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For our predictive texts series, we have asked our contributors to select a book which sheds eerily prescient light on our lives today. We weren’t after HG Wells or George Orwell, we wanted something less predictable. Here is the foresight so far.
The fact that the word “meritocracy” originated in the dystopian fiction of Michael Young is usually forgotten among politicians. It’s most commonly used to represent a positive, optimistic goal for those who believe in social mobility and opportunity for all – those who want leadership potential to be judged on capability, not parentage, race, gender, class, or sexuality.
Such an idea is compelling – particularly in the current climate of idiocracy, where we seem to be governed by precisely the least capable people for the job.
But Michael Young’s warnings about the perils of meritocracy deserve a hearing. We may not have a true meritocracy, but we already have many of the faults he predicted in his 1958 novel, The Rise of Meritocracy – a mock-history charting the rise and, in 2033, fall of the concept.
Young had three major things to say about the dangers of a meritocratic society.
The first is that only a certain kind of “merit” would be celebrated – and it would be the kind favoured and promoted by the establishment classes. Essentially, he argued, we would evaluate merit on a scoring system designed to favour the children of the privileged. And so the meritocracy would look faithfully familiar to the class hierarchy it supposedly replaced.
Second: Young observed that those at the top of a society which considered itself meritocratic would inevitably end up smug and arrogant, believing every luxury of their status to be earned and deserved. He foresaw the emergence of something like the divine right of kings: the divine right of the best to live the best lives.
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