| Title | When the Term Meritocracy was Coined in 1958, it was in a Dystopian Satire | |
| Date | Saturday June 18 2016, @06:20AM | |
| Author | n1 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the in-my-day-we-called-it-social-darwinism dept. | ||
When Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined the term meritocracy in 1958, it was in a dystopian satire. At the time, the world he imagined, in which intelligence fully determined who thrived and who languished, was understood to be predatory, pathological, far-fetched.
Today, however, we’ve almost finished installing such a system, and we have embraced the idea of a meritocracy with few reservations, even treating it as virtuous. That can’t be right. Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.
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