{"id":1746,"date":"2018-11-05T15:39:17","date_gmt":"2018-11-05T15:39:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/honour-in-greece\/?p=1746"},"modified":"2018-11-06T12:26:16","modified_gmt":"2018-11-06T12:26:16","slug":"ancient-honour-and-modern-meritocracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/research.shca.ed.ac.uk\/honour-in-greece\/2018\/11\/05\/ancient-honour-and-modern-meritocracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient Honour and Modern Meritocracy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Michael Young, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Aristotle<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Michael Young\u2019s dystopian future \u2013 2033 Britain \u2013 as imagined in his The Rise of Meritocracy<\/em><\/a> (of 1958) is now.\u00a0Not just because we\u2019re only fifteen years away, but because \u2018meritocracy\u2019 already is the internalised recognition order of our age.\u00a0We might not live in an actual \u2018meritocracy\u2019 (Young\u2019s new coinage), but, as argued in last week\u2019s Guardian Long Read<\/a> by Kwame Anthony Appiah<\/a>, a meritocratic ideal is what justifies entrenched inequalities in our societies, what keeps the 1% on top and the 99% docile.\u00a0In Young\u2019s dystopia, wealth, power and status (i.e. honour) are allocated according to a simple formula: \u2018IQ + effort = merit\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

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No more inherited wealth, no more birth-right \u2013 an aristocracy of the clever. Except, of course, that IQ and effort are to a certain extent also socially determined \u2013 they are the result of environment, stimuli, education \u2013 and those who happen to be on top \u2018are going to try to gain unfair advantages for their offspring\u2019. The meritocracy ends up being a society rigidly divided in two classes, the haves and the have-notes, with the added injury that the haves are convinced that they deserve their status \u2013 that they do not owe it to anybody or anything else \u2013 and the have-nots are resigned to their natural inferiority.\u00a0Appiah\u2019s discussion of Young\u2019s life, and of his indictment of meritocracy, touches perceptively on many of the themes of his own reflections on honour and identity, and on many of the themes that are central to our project \u2013 to the way we understand the workings of \u2018honour\u2019 in ancient Greece.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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In Appiah\u2019s account, meritocracy is not so much a political system, but rather an \u2018honour code\u2019 (to cite the title of his 2010 book<\/a>) \u2013 one of many possible ones.\u00a0It is, that is, a normative order that is enforced socially but also, and more strikingly, internalised by social agents, and which lays behind one\u2019s assessment of her own worth as well as of the worth of others \u2013 it is at its most basic an ideal of distributive justice which enlists the motivational mechanism of honour.\u00a0And it is at work, first and foremost, in people\u2019s heads.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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It is the meritocratic ideal that justifies the CEO\u2019s belief that he deserves<\/em> millions and millions in salary, or the Vice-Chancellor\u2019s conviction that it is entirely appropriate for him to earn six times as much as the top professor at his institution \u2013 if they didn\u2019t deserve so much, they wouldn\u2019t get so much! This also justifies their belief that they are in fact better than you. Likewise, it is the meritocratic ideal that convinces the single mother on benefits that she doesn\u2019t really deserve any better \u2013 as we do live in a meritocracy (so we\u2019re told), if she did deserve better, she\u2019d fare better. Meritocracy, then, is less an efficient system for assessing skills and proficiency (as, perhaps, it should be) than a context-specific (social-hierarchy-specific, in fact) honour code that justifies the world as it is, while at the same time pretending to be a harmless and \u2018natural\u2019 criterion of value.<\/p>\n

The scholar of Greek ethics and Greek society can\u2019t help but being reminded of Aristotle\u2019s discussion of the causes of stasis<\/em><\/span> (civil strife) at the beginning of Book 5 of the Politics<\/em><\/a>. There, Aristotle unpacks the motivations for \u2018revolutionary actions\u2019, as they unfold within the revolutionary\u2019s psyche<\/em>, as a battle of ideals of distributive justice. The oligarch believes that, because he has a larger share of material goods, he should also have a larger share of everything else: power and honour. He therefore actively works towards bringing about a political system (a politeia<\/em>) that enacts this particular ideal of distributive justice, in which naturally he is on top. Likewise, the democrat believes that because he is a free man, he should have the same share of power, honour and wealth as any other free man, and acts accordingly to bring about a politeia<\/em> aligned with this ideal. Both see the particular ideals of distributive justice as \u2018naturally\u2019 right and judge their own worth and the worth of others on their basis. And, if they were to win the day, those ideals would also serve as the normative justification of the new social and political order. They are thus pursuing both a political revolution and a \u2018moral revolution\u2019, to use Appiah\u2019s terminology: a change of the \u2018honour code\u2019 that underlies not only social arrangements, but individuals\u2019 perception of their own and others\u2019 worth.<\/p>\n

Like the ideals of distributive justice that, according to Aristotle, underlie the demands of ancient democrats and oligarchs, the ideal of meritocracy is the honour code of our current elite \u2013 the 1%, as it were \u2013 which works because it is internalised by everyone else, and because membership of that elite is increasingly the only form of membership that really matters, for those that are in but equally for those that are out. Honour is all about group membership, after all (and see Kleanthis Mantzouranis\u2019 blog post for a discussion of Sandy Welsh\u2019s book<\/a> and of why this is so). But here is something else that Appiah brings to the discussion: it is not about the actual group we belong to, really, but rather about the group we internalise \u2013 the group we imagine. It is about the group identity we choose to assume and to attribute to others.<\/p>\n

In his latest book, Appiah quotes approvingly American sociologist Alvin W. Gouldner\u2019s contention that \u2018corresponding to different social identities are differing sets of expectations, differing configurations of rights and obligations\u2019.\u00a0Different social identities entail different honour codes (or, with Aristotle, different ideals of distributive justice), and the dynamics of honour and shame are the mechanisms through which such honour codes are enforced. Social identities are the ties that bind us \u2013 the bonds that make cooperation possible \u2013 and they bind us through mechanisms that the Greeks strikingly described with the language of tim\u0113<\/em>. Yet there\u2019s nothing inevitable about any particular social identity, and the honour code that comes with it \u2013 to quote Appiah one more time (the title of his latest book<\/a>), they are \u2018the lies that bind us\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Meritocracy is the powerful weapon of an elite of wealth and privilege. It is indeed a lie that binds us. True, we can\u2019t do without such lies, but we should perhaps abandon this one, reject the aspirational ideal of this elite\u2019s social identity, and think of a better lie: one that underpins a more humane honour code, a less exclusionary conception of distributive justice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Mirko Canevaro<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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Featured images:<\/span><\/p>\n