SO DEFINE "MERITOCRACY"

My high school class of 1957 pushed hard on the idea of meritocracy — that the talented and hard-working can rise to the top and SHOULD do that, but always remembering that their privilege is accompanied by responsibility for everyone else.  When I got to Browning, MT. as a teacher, which was NOT the top — in fact, was considered so low class that it was hard to hire teachers — I had not forsaken being best or bright, but had “re-framed” what that meant.  I was after adventure, artistic quality, and devotion.  I ignored money.

This change was not just due to college -- which was mostly in theatre where there are no small parts, only small actors, and everyone works for a common goal.  But also due to parents whose target was not to get rich or to climb a hierarchy, but humbly to accept life as it came without taking unnecessary chances.  They came from farms, not offices. 

Longer PBS interview of Daniel Markovits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLEvJUNfyBY

Markovitz “authored "The Meritocracy Trap" (2019), [which] places meritocracy at the centre of rising economic inequality and social and political dysfunction. The book takes up the law, economics, and politics of human capital to identify the mechanisms through which meritocracy breeds inequality and to expose the burdens that meritocratic inequality imposes on all who fall within meritocracy’s orbit.”  (Wiki)

Markovitz ignores a number of things.  One is that there are always more systems than the dominant capitalism that has made empty cynical shells of so many people who control our country.  There have always been “bohemians” or “hippies” or eccentrics who connected with each other in systems, with or without media.  Adventurers, explorers, those who went out to the edges looking for the unknown would endanger the wealth that was their own bodies.  

Most didn’t pay for their adventures but depended on the largess of sponsors, taking advantage of accumulated money of others.  This is also true of those inspired by charity or major aesthetic accomplishments, using the advantages of concentrated money by exchanging for it a different kind of exceptionalism — that of the superior people in terms of prestige and high tastes.  I'm not even talking about crime. 

One of the major mistakes of the Soviet system as seen from the outside is their failure to appreciate these systems.  The country seems a nation of babushkas, heads down, diligently doing minor work while a few militaristic bullies set the rules for everyone else.  This is what Trump admires.

One of the major mistakes of the USA has been poor education for BOTH the middle class and the disadvantaged.  This begins with the poor education of teachers, who often see ed classes in state schools as Mickey Mouse courses for athletes busy smashing their heads together.  The dominance of sports has seriously damaged education IMHO.  Coaches rule and become superintendents.

This vid is a quickie from an entirely different area, those offices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn2pCNUCpzs

In terms of small businesses, office jobs, and even techie jobs, a major deficit in my experience has been management skills.  Someone told me early in my short “career” as clergy that I would never make money unless I converted my job into management of the congregation’s and the denomination’s organization.  Such jobs did exist but they had nothing to do with my preparation for ministry.  They require really big churches, which are scarce in the UU context because it is a small denomination.

Also, it would have to be urban, a place highly populated with specialized jobs that demand education.  This is structural as well as overtly hierarchical.  Even in the secular City of Portland some managers were so overwhelmed by their jobs that they could not design systems that could keep up, even for something simple like nuisance abatement, which required going into the field to see what was there.  It could not be computerized.

We need a lot more of the kind of training described by this management blog.  It’s not easy when the work arrives unpredictably on its own schedule.  But even students and householders need to think this way.

https://monday.com/blog/product/social-media-plan-templates/?utm_source=mb&utm_campaign=pocketlp.

Another factor that is neglected by this capitalist Yalie concept of merit will not be popular.  It is that of reputation.  Even in a city institution, word gets around about who shows up, who "gets it", and who is lost in the perks of long alcoholic lunches.  On a rez or in a small town, much depends on the reputation of a whole family for honor, dependability, and hard work.  If someone is an exception, they stand out and get discussed; if their reputation is bad or erratic, often passed over.

Yalies think of money and tenure as the only measure of hierarchy.  Out here on the prairie we have another marker for privilege which is about labor — it’s very old, the diff between those who own land and sit somewhere making marks on paper and those who are out in the weather digging, planting and harvesting.  

Children of men on farms who were broken down in old age by hard work, dusty breathing, and risky machines have been urged by their fathers to choose work that is indoors, safe, and clean.  This is considered the reward of merit.  Presumably it escapes the vicissitudes of the climate and the market.  But expert manual labor also pays well, like plumbers.  People don't hold back money from them if they’re drowning.  Still, everyone believes that more education will be rewarded with less strenuous work.  Only sports deserve effort because it is not considered labor.  The backside of this is contempt for learning because it was hard and not useful, often irrelevant to the public mind.

My own reputation as an “intellectual” is hindered by the reputation of Bob Scriver, sculptor judged by income and judge involved in many emotional issues.  It’s hard for people here to separate me from him.  There are a few advantages but no money.  In terms of my major occupation of ministry, I’m too anchored to rural places — NOT environmental issues — to deserve attention.  UU's consider themselves elite and urban. 

So far I’m not seen by publishers as saleable so writing is not a source of money.  Slowly I build another reputation as worth reading because of merit for future understanding.  This is a characteristic of “merit” that’s not necessarily recognized.  My goal is finding deeply shared human characteristics.  This interferes with those who maintain their “merit” by pulverizing everyone else.  But that takes effort -- labor -- and does not give progress to the whole.

If merit is defined by capitalism, I am a failure, not even attracting other people's money.  If merit is defined by other kinds of value, I'm priceless.

SEE SAW FOR WRITERS

The social media venture called medium.com has two ends — one end is paid professional but pretending not to be, and the other end is wannabes who are not writers and not paid.  What the platform amounts to is a kind of grinding stone that entices people into producing content.  The covert point is not to make them writers.  The point is for the site owners to have grist for their mill — timely prompts for their own writing or possibly commissions for their own friends.  What happens to the writing and the writers is entirely beside the point.  It’s just stuff to fill the publication: reader bait.  Readers equal advertising equals income.  The useful thing about people who can’t write is they that are always reading in an attempt to figure out why.  

Most of the stuff published is arguing about what good writing might be and since writing is about as definable as porn, the argument never ends.  One person feels that only a cry from the heart counts, the next one values only steely conformity to a formula.  The third is so incoherent no one knows what it’s supposed to be.  Mostly all this stuff reveals that there are a lot of people out there who are seduced by the “idea” of writing, who fall for the juju of religious revelation, Gutenberg, and a thousand scribbling wretches in garrets who became famous after death.  The flip end of this — the repelling pole — is parents.  An abiding and terrifying prospect is the gray conformity of the Fifties, mediocrity, the middle class.  One of the appeals of writing is that it represents rebellion, even as it tries to conform to standards of previous writing by yesterday’s rebels.

Go to http://www.storygrid.com/got-live-if-you-want-it/  where a couple of guys dialogue over writing, a specific manuscript.  The story doesn’t interest me, but I am sometimes interested in the dialogue about it.  It goes to a meta-level that’s pretty useful.  Here are some quotes from Pressfield:

“. . . You constantly are at the edge of what you know and what that means . . ., it’s constantly scary and you’re constantly trying things you don’t know how to do. When you’re trying things that you don’t know how to do, you fail.

“So you constantly are in a place where you’re doing something that you are going to fail at. . .

“The second thing [is] deliberate practice, and this is where so many writers don’t have this.”

“If you’re feeling good all the time about your creativity, you’re doing it wrong. You’re . . . not pushing yourself into unknown territory, you’re doing something that’s safe, you’re not getting true feedback on things and so you need to put yourself in a position where that you can get that bad feedback. Because that’s the only way we can learn.”

Many people who think they are writing from deep within their soul are merely doing self-talk, that chatter in one’s head that is meant to reassure but often echoes old critics from the past.  As in Method acting, it’s important to be able to access moments from the past in order to draw on them for details and also to grasp intense moments of emotion.  But then the artist leaves the reality and uses that information, possibly reconfigured in quite a different way.  Presumably, one is a more secure and informed person that readers will be delighted to learn from.

Of course, part of the delight will be about the skill of the sentence, the jolt of vocabulary, the seduction by images.  One editor said she only wanted to acquire “beautiful” writing but that’s childish greeting-card level aesthetics.  Candy-minded.  It will rot your morals.  How many haiku moments can a reader absorb in the pursuit of plot and meaning?

Obversely, recitations of suffering — esp. minor passive misery — can lose us all in despair.  Surgical analysis, microscopic dissection, and the strong medicine of social reform are called for.  Uproar, outrage, are often vital.  But terrible shocking language is an antibiotic that is losing its power out of overuse.  When little kids walk by trailing Anglo-Saxon four-letter words, the epithets have been diluted beyond usefulness.  

Nevertheless, scientific and anatomical metaphors hold their power.  Consult Lakoff and his friends for an array of comparisons and reminders that come from close observation and causal relationships noted in those little journals writer-wannabes use in coffee houses.  I shouldn’t make fun.  It worked for Thoreau.  It’s more natural history than data-grid, but I like that.

Something inevitable but not always comfortable governs writing, so that most readers can deduce the outline of who the writer really is, even what sort of child is down at the center, despite all attempts as assuming a role, a disguise for the arsonist, the assassin, the cannibal we all are in the right circumstances.  Writing cannot help being self-revelation.

No matter how clever a fabulist a writer may be, to turn away from the shifting reality of other people on many levels is to ignore the powerful shaping of time and place.  Observers have noted that some writers can present the world they know best from an outpost where distance gives them a bit of clarity, like writing about America from England.  Maybe even a yearning for situations that were toxic and dismaying at the time, because toxins can cause extravagant drug visions and dismay can be the motor of change.  Well, motive anyway.

Sometimes the narrator steals the story, lining out a point of view that engages the reader even if the purported speaker is an animal or a slow thinker or unreliable.  We’re always curious about other people we don’t really know: the wicked, the traumatized, the addicted, the ones whose brains work differently than ours.  Everyone is fascinated by Einstein’s brain, to the point of thin-slicing it as though it were deli-meat, as though its dead molecules would show how they interacted in life.

The other end of that phenomenon is people who think they already know how things work and refuse to consider any other point of view, becoming so vehement that they will taboo, stigmatize, and even criminalize to the extreme of capital punishment whatever doesn’t conform to their ideas.  This is as true of people outside of any culture as those who kowtow to the neighbors.  Writing that can reach those people is at the level of religious conversion.  It is what keeps the human world alive and growing.