Log24

From the Feast of St. Nicholas, 2018 —

♫  "You're gonna need an ocean . . . ."

The New York Times  online opinion today—

"Merit has been traditionally equated with intelligence, industriousness, educational attainment, creativity and competency. In a meritocracy, formal qualifications provide opportunity, position is no longer ascribed by birth, and rewards flow to those who excel.

The rise of meritocratic competition as the preeminent means of social stratification in America has been hailed as a welcome advance because it replaced a society dominated by an upper class dependent on inherited wealth and status. The transition to meritocracy has, however, had unintended consequences. In the business sector, particularly, other less benign qualities emerge as essential to meritocratic success: aggressiveness, ruthlessness, dominance-seeking, victimizing behavior, acquisitiveness and the disciplined pursuit of self-interest." 

— Journalism professor Thomas B. Edsall discussing remarks last December by Mitt Romney

Note the subtle shift here from "merit" to "meritocracy." Romney used the former word, not the latter.

Note also this sentence, aimed particularly at meritocratic New York Times  readers—

"In a meritocracy, formal qualifications provide opportunity… and rewards flow to those who excel."

Edsall lies. In a meritocracy, rewards flow to those who rubber-stamp "formal qualifications." See particularly Walter Kirn on meritocracy.

Edsall is pandering to Times  readers. Romney was pandering to a different group—

Or: Being There

(A sequel to last night's Lyric Intelligence )

William Deresiewicz reviews Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel Player Piano :

The novel’s prescience is chilling. Six years before the left-wing English
sociologist Michael Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy ,
a dystopian satire that coined that now-ubiquitous final word,
Vonnegut was already there.

Related material:

Intelligence Test , Gombrich,  and, more generally, Stupidity.

"And when I think about the values
that are important to me today,
I think first about meritocracy."

— Robert Diamond, Colby College '73, now
Chair of the Colby College Board of Trustees, in a
commencement address on Sunday, May 25, 2008

Other remarks on that Sunday —

• "Caught up in circles…"
• Wechsler Cubes
• Hall of Mirrors
• Sermon

Related material from Colby—

See also an MAA report on Gouvea from June 6, 2012.

"I think there's a lot of meritocracy, a lot of blue-ribbon talk here."

– Chris Matthews on President Obama's Tuesday night speech

And here…

Detail from cover of current New Yorker
in Thursday afternoon's Log24 post

Related material:

See also "Saramago" in this journal
as well as his Nobel Prize lecture.

… and week, year, decade, century…

"I think there's a lot of meritocracy, a lot of blue-ribbon talk here."

— Chris Matthews, at 5:00 of 6:44 minutes in a YouTube video of an MSNBC discussion at the news blog ArlingtonCardinal.com Wednesday morning. The post containing the video was headlined "Word of the Day: Meritocracy."

"There is a growing meme that Mr. Obama is too impressed by credentialism, by the meritocracy, by those who hold forth in the faculty lounge, and too strongly identifies with them."

— Peggy Noonan in today's Wall Street Journal

Some background—

Lost in the Meritocracy:
The Undereducation of an Overachiever
by Walter Kirn, 224 pp. Doubleday, 2009

and the review by Laura Miller in the Sunday,
May 24, 2009, New York Times Book Review.

See also Log24 on this date three years ago—
a post on Harvard, Bunker Hill Community College,
and the Mystic River area in between.

Go Tigers!

Recommended reading for the
Princeton Evangelical Fellowship (PEF):

Walter Kirn, Lost in the Meritocracy,
Atlantic Monthly Jan.-Feb. 2005

The PEF in action:

"Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness."

— T. S. Eliot