I believe in meritocracy, just not merely intellectual meritocracy

I received what you could describe as a western elitist education. I went to Eton College, the 500-year-old private school in the UK whose pupils included Boris Johnson, Prince William, and everyone from Aldous Huxley to Percy Shelley. Then I went to Oxford University.

In both institutions, a huge emphasis is put on your intellectual performance under test. At Eton, all 250 boys in my year would gather in the school’s theatre on the last day of term, to be read the exam results, starting from the bottom and going up. The boys at the bottom were labelled ‘General Total Failures’.

I did well under this system, and learned to marshal information and construct convincing arguments quickly. There is an Eton-Oxford tendency to cocksure glibness, which I fear has not served my country well in the last decade.

The climax of this education was Oxford finals, two weeks of the most relentless intellectual pressure I’ve ever experienced, during which I had to write 15 essays on the history of English literature. My mind was so prepared, I would dream my essay plans at night. I passed with a first-class degree, and then had a nervous breakdown. My life then took its own direction, far from the ruling elite.

Because of that experience, I have a complicated relationship to the idea of elitism. No doubt, I am still something of an intellectual snob. But I am wary of arrogant intellectual elites who pride themselves on being the ‘cream of the cream’. My entire research into ‘spiritual eugenics’ is an exploration of how that sort of self-regarding elitism can go wrong.

It goes wrong not just for the hapless people outside of the elite, but also for the elite itself. Intellectual meritocracy makes a god of success, and exams become the altar on which millions of humans are sacrificed. If you fail a test, there is no forgiveness.

This takes a tremendous toll on everyone in the system, including those at the top of it. The Huxley family, for example, were leading architects of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’. They prided themselves on being intellectual ‘Alphas’ — one family motto was ‘Huxleys always get firsts’. But this expectation helped make them prone to nervous breakdowns. Aldous Huxley’s brother, Trevenan, killed himself when he failed to get a first at Oxford.

However, when I criticize a culture for being elitist, I occasionally receive the retort ‘every culture is run by an elite’. Perhaps this is true. Someone always needs to be in charge. The question then becomes, how does a society select its elite. How does it distribute resources and power?

Our culture tries to distribute resources and power according to intellectual merit. This has all kinds of problems, but it’s better than the usual alternatives, which is to distribute resources and power according to heredity, nepotism and favouritism.

That, in a nut-shell, is the argument of Adrian Wooldridge’s latest book, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.

Wooldridge, who is a fellow of All Souls and was a journalist at the Economist before moving to Bloomberg, sees meritocracy under attack, from the left via social justice and Critical Race Theory activism, and from the right via nationalist populism. He seeks to defend and reform it, as the best system humans have yet devised for choosing who governs our institutions.

His book takes us on a historical tour of meritocracy, first exploring what life was like before it arose, when positions of power were distributed hereditarily. Wooldridge writes:

When the future 10th Earl of Wemyss attended his interview for admission to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1837, he was asked just one question: ‘How’s your father?’

The old system had major flaws, not least, the aristocracy’s tendency to inbreeding and madness. Heredity proved an unpredictable predictor of competence, but the only system for shifting power from one ruling dynasty to another was war.

Wooldridge then chronicles the rise of meritocracy, first in the utopian scheme of Plato with his ‘philosopher kings’, then in Confucian China, which was run by a civil service that picked its ‘mandarins’ according to a rigorous national exam system.

Your performance in the civil service exam decided your destiny. Do well, and you could rise from nowhere to become a member of the god-like mandarin class. But failure could be traumatic. The 19th century Taiping rebellion was led by a man who failed the civil service exam and then went mad, deciding he was Jesus Christ’s brother with a divine mission to overthrow the Confucian bureaucracy. Historians estimate 20–30 million people died in the subsequent civil war.

Wooldridge then looks at the liberal revolutions of France and the United States, both of which attacked the inefficiency of aristocracy and instated what Thomas Jefferson called ‘a natural aristocracy’, an aristocracy of the most intelligent, talented, vigorous people, like Alexander Hamilton, an orphan from the West Indies who rose to become the first secretary of the US Treasury.

Meritocracy really came of age, Wooldridge writes, in mid-19th century Britain, through the efforts of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’. This was a network of families, largely from middle-class dissenter Christian backgrounds, who championed the creed of meritocracy and introduced reforms like universal education and the civil service exam. Families like the Huxleys, Darwins, Trevelyans, Haldanes, Keyneses and so on.

The intellectual aristocracy introduced new ways to measure intellectual merit, like the IQ test, pioneered by Francis Galton and other psychologists in the late 19th and early 20th century, and selective schooling exams like the eleven plus and the SAT. These were designed to be fairer and better at capturing talent than the old nepotistic system.

These meritocratic reforms triumphed after World War II with the expansion of higher education, the rise of grammar schools, the development of business schools, and above all the access of women to better educational and career opportunities.

In the last third of the book, Wooldridge explores how the intellectual meritocracy then came under attack, starting in the 1960s and gathering pace in the last decade. First came the attack from the left. Before the 1960s, progressives tended to support meritocratic ideology, but by the 1960s it came to be criticized as unfair and even racist.

IQ tests, selective schooling and competitive entrance exams were seen to favour white affluent pupils and to harm equality. It didn’t help that so many supporters of meritocracy were eugenicists, from Francis Galton to Cyril Burt, inventor of the eleven plus exam.

Today, some left-wing activities argue that western societies are so systematically racist, we should do away with many of the standard measurements for assessing intellectual merit — like spelling abilities or SAT performance — and give places in top schools, universities or companies based on the candidate’s intersectional score (ie to what extent they come from an oppressed minority group). Joe Biden saying he will select a black woman as the next Supreme Court judge could be seen as an example of this.

Then, in the last decade, a populist backlash has grown on the right. According to Brexiters and Trumpers, meritocracy has given us a self-perpetuating and self-regarding elite, who look down on the rest of society as ‘deplorables’, but who aren’t actually as smart or as good at running the world as they think (hence the financial crisis, the Iraq war, and what populists see as COVID hysteria).

The ruling elite float around the world, from Ibiza to Davos, serving their own neoliberal interests, without any care for the working class of their own countries. They speak the rhetoric of ‘diversity’ and call the white working class ignorant bigots, while gaming the system to preserve power for their children, through private schools, private tutors, networking and the power of global capital.

Both the left and right-wing critiques of meritocracy have some truth to it. Western societies put too much emphasis on university degrees as proof of talent. We’ve divided our societies into the ‘have-degrees’ and the ‘have-nots’. While it’s becoming ever more popular and expensive, a university degree means less and less — you’re likely to receive less teaching, in bigger classes, and your final grade is likely to be inflated. That’s why I agree with Silicon Valley rebels like Peter Thiel that companies should not be too dazzled by degrees when they hire candidates.

A problem which Wooldridge doesn’t really address, but which Michael Young did address in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy (which gave us the term) is: what if intelligence is hereditary and the meritocratic elite become a genetic caste?

That’s what Aldous Huxley depicted in Brave New World — and it wasn’t entirely a satire. It was a reflection of what Aldous thought was a reality. He believed a handful of clever families like the Huxleys and the Haldanes consistently produce the most talented people.

This was why Michael Young’s son, Toby Young, shocked the left by arguing for a form of state-back eugenics, to boost the IQ of working-class foetuses. He was worried — as I am — that in a not too distant future the rich will be able to not just pay for the best education for their kids, but the best polygenic scores for capacities like intelligence and sporting fitness.

However, I hope nature is more unpredictable than that in its distribution of talents. You never know where a genius is going to crop up, so I don’t think a hereditary cognitive elite truly exists. I saw enough ‘nice-but-dim’ types at Eton to convince me of that.

Finally, I think we should broaden our idea of merit and excellence. There are many kinds of excellence. I am good at reading and writing about books, but I have never changed a car tire. I moved to a Costa Rican village last year and thought ‘what exactly do I have to contribute to this village? Philosophy lessons?’ ‘Fitness’ depends on the environment you are in.

A person may be a ‘general total failure’ at school and prove themselves extremely skilled at business. Or they may have other skills — an attunement to the natural world, a deep capacity for love, or prayer, or a burning passion for justice. They may be excellent at highlighting the needs and talents of an oppressed group — like BR Ambedkar, the untouchable who wrote India’s constitution.

I think it is possible to be ‘excellent’ in any one of these fields. I am a meritocrat, then, a believer in excellence — just not merely intellectual excellence.