Thursday, April 16, 2020
One aspect of "Equality of Opportunity" and "meritocracy" is that it creates a *need* for people to prove that they have benefitted from it. Everybody likes a nice rags-to-riches story, about the deserving, hard-working guy or girl who made it. For example, it may have benefitted Pete Buttigieg, as told by Nathan J. Robinson:
Current Affairs article
QUOTE: "To give a bit of color to the “from elite school boyhood to elite school undergraduate years” story, Buttigieg portrays himself as an Indiana hayseed for whom the bustling metropolis of Cambridge, MA was an alien world. So, even though he grew up on the campus of a top private university 90 minutes from Chicago, the Boston subway amazed him. “My face would[…] have stood out amid the grumpy Bostonians, betraying the fact that I was as exhilarated by the idea of being in a ‘big’ city as I was by the new marvels of college life.” He claims to have always found something “distant and even intimidating about the imagery” of being a student. His dorm was a “wonder” because it had exposed brick, “a style I’d only ever seen in fashionable restaurants and occasionally on television.” In a ludicrous passage, he suggests that he found the idea of a clock on a bank a wondrous novelty: “Looking up overhead, I could note the time on a lighted display over the Cambridge Savings Bank building. I felt that telling the time by reading it off a building, instead of a watch, affirmed that I was now in a bustling place of consequence.” Uh, you can tell time off a building on the Notre Dame campus, too, albeit in analog form—clock towers are not a unique innovation of the 21st century megalopolis. (I enjoy reading these “simple country boy unfamiliar with urban ways” sentences in the voice of Stinky Peterson from Hey! Arnold.) Calculated folksiness runs through the whole book. On the cover he is literally in the process of rolling up his sleeves, his collar blue, in front of a Main Street Shopfront. There is a smattering of exaggerated Hoosierism on many a page: “You can read the progress of the campaign calendar by the condition of the corn.”"
The formula is: person X pitches themselves as starting out without privilege -- either they are poor, or part of an ethnic minority, or female, or gay, or handicapped, or autistic, or have a learning disability, etc. -- then applies themself to overcome all the challenges, and eventually becomes a Harvard graduate. Throw in a few words like "golden" and "electric", and you've got an award-winning essay.
First of all, there's the question of whether the "without privilege" is even true. But assuming that it is, you can read this story in a completely different way: person X may have had certain obstacles that stood in the way, but they had the right genes and brain structure; so developed the fearsome grit / determination and conscientiousness to sail right past them. That is actually another kind of privilege -- a gift from nature, that not everyone has. Anybody could have done what they did, if only they were endowed with those genes (and had a little bit of luck).
"But you can knock every kind of accomplishment down with that kind of thinking. Are you saying there is no free will? Surely you're not suggesting we give in to fatalism!", I hear you saying. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people call me out for promoting "fatalism". The quick answer is: absolutely. However, you don't have to keep it in mind at all times. It's like death -- it's important to know that it is there, but not healthy to dwell on. A little fatalism, now and then, quells arrogance and self-righteousness. And I think that is a good thing.