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John
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Skipthis last part of the rant goes back to the united kingdom, whose culture was imported into singapore and never quite left when the british withdrew in 1963. it speaks of michael young, the man who coined the term ‘meritocracy’, its mutation through failure to recognize satire, and its use by tony blair, soliciting a few tired words from lord young.
p.s. upon reading some comments on the first installments, i stumbled upon an article on the dysfunctional aspects of singapore by thomas freeman. all good no bad gives an outsider’s refreshing point of view and raises some interesting questions with respect to what i have to say here.
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- part vi -
singapore is not entirely to blame for its screwed-up implementation of meritocracy, simply because the latter is an impossible concept, even in principle. in fact, the word ‘meritocracy’ was coined in a satirical vein, a nuance apparently not picked up on ever since the word was first published and had been bothering its inventor until his death in 2002.
i assume that most of you have yet to become familiar with the venerable lord michael young of dartington, the very man who coined the word ‘meritocracy’. for those of you loyal readers who have yet to read sir michael young’s book the rise of the meritocracy, written in 1958, i highly recommend that you do. last i checked, the national library had a single copy in reserve, which you may borrow for a mere s$0.50.
oh, the irony, that a concept fundamentally enshrined in our very existence be so poorly documented! but the dystopian picture that it paints is a society where iq tests become the sole arbiter of a person’s worth, and replace the british class structure as the new way to differentiate society. social benefits become dependent on one’s intelligence (the new social class). the elite nouveau, i.e. the meritocrats, develop a snootiness that they deserve all the trapping that society heaps upon them — the same society that they govern. simultaneously, the stupid are led to believe that they deserve to fail and deserve less than the smart. eventually, iq testing becomes more and more refined, resulting in testing and differentiation at earlier and earlier ages until it reaches its logical extreme of pre-natal testing and labeling. in 2033, the underclasses become sufficiently pissed off to incite a massive revolt against the meritocrats and britain slips into anarchy.
the parallel with contemporary singapore is chilling, even just in its synopsis. and consider that it was written almost fifty years ago! if you found this spookily accurate, i guarantee that the full prophecy will keep you up for nights on end.
this was a big issue in the uk in 2000, with a big debate over tonyblair’s use of the word ‘meritocracy’. notice the conspicuous absence of similar debate in singapore, where the concept of meritocracy as espoused by the ruling elite coincides neatly with the context of blair’s usage, and is arguably much more pervasive than in britain. even if you do not read any other article that i reference, you absolutely must read lord young’s letter to the guardian,
lamenting the misuse of his then neologism. it is so important that you hear it from the horse’s mouth that i will feign ignorance of copyright
laws and reproduce most of that article wholesale here:
I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general circulation… The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033. Much that was predicted has already come about. It is highly unlikely the prime minister has read the book, but he has caught on to the word without realising the dangers of what he is advocating.
Underpinning my argument was a non-controversial historical analysis of what had been happening to society [... since ...] schooling was made compulsory and competitive entry to the civil service became the rule. Until that time status was generally ascribed by birth. But irrespective of people’s birth, status has gradually become more achievable. It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.
Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education. A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education’s narrow band of values. With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before. The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.
The more controversial prediction and the warning followed from the historical analysis. I expected that the poor and the disadvantaged would be done down, and in fact they have been. If branded at school they are more vulnerable for later unemployment. They can easily become demoralised by being looked down on so woundingly by people who have done well for themselves. It is hard indeed in a society that makes so much of merit to be judged as having none. No underclass has ever been left as morally naked as that.
They have been deprived by educational selection of many of those who would have been their natural leaders, the able spokesmen and spokeswomen from the working class who continued to identify with the class from which they came. Their leaders were a standing opposition to the rich and the powerful in the never-ending competition in parliament and industry between the haves and the have-nots.
With the coming of the meritocracy, the now leaderless masses were partially disfranchised; as time has gone by, more and more of them have been disengaged, and disaffected to the extent of not even bothering to vote. They no longer have their own people to represent them. [...]
In the new social environment, the rich and the powerful have been doing mighty well for themselves. They have been freed from the old kinds of criticism from people who had to be listened to. This once helped keep them in check - it has been the opposite under the Blair government. The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.
They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side. So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited. Salaries and fees have shot up. Generous share option schemes have proliferated. Top bonuses and golden handshakes have multiplied. As a result, general inequality has been becoming more grievous with every year that passes, and without a bleat from the leaders of the party who once spoke up so trenchantly and characteristically for greater equality. [...]
There was also a prediction in the book that wholesale educational selection would be reintroduced, going further even than what we have already. My imaginary author, an ardent apostle of meritocracy, said shortly before the revolution, that “No longer is it so necessary to debase standards by attempting to extend a higher civilisation to the children of the lower classes”.
At least the fullness of that can still be avoided. I hope.
and in the context of contemporary singapore, it is painfully ironic that on some english website carrying a discussion of the word meritocracy, the author states:
“the problem with it, of course, was that mr young used the wrong word as the basis of his creation. merit, as usually understood, has little to do with educational achievement as such.”
obviously the author has no inkling how false his statement is to us. i had a thought a few years ago, when i was still in jc, about how singapore might just be passing its best and brightest over. how? because some of them are not academically inclined, but may be incredibly talented at other things, skills that are not measured by standard examinations.
the one i decided to voice out turned out to be juggling, which juggleress has turned into a pretty profitable (and immensely enjoyable, i would imagine) freelance act. i asked myself (and a bunch of unsuspecting friends): how should we go about discovering such hidden talents? should we go around and test for absolutely everything? how do we quantify an ability to cook? or comfort lost souls? or juggle? (i suppose you could do this pe-style, and add more and more items to juggle until people just lost control…)
then i came across another michael young document: a transcript of a
speech entitled equality and public service delivered to the sociology section of the british association for the advancement of science on september 11, 2000. again, i will let the horse speak for itself:
Ethics [... comes] from how people report their feelings about themselves. Ethics are about other people and how well or ill you behave towards them and they to you and to each other. Your unease can be added to if you think of other people, especially towards the bottom of the heap…
So neglect at the bottom is combined with indulgence at the top – but with the suggestion that the indulgent may also be discontented, or at best no better off in the way they feel about themselves. At a deep level, something has gone awry, no doubt for many reasons. Perhaps one is that wealthier people in wealthy countries like ours are beginning to question whether wealth has much value apart from monetary. Perhaps some satiation is setting in; perhaps enough will be enough.
If it happens, there could be less resistance to higher taxes and a surplus left over for the poor at home, and even more for the poor overseas who are still in grim and absolute poverty. In the century ahead, we may get near the point where advanced society turns in a new direction.
If it happened it would be the biggest watershed since the first Industrial Revolution: people would no longer be cursed by being unequal but prized for their differences from one another. Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupations and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there would be no overall inequalities of the sort we have got used to. Who would be able to say that the scientist was superior to the porter with admirable qualities as a father, the civil servant to the lorry-driver with unusual skills at growing roses?
A pluralistic society would also be a tolerant society, in which individual differences were actively encouraged as well as passively tolerated, in which full meaning was at last given to the dignity of man. Every human being would then have equal opportunity, not to rise up in the world in the light of any mathematical measure pervading the whole society but to develop his or her own special capacities for leading a full life which is also a noble life led for the benefit of others as well as the self.
michael young espouses an ideal that we would all do well to work toward. the only question, is how.
so now that my rant is finally done, you may ask: why pick on singapore?
because singapore has taken the principle of meritocracy to the extreme of a social more, one that is enshrined as one of the country’s core values.
because examinations have long been the means of judging one’s worth in this ex-british colony.
because the concept meritocracy is supposedly steeped in a thousand-year-old tradition supposedly carried down by the immigrant chinese majority from the imperial service examinations of mainland china.
because clinging to this false ideal explains many dysfunctional aspects of singaporean society without even trying. because practically all of us have been burnt by the unforgiving system that is the manifestation of the horrible concept at some point in time.
because many of us then turn against our society for some superficial reason but are oblivious to the undercurrents that we are struggling so hard against.
because i care, and if you are reading this, you probably do, too.
because i don’t know what can we do about it, and it worries me greatly.
- end of part vi -
ok, that’s all i had in mind during yesterday’s biochemistry class. all 6,324 words’ worth, for your singular reading pleasure. (if you include lord young’s words, 7,542 words.) and to my peers in singapore, think, and think hard, together, if she is to have any future at all worth talking about.