« Mormonism And Its Enemies | Main | Mormonism And Its Enemies (II) » Meritocracy vs. Democracy04 Dec 2007 12:05 pm David Brooks on China: Imagine the Ivy League taking over the shell of the Communist Party and deciding not to change the name. Imagine the Harvard Alumni Association with an army. Read the whole column. It's catnip for my own prejudices, since I've long thought that insofar as there's likely to be a serious ideological challenger to the liberal-democratic order going forward, meritocracy - rather than, say, Qutbism - is most the likely candidate for the job. Comments (15)
Ross, I've enjoyed your previous writings on this ideology of meritocracy in American elites. What do you think are the backstops in American life that do, will or might keep liberal democracy more popular than meritocracy over here? To what extent can they be transferred to other countries? 
Brooks uses a phrase: educated paternalism. This brings to mind a quotation from Spengler: "In a world of faith, Truth is all. In a world of fact, Success is all." The Chinese problem, it seems to me, is not having enough paradigmatic freedom -- vertically and horizontally. Without the ability to replace suddenly-obsolete logic systems quickly and decisively -- the insurance mechanism supplied by liberal-democratic feedback loops -- Chinese leadership, however brilliant and educated, will be 1) too removed to see subterranean system trends, 2) too awash in information to recognize significant signals, 3) too reliant on particular genres of solutions in the face of a wide variety of complex problems. The combination of these and other weaknesses will likely conspire, over time, to erode the legitimacy of government. By grooming a proud, educated, and connected citizenry who have been taught, above all, to judge merit by metric, the Chinese leadership has chosen to ride a tiger.
Is David Brooks a Maoist? Perhaps they need a new cultural revolution to wipe the smiles off of those elite know-it-alls.
Meritocracy may be the challenger, but China really isn't meritocratic. It's too corrupt and too unfree to be meritocratic-- a meritocracy would allow the best entrepreneur to get the business, even if he or she had dissident political views; in China, the person with the Communist Party connections who bribes the right officials gets it.
What would happen to a Chinese Bill Gates?
What David Brooks describes is more like oligarchic fascism than "meritocracy". The meritocratic aspect is secondary. Nazi Germany was meritocratic.
I don't know anything about China from direct experience, but from what I read, China is a bit more nepotistic than Brooks portrays, though I obviously could be mistaken. I think a parallel to China 'modernizing' would be the Meji restoration in Japan that happened 150 odd years ago. The Japanese decided to 'modernize', or more correctly 'Westernize', though which Western country to emulate was a bit of a problem, and the way the tale is traditionally told is that there was a bit of confusion as to which country to emulate, either Britain/America, or Germany/Prussia. They could have went either way in the beginning, but ended up emulating Prussia. It seems that the Chinese are now getting into the act, and if Brooks' description is correct, the Western country they are emulating is... France?
I presume they are trying to imitate Singapore. I suspect a more likely outcome, though, is Mexico -- lots of smart guys at the top, but also lots of nepotism and corruption.
've long thought that insofar as there's likely to be a serious ideological challenger to the liberal-democratic order going forward, meritocracy - rather than, say, Qutbism - is most the likely candidate for the job. But for meritocracy to exist, there's got to be a level playing field. There isn't; there isn't anything resembling one. And since conservatives are adamantly opposed to any kind of government venture aimed at leveling the field, I'm afraid I'm not optimistic about your vision coming true. If, on the other hand, you just want people to pretend that we have a meritocracy, and believe in an illusory America where everyone has a chance to attain their dreams, I have good news. We're already there.
Freddie, I don't think Ross thinks this kind of meritocracy is a _good_ thing, or a "vision" in the sense of something one would equate with optimism.
Hmmm, you may be right. Mea culpa if so.
As was pointed out in the earlier posting on this topic (I clicked through to read it, believe me I don't have that good a memory), this is basically the system the PRI used to run Mexico for many decades after the Mexican Revolution. Interestingly, both systems have a few things in common, namely nominally socialistic parties running the show, and a culture that is somewhat fatalistic and interested in maintaining general social order above other social goods. Of course, Mexico managed to make a system like this work without mass slaughter and Maoist barbarism, which was beneficial for all involved. That having been said, I'm not sure if I'd call such a system a "meritocracy". There's too much corruption and nepotism baked into such a system to call it that, plus meritocracy presupposes that incompetent parts of the upper classes will fall down the social ladder as a result of their incompetence. I'm not sure that happens much in China, and that certainly didn't happen much in PRIista Mexico. Unfortunately, there's no simple word in the English language for an oligarchy that is wise (or cynical) enough to make it a point to checkmate any serious threats to its rule by co-opting the more talented members of its lower classes and by maintaining a certain modicum of socialistic ownership of the means of production on the part of the state. The closest words might be corporatism or fascism, but the former makes people think too much of big business for it to work as a name for this kind of system and the latter, well, we all know what that word makes people think of.
Brooks: Is that why Beijing is all lovey-dovey towards Taiwan? Because they are so prosperous? A better analogy than Skull and Bones would be the jolly roger, considering the extent to which the Chinese rip off American intellectual property.
One of the biggest barriers to meritocracy here is the difference in test scores and other measures of accomplishment between African-Americans and others seeking advancement. The old PACE exam for entry to the civil service, the post office exams, exams for entry to state and local jobs: all of these have fallen by the wayside in favor of murky resume-based hiring systems which produce the desired results in proportion of successful applicants from identified groups.
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I never really believed Qutbism to be a major ideological threat. It can only appeal to Muslims, and all American Muslims I know have no interest in changing the ideological fabric of the current liberal-democratic order. Meritocracy may be a more formidable challenger, but I think Brooks hits the nail on the head at the end of his column when he asserts that it's not sustainable.
This hits at one of the reasons the Cold War was a worse security situation than the current "war on terror." There was an active, growing international communist movement, and its two major powers in Moscow and Beijing had nuclear weapons. There is nothing in the world like that today no matter what NPod thinks.
Posted by Matthew Struhar | December 4, 2007 1:15 PM