From Tucker Carlson, profiled by McKay Coppins.
“Look, it’s really simple,” Carlson says. “The SAT 50 years ago pulled a lot of smart people out of every little town in America and funneled them into a small number of elite institutions, where they married each other, had kids, and moved to an even smaller number of elite neighborhoods. We created the most effective meritocracy ever.”
“But the problem with the meritocracy,” he continues, is that it “leeches all the empathy out of your society … The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid—I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.”
Of course, assortive mating is only one of the four forces. But he is talking about it as a political force, not as an economic force.
My concern is that we are losing the ability to discuss ideas with people who disagree. Instead, we keep getting better and better at closing the minds of people on our side.
All the stuff our non-ruling class also is. It wasn’t just elites running over them but their allowing elites to run over them. Blaming the poor for their poverty, the unemployed for their unemployment, the ill for their illness, minorities for prejudice, victims for violence, isn’t empathetic but it is hardly confined to the elite. There is plenty of blame to pass around. It only works though as long as you aren’t one of those. Then it obviously becomes someone else’s fault. I would ask what fault is yours?
The problem with a meritocracy is that it contains the seeds of its own destruction. Those who win in the first round pass along advantages to their children in the form of higher education and inherited wealth, i.e., “wealth condensation”, the idea that new wealth attaches to old wealth. Then you have a plutocracy.
There is nothing wrong with inequality, it is the sign of a meritocracy. What we don’t want is ingrained inequality, the kind that persists from generation to generation. For that reason, we should redistribute wealth in such a way that provides an equality of opportunity. Free post-secondary education is an example of that.
“My concern is that we are losing the ability to discuss ideas with people who disagree. Instead, we keep getting better and better at closing the minds of people on our side.”
Looking at US history, I don’t see much of an ability to discuss ideas with people who disagree, except for a few decades after WWII. The decentralized nature of the American system combined with high labour mobility made both debate and compromise unnecessary. WWII increased federal power and national unity. The political troubles of the last few decades have been caused by political centralization without the appropriate level of cultural cohesiveness. Despite my distaste for Trump, I think losing all federal levels of power is necessary for Democrats to rediscover the virtues of federalism.
On the bright side, most of the disagreements seem very complicated. The difference between defeating ISIS and not may be small. Not to mention nobody knows how ti do it. We spent more lives in Iraq and Afghanistan (not counting foreigners) than the likely consequences had we done nothing.
There is a lot of various flavors of narcissism out there now. With little hand-held mirrors ( celllphones) everywhere, it is no wonder.
The disagreements are not small, but they generally reduce to some Sophomoric Large Issue, the sort adult-people used to agree to disagree about. But you have to *practice” reasoned disagreement. It takes *work*. People used to be more cautious abut their own beliefs. But that also takes effort; it’s easier to just sort into piles of belief-as-mood-affiliation and coast.
The problem is that most/many organizations that use any sort of quality metrics collect unqualified satisfaction data. You will tend to be less satisfied if you have to deal with One Of Those People.
There’s just something about the Internet – I see postings on tech fora, which should be highly meritocratic and reasonable, where people immediately attack the question, using up a lot more bandwidth to not-answer than to answer. On StackOverflow, the majority of questions are met with “This is inappropriate.”
“My concern is that we are losing the ability to discuss ideas with people who disagree. Instead, we keep getting better and better at closing the minds of people on our side.”
Maybe because we have less in common. Only people with lots of similarities and a sense of shared interest can constructively disagree.
There was a C.S. Lewis essay one time on the topic of “Why I am not a Pacifist.” Most of the essay goes by before he even discusses pacifism, first he sets up his entire concept of what logic and argument are step by step.
At one point in the essay he points out that while you can debate facts, authority, logic chains, etc, ultimately any argument has to be strung together by certain common moral intuitions. If the other party does not share these intuitions, you can’t have an argument. He recommends you don’t even bother trying argument if that’s where you end up.