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Pondering this meritocracy thing..

The one counterargument that I came up with the other day is that the UK government in the time when the sun never set on the british empire was definitely somewhat a meritocracy, with a attempt to educate the governors and military leaders to the extremes of their capability (sing “I am the very model of a modern major general” and think about what he’s saying)..

.. and they never saw the problems with colonialism, and it took them some time to see the problems with slavery. (Less time than it took US, to be sure, but still, a disturbing amount)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2021 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Pondering this meritocracy thing..”

  1. Firesong Says:
    January 9th, 2021 at 3:27 am

    I think that’s partly because it wasn’t *really* a meritocracy. Women were disadvantaged and not encouraged to enter the public sphere. Neither were minorities. It didn’t have the same variety of viewpoints that most of today’s nations do. A meritocracy would have a better chance now, if it was purely based on merit and not on race/gender at all. Of course, smart people of all creeds and colors can be surprisingly unempathetic. It would be tricky to get right. In theory, it would work — but in theory, so should a lot of government types that don’t turn out so well in practice.

  2. bunne Says:
    January 10th, 2021 at 4:18 am

    Civil society is an emergent construct.

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