Meritocracy as government

FROM A DISTANCE

By Carmen N. Pedrosa

Meritocracy is a word often bandied around as a way to get the right people in government. To all who marvel at Singapore’s success, Lee Kuan Yew says “because it is a meritocracy.”

It is especially felt acutely in the Philippines at this time. We have the wrong people leading our country. But it was inevitable because of our social structure, our politics and our system of governance.
How many times have concerned Filipinos said that if only we had better leaders we might be a better country than we are. And I do not mean just to be wealthy or have a high GDP or a triple A rating from credit agencies. We know how these yardsticks of what a country should be are sometimes the very instruments of failure and injustice.

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But it isn’t only in the Philippines that there is dissatisfaction about governance. We know that it is about systems, not just because countries are either presidential, parliamentary or monarchy or its modern versions of dictatorship or democratic or communist or socialist. All are susceptible to graft and decay. Still, because we have ideas of how societies should be organized to mitigate defects, it is always useful to hear what other people think.

Having read Lee KuanYew say that Singapore was built through meritocracy and aware of the Philippines’ recent fiasco of how a clueless president assigned a clueless senator ex-rebel soldier to back channel our problem with China has made me think. Could we apply meritocracy in a society like the Philippines? The way things are, the answer is no, we can’t. We are bedeviled by a system that gave birth to attitudes inimical to good governance. It is designed towards being led by the incompetent.

I found some of my thoughts echoed by a group that have put their ideas on meritocracy on paper. With both democracy and communism leading us to dead ends, the idea of meritocracy becomes attractive.

Indeed proponents see it as the coming big idea in a changing world.

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Here are some of the thoughts they share from the website:http://rondetafelbeleid.nl/meritocracy.

“Some political commentators have written in favor of meritocracy and suggested that this should be the big idea that our political leaders rally around. These commentators are right, but not in the way they think. This is indeed the time for meritocracy, but there’s one straightforward reason why democratic politicians would be mad to accept the challenge. Quite simply, meritocracy and democracy are incompatible.”

We have been so used to mindlessly extolling the virtues of democracy that we have failed to tackle its defects.

“Meritocracy is just a new way of saying a very old word: aristocracy — rule by the ‘best’. If democratic politicians were not the best individuals to be running our country — i.e. those most deserving by virtue of their talents — what right would they have to lead us in a meritocratic environment? As soon as the meritocratic genie is released from its bottle, the legitimacy of democracy itself is called into question.

The democratic voting system — a system in which the only qualification required is that you should have achieved the astounding feat of surviving in this world for at least 18 years — is, and never has been, consistent with any principle of merit. If it were, voters would have to pass exams to demonstrate their merit before being allowed to participate in elections. It’s meritocracy’s revolutionary challenge to democracy that should become the focus of political debate.

And why shouldn’t democracy be forced to justify itself? As disillusionment with politicians grows inexorably, hasn’t the time come to try something new? Is it possible to construct an entirely new political system based not on democracy but on meritocracy?

We are bombarded with so much rhetoric promoting the virtues of democracy that people have been brainwashed into thinking there’s no alternative. Apart from extremist fringe parties, no one spends any time considering a radical reshaping of our political institutions. Yet through history few intellectuals have spoken supportively of democracy and most have been openly contemptuous of it.”

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“The American journalist H. L. Mencken said in 1916, ‘Democracy is a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.’ One of his alternative definitions was: ‘Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.’ He considered democracy actively hostile to free thinking: ‘Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid set of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalise the free play of ideas.’

In this regard, democracy has surely succeeded in its aim — there is little discussion in modern intellectual circles of replacing democracy. That said, a book has just appeared that accuses voters in democracies of being irrational. The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (2007) by Professor Brian Caplan advocates that a nation’s economic decisions should be taken by councils of economists insulated from the vagaries of democracy.

There are two central problems with democracy. The first is that the electorate, by and large, are grotesquely ill-informed about the issues upon which they are voting. They are usually guided by emotive arguments, glib sound bites and crude, scare-mongering propaganda. A careful, considered analysis of complex issues never occurs. If I were to ask a typical voter to write a four-page essay on the pros and cons of joining the Euro, or on any other significant issue for that matter, they wouldn’t have a clue. In other words, democracy, at heart, is government by emotion rather than reason, which is why it’s associated with so much ineptitude.

The second problem is that democracy constantly provides the proof of its own inadequacy. Mencken says, ‘Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right.’ If a democratic government were competent, what would be the point of an opposition? We are supposed to regard the opposition as keeping the government on its toes, but the opposition’s unending carping simply erodes confidence in both the government and democratic institutions in general.”

CNP: This article is written to invite thought and debate. Indeed, it may take another generation to take it on but it can be a legacy from this generation by spreading it as an alternative idea to democracy.