Tom Walker wrote:
>
> At 10:35 AM 06/29/01 -0700, Franklin Wayne Poley wrote:
>
> >What happens to the meritocracy if/when we find ourselves in an era of
> >total automation and "the end of work" as Rifkin phrases it?
> >FWP
I believe one of the fundamental theorems of Industrial Sociology
is that, as the automation of a production process approaches
100%, the downtime of the assembly line approaches 100% too.
The very most efficient production processes utilize advanced
technology which is subject to control
at all levels by skilled, motivated persons -- "transparent" processes where
persons don't generally need to work hard, but in which
the persons can easily intervene at every point at every level
when they see reason for "manual override".
[snip]
> I was musing over an even more awkward
> neologism than meritocracy -- how about the "meritolottocracy" (my
> dictionary gives the etymology of lottery, *loterij*, as Dutch).
Sounds good to me:
Buy your Lottery tickers at your local Merrit convenience store!
[snip]
> Decisions are made not on *the merits of the case* but with respect to the
> presumed merit of the persons affected by the decisions and/or entrusted
> with making the decisions. In turn, that presumed merit is predicated on the
> persons' inflated/devalued credentials and on their success in the lottery
> in which those credentials have entered them. Instead of having to endure
> plain old garden variety corruption and cronyism, we now have an equally
> corrupt hybrid system of cronyism based on credentials and conceitedness.
The visible maw and paw of privilege passing itself on, and which
can be pinpointed by the less fortunate ("Hitler/Stalin did it to me!")
is replaced by the invisible hand which enables privilege to
argue that it is persecuted too ("If we didn't lay you off the whole
company would have to go out of business and then none of
your colleagues will have an income.!"), so that nobody is
to blame. Remember what Odysseus answered the Cyclops after
he had poked out the Cyclops's eye and the Cyclops asked who did it?
Odysseus answered: "The invisible hand of the new global economy did it!"
(AKA "Nemo")
[snip]
> In short research supports what the Ministry does. It also supports what the
> Ministry doesn't do. It also doesn't support what the Ministry does. And
> let's not forget that the funding of research is itself biased by the uses
> to which funders wish to put the results of the research.
[snip]
If all persons were "peers in the space of speech and action" instead of
some being rulers/managers and others being governed/managed, then
the sciences of management would simply not exist, because
they would not be applicable to anything. This would include
much of psychology, sociology, economics, etc. Just like we don't
have slave-ology, because there are no slaveholders to need its
findings.
[snip]
> Somehow, the labour market activity of the lowly is an abiding concern for
> the privileged. The labour market activity of the *privileged* is, however,
> simply a "fact of life" -- the reward of merit, we might imagine -- that
> belongs behind a veil of discretion.
This is very important. The "social sciences" are mostly pseudo-empirical
disciplines which study
human beings as objects of human action (AKA "management decision" and
"legislation"). The reflective social sciences which would study the
"peer space of speech and action" are not so much developed. I believe
it is important to note that real democracy and socialism
at least approximately exist in our society -- among the privileged,
at the level where they deal with each other through human relations
and not thru the cash nexis.
We see an archetype for such truly human relations of mutual respect and
their limitation in the biblical story of Job. G-d and Satan
related to each other as peers. They related to Job as the
object of their mutual empirical-sociological research praxis.
The way they treated Job was like Galileo treated
billiard balls: Exert an impetus on the object
and try to predict how it will react. But G-d's relation
with Satan was *dialogical* -- neither was an object for the
other, but both shared a conversational intersubjective
space in which their [mutual] object was the specimen lump of
animate material stuff labeled: "Job".
The problem is not so much to take away from the privileged as to
eliminate the exclusion of the non-privileged, for what
merit would equality have if one did not have good things to
share with one's peers? It would be like the equality of
officers and enlisted men on a sunk submarine.
Measure IQs twice, cut headcount once.
(--apocryphal social engineering axiom)
+\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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