time for perfection.

Under that article, I argued for two different kinds of meritocracy, egalitarian-survival meritocracy and elite fast-track democracy. Each type of meritocracy, while upholding the primacy of talent and skill, have different ideas about how to train people to that level of skill required. Meritocracy looks an ends, when we haven’t talked about the means. I’ll leave the explaining of the two types of meritocracy there on Kent Ridge Common.

One sort of “means-to-a-meritorious-end” I have mentioned before about egalitarian meritocracy is that there isn’t a way to be pro-meritocratic. By that, I mean that under egalitarian-survival meritocracy, you cannot actively promote meritocracy. You can only passively support a meritocratic system, what I clumsily term being “anti-unmeritocratic”. Under that sort of logic, actively helping a set of people is not meritocratic because its done under artificial circumstances.

Such groomed under elite fast-track meritocracy people might seem to have merit, but we can’t tell if they have any true demonstrable innate talent or merit because of the extra privileges granted to them. If you’re a supporter of social darwinism, it’s also a bad position to take because we might be allowing bad vestigial habits to form under privileged circumstance rather than exposing it to open competition.

Still, what is the relationship between meritocracy and pragmatism? Is there philosophical harmony and sufficient justification of support by both concepts by each other? If the relationship is qualified by some reason (i.e. pragmatism implies meritocracy under x conditions), what are the conditions where meritocracy is NOT qualified?