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A Distant Elite: How Meritocracy Went Wrong
[HedgehogReview] We need to find ways to restore and preserve a less regimented, less class- and status-stratified, less school-sorted, more open-ended America, one more respectful of men and women of all stations and educational levels. We need an economy and legal structures that are as open as possible to enterprise and innovation. We need an educational system that is open to all, and geared not to the manufacturing of credentials (or artificial and dysfunctional rites of passage) but to the empowering of individuals. We need a society that concerns itself with the knowledge and skills a person can acquire, not where or how they were acquired. Why could we not restore the practice of bringing talented and ambitious young people into professions such as the law through apprenticeships, as was done in the era of the founders, instead of insisting that they expend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a law school credential that means less and less with each passing year, and only serves to delay their entrance into the work force and the productive life of the community? Why could we not do the same with engineers, accountants, teachers, health-care professionals, and the like? Would not such changes move us back in the direction of a restoration of essential merit?So that these statements not take on an air of wistful abstraction, let me conclude with a flesh-and-blood example from the American past. Consider Abraham Lincoln, a common man born in a log cabin to humble circumstances, whose character and outlook were molded not by the advantages of birth or pedigree but by his own relentless striving toward self-betterment, and his labor to wring a better life out the hard opportunities presented to him. We see, and rightly so, a considerable portion of our national ethos bound up in his story. We see an image of meritocracy rightly understood. Lincoln was not particularly proud of his humble origins, and did not like to go into detail about them. His early life, he once said, could be summarized in a single phrase: “the short and simple annals of the poor.”11 Hence, our knowledge of his early life is scrappy. We know that he moved from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois, a typical pioneer farm boy, burdened with the tasks of hauling water, chopping wood, plowing, harvesting. We know that he hated farm work so much that he would seize the opportunity to do almost anything else. We know that he had little educational opportunity yet was a voracious reader, with a great love of language and oratory. When young Lincoln arrived in New Salem, Illinois, as, by his own description, “a piece of floating driftwood,” he was an uncredentialed nobody.12 But he soon found employment as a clerk, insinuated himself into the life of the community, became well known and well regarded by all, was appointed postmaster, ran for and on the second try was elected to the Illinois General Assembly, borrowed money to buy a suit, then found himself thinking about a career in the law. And from then on, there was no holding him back. You could say that this was a rather unpromisingly hand-to-mouth pattern of development. Or you could say that Lincoln benefited from the looseness and easygoing disorder of frontier society, with its fluidity and absence of confining rules and regulations, its steady succession of fresh challenges demanding a fresh response. He did not live in a world where all of life hinged on his parents getting him into the “right” kindergarten so that he would have a plausible path into the ruling class. He could come to a town like New Salem and, in a matter of weeks, persuade his neighbors that he was a plausible candidate for office. He did not have to be defined as his father’s son. He could begin over again, and again. Not everything about this frontier world was good, and Lincoln especially regretted the absence of educational opportunities in his own life. But one cannot separate the resourcefulness of his character from the fact of his frontier origins. Nor can one separate those humble origins from his iconic and enduring meaning in American life. There was nothing ordinary about Lincoln. But his ascension to the presidency was a clear example of the common man’s potential in a land open to men of merit. As Lincoln said in announcing his candidacy for the General Assembly in 1832, he “was born, and [had] ever remained, in the most humble walks of life,” without “wealthy or popular relatives or friends to recommend me.”13 But he had been given unprecedented opportunity to realize his potential by the right set of conditions. We would do well to leave room for the Lincolns among us—especially if they are as raw and uncredentialed as the man who would become our sixteenth president was. Think of his great speech at the dedication of the cemetery in Gettysburg in November 1863. As many know, there were two notable speeches that day. The first, and the longest and most learned and most florid, was given by the supremely well-pedigreed Edward Everett, former president of Harvard—and the first American to receive a German PhD. But it was the self-educated frontiersman president who gave the speech whose accents ring down through the ages. Perhaps there is a pattern here to learn from. Posted by: Pappy 2016-08-01 |
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