Sohrab Ahmari, a visiting fellow of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University, has written a fascinating article for the American Conservative exploring why our meritocratic overlords got the response to the pandemic so badly wrong in spite of their scientific and technological expertise. The answer, he says, can be found in The Rise of the Meritocracy, an extraordinarily prophetic dystopian satire written by my father in 1958 which anticipated many of the missteps made by the meritocratic elite over the last two years. Here are the first few paragraphs:
The COVID-19 pandemic is so complex, so vast in scale, that I doubt any single future historian will be able to tell a unified story about the crisis and the global response to it. And any journalist or scholar attempting a synthesis today will find his work hampered by the fog of war that clouds many aspects of a still-‘live’ world-historical event. Yet if there’s one central thematic thread deserving urgent attention, surely it’s the question of meritocracy.
To wit: How did the West’s meritocratic elites, with all their scientific-technological prowess, end up driving their societies into a ditch of distrust, rancor, and division? What led the meritocracy to badly overplay its hand on lockdowns, masking, social distancing and, above all, vaccine mandates, triggering explosive popular uprisings like the one in Canada? It won’t do for the meritocracy’s apologists to blame the unenlightened and irrational mass of people who refuse to comply with what’s good for them, which would amount to circular reasoning: The whole promise of meritocratic governance is that the ruling class’s sheer intelligence and ability can overcome the messy antagonisms of ‘ordinary’ politics – yet that, evidently, has not be the case.
Why?
We’d do well to turn to Michael Young, the British sociologist, Labour party peer, and author who coined the word ‘meritocracy’ in a dystopian novel first published in 1958. The novel, The Rise of the Meritocracy, proved enormously influential on our side of the pond, especially among such heterodox thinkers as Christopher Lasch and Michael Lind. And deservedly so, for Young masterfully grasped trends underway in his time and projected them into the future.
I made many of the same points, linking Trump’s victory and Brexit to the arrogance and hubris of the meritocratic elite, in a half-hour documentary for Radio 4 in 2017 that you can listen to here. And last year at the Lockdown Summit, too. If you click on the 6hr 3m mark, you’ll see me holding forth on the failures of our meritocratic overlords and worrying about the forthcoming populist revolt, with Will striking a more sober note at the end.
Sohrab’s piece is worth reading in full.
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