Tom Walker wrote:
>
> Down with meritocracy
>
[snip]
All "ocracies" are instances of strong social polarization,
with a few holders of power and many propping them up (or else!).
Perhaps global hyperpopulation has foreclosed the
possibility of truly human society, i.e., "peer space of speech and
action" in which "the government of people is replaced by the
administration of things" (Hannah Arendt + Marx).
I think we are largely victimized by falsifying dichotomies,
revolving around the "selfish" vs "altruistic" axis.
Why should anybody be altruistic, if that means ripping out
your own body organs to give life to people who don't
give a sh-t about you and being left to rot in the street? (Isn't that
the ideal of Parento-Christian virtue even if Mother Theresa didn't
quite attain it?).
Similarly, selfishness is really repulsive: The individual trying to
ingest the whole universe and especially every other human being.
(I've seen a couple of these who earned their
paychecks by being professional emissaries for
human freedom and creativity!)
Well, that dichotomy which makes
life not worth living was
the ideological "surround" in which, like a
fish in water polluted by PCBs, I was childreared in,
and I had no idea there was any alternative, so I chose to be
unhappily relatively selfish instead of giving away my soul to the
holier-than-thou's who didn't so much want it as
simply presume they merited it.
But there *is* an alternative: Activities that benefit me and
benefit others. Like it or not, if you have a serious disease,
you have the choice of either dealing with a highly specialized
doctor or rotting. Like it or not, that physician will
probably be better able to treat you if he lives in
a nice house, eats nice food, drinks nice wine and
drives a BMW than if he can't sleep at night due to rats
chewing on his toes. So there seems to me to be justification
for those who do a lot of good for humanity being treated
pretty nicely.
Is inventing a new hyper-junkfood *really* a greater intellectual
challenge for a PhD chemist than figuring out how to
modify a person's genetic makeup to cure a genetic disease like
diabetes? Is it really a greater intellectual
challenge for a computer nerd to invent a program to
prevent people from surfing the internet without watching
banner ads than to devise a really useful text comparison
function for MicroSoft Word (I used this function a couple
weeks ago, and it showed lots of false changes, etc. -- and this
is the best $50Bill[ion] Gates can do, so that should be
a real nerd challenge!!!). Etc.
A real meritocracy would probably reward the most
productive more than the less able -- Marx himself
said that "from each according to his abilities,
to each according to his work" would have to precede
"from each according to his abilities, to each according to
his needs". But part of merit is the merit of one's work,
and it's not rocket science to figure out that
housing the poor is more meritorious than
artificially raising electric rates in California.
--
I was about 40 years old, when a psychotherapist who
had been raised in a highly cultured upper middle
class assimilated jewish family (curiously, geographically
close to, but ideologically in a different ontological realm from
where I lived!) -- when this psychotherapist said to me
in response to my ranting about selfishness and
altruism, that: "In my family when I was growing up, it was just
obvious that you found things to do that you
found appealing and that also helped others." Or,
as she more pointedly put it:
To be a good therapist [read: to help others effectively],
you need to be well-paid and well-laid.
In today's post-modern world, this is one
example of "both-and" rather than "either-or" which
might be *constructive* (if I may use a
non-POMO word!).
"Yours in discourse...."
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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