“Meritocracy.” It’s a word we’ve all probably heard before. It feels like it’s always been there, perfectly describing our social structure for centuries. It’s up there with “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and “I pledge allegiance to the flag…” as an all-time great Eternal American Ideal. Except it’s not American, it’s not ideal, and it’s certainly not eternal at all. Meritocracy has its etymological and ideological beginnings in the mind of a British sociologist and welfare state architect, Lord Michael Young. Young coined the term in his 1958 essay, The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870-2033: An Essay on Education and Equality, as a term of derision for the government he describes in the piece.
The Rise of the Meritocracy is a seminal piece of sociological satire, describing with biting wit the rise and fall of a British state that organizes its vertical hierarchies purely on the basis of people’s individual skills and talents – and attributes its failures to individual shortcomings as well. For over 150 years, the Britain Young describes becomes ever more stratified and the boundaries between meritocratic class become less and less permeable until, as he describes in the very first page, the country is seized by an “unofficial transport strike” and a “equally unofficial walk-out of domestic servants,” with a general strike happening the following May. “Will 2034 repeat 1789 or merely 1848?” Young asks, referring to the start of the French Revolution and the “Springtime of the Peoples,” respectively.
As piercing as the satire was, unfortunately, Young’s brainchild did not quite have the effect he was looking for. Instead, the monkey’s paw curled – and instead of a warning against the foolishness of building a society obsessed with measuring aptitude and intelligence and using those standards as a basis by which individuals obtained state power, we got Tony Blair, to say nothing of every other modern politician.
I mention this not because I’m looking to do a deep dive into meritocracy (though that might be coming up later) but because I was struck by how badly Young’s satirical efforts backfired – all while he was being proven right.
Just imagine it. You are Michael Young. You helped build the modern Labour Party and lay the groundwork for the postwar welfare state. You spend your days creating a compassionate informal infrastructure built around mutual aid. You’re an advocate for educated consumer choice before anyone else was thinking about that, you build networks for the elderly to connect with younger folks, you’re anti-war, you advocate for free college, and you create a system that provides better language services access to people who speak different languages from English. Your friends fondly call you a “utopian socialist.” Your work lives on ahead of you in numerous organizations founded all over the world.
And you’re also the guy who coined “meritocracy.”
I’m not just making a mountain out of a molehill here; by all accounts, the unironic embrace of meritocracy really truly bothered Young. In 2001, he wrote a piece in the Guardian imploring Tony Blair to stop promoting the ideology. Blair never did.
“It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others,” he wrote.
Young died in January 2002. He probably would have hated video games.