One point on which all modern British political parties seem agreed is the desirability of creating a fully meritocratic society. The present government feels especially passionate about this. Almost all its employment and educational reforms are guided by a wish to create a Britain where we will all end up where we truly �deserve� to be � rather than where luck or the very wrong or the very right parents may have pushed us.
From a historical perspective, the aim of removing inherited under or over-privilege has been the single greatest motivating force in politics in the West in the last 200 years. The lead has come from the United States. In his Autobiography, Thomas Jefferson explained that his proudest achievement had been to create �a new aristocracy of virtue and talent� to replace the old aristocracy of unfair privilege and, in many cases, brute stupidity.
Thanks to the meritocratic ideal, multitudes have been granted the opportunity to fulfil themselves. Gifted and intelligent individuals who for centuries were held down within an immobile, caste-like hierarchy, are now free to express their gifts on a more or less level playing field. No longer is background, gender, race or age an impassable obstacle to advancement. An element of justice appears finally to have entered into the distribution of rewards.
This has had the effect of endowing money and social position with a new, quasi-moral quality. When wealth had been handed down the generations according to blood-lines and connections, it was natural to dismiss the idea that money was any indicator of virtue besides that of having been born to the right parents. The world was patently unfair: societies were filled with kings who couldn�t govern, lords who couldn�t manage their estates, commanders who didn�t understand the principles of battle, peasants who were brighter than their masters and maids who knew more than their mistresses. But in a meritocratic world, where prestigious and well-paid jobs seem to be available only on the basis of one�s own actual intelligence and ability, it does seem that wealth may say something more directly meaningful about you. It is no longer possible to argue that worldly position is wholly divorced from inner qualities, as many Christian thinkers proposed, or to claim that the wealthy and powerful must necessarily have attained their positions through corrupt means, as left-wing thinkers have suggested.
Which brings us to the darker side of the idea of meritocracy. If the successful merit their success, it necessarily follows that the failures have to merit their failure. In a meritocratic age, perceived justice enters into the distribution of poverty as well as wealth. Low status comes to seem not merely regrettable, but also deserved. The rich are not only wealthier; they could also be plain better. To succeed in a meritocracy allows self-made individuals to feel an element of personal pride that the nobleman of old, who had been given his money and his castle by his father, had never been able to feel. But, at the same time, financial failure becomes associated with a sense of shame that the peasant of old, denied all chances in life, had also thankfully been spared. The question of why, if one is in any way good, clever or able, one is still not rich and revered becomes more acute and painful for the unsuccessful to have to answer (to themselves and others) in a meritocratic age. As Michael Young put it dryly back in 1958 in his The Rise of Meritocracy: �Today all persons, however humble, know they have had every chance� If they have been labelled �dunce� repeatedly they cannot any longer pretend... Are they not bound to recognize that they have an inferior status, not as in the past because they were denied opportunity, but because they are inferior?� To the injury of poverty, a meritocratic system adds the insult of shame.
The idea of meritocracy isn�t just harsh. It is also in many ways misguided, for in truth, in our society, the chief merit under consideration is only ever the ability to make money, rather than the ability, say, to bring up children or write good poetry. It�s not one�s merit as an entire human being that is being considered and yet we�re made to feel (for worse and for better) as if it might be. We speak of meritocracy: rather than (as we should) of a very narrowly defined economic meritocracy.
We also tend to underestimate how hard, almost impossible, it would be to judge true merit. We imagine that a set of examinations and a few interviews might ensure that satisfactory justice was done. But we would be better off following the Christian idea that the merit of our fellow humans is in fact so hard to judge that we should leave the task up to God and His angels on the Day of Judgement.
A meritocratic philosophy rules out the role of luck. While it is theoretically granted that luck can have a role to play in shaping careers, the evaluation of people proceeds, in practical terms, as if they could fairly be held responsible for their biographies. It would in many quarters seem unduly (and even suspiciously) modest to ascribe a professional success to �good luck� and, more importantly in this context, pitiable to blame defeat and unemployment on the opposite. Winners make their own luck, insists the modern mantra.
None of this is to say that merit is equally distributed or indeed theoretically immeasurable, but simply to insist that you or I are in practical terms unlikely ever to know how to do the measuring properly and hence should display infinite care before acting or thinking in ways that presume we can.
Alain de Botton�s new book is �Status Anxiety� (Penguin). It was presented in a Channel 4 programme of the same name on Saturday 6th of March, 7-9pm.
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