On meritocracy and blank slates

We start by acknowledging the opposition to the blank slate hypothesis.

It is established that social outcomes are determined by so-called inherent traits. Both the words “inherent” and “traits” have a certain genetic ring, but in this frame, lets agree instead that they relate to those inescapable qualities that describe our existence. Yes, that encompasses our genetic inheritance. But it also includes our social and environmental inheritance: essentially everything that affects us but which we cannot control.

In his book of the same name, Steven Pinker debunked the notion of the blank slate. And now, anyone trying to claim that humans emerge blinking into the world with exactly the same opportunities for prosperity or squalor would be laughed out of the room.

The practice of clinical medicine offers one of the best vantages to observe this reality. Doctors encounter on a daily basis the harsh injustices that fate delivers. A child born blind. A young mother ravaged by cancer. The intractable pain of aging. The merest slip of a blade that extinguishes existence. None of these are conducive to economic success. And at its most stark, we observe the truth that a single wrong turn, genetically, during the very first moments of conception, can spell certain doom for the organism before it is even a “concept” in its mother’s eye.

The blank slate is fully dispensed with in modern philosophies of science, in favour of a granular determinism. Free will itself is denied. The expanse of human behaviour, from the heights of sporting prowess to the swamps of mass murder, are fully explicable. We may not have the tools to explain them, yet. But they are explicable.

And this ideology is implicit in the broader sociopolitical trends we observe. It is not coherent, say, to be “anti-Islam” unless you consider religious doctrine as able to manipulate the behaviour of those who make contact with it. If a fully autonomous homunculus sits at the cockpit of each of our minds and was able to objectively weigh the virtues and vices of each idea that came across its desk, then it would be more coherent to the hate the person rather than the idea. To be “anti-woke” implies that wokery infects helpless minds that cannot resist (the so-called “mind-virus”) and so it is the doctrine that must be attacked rather than the fools who have adopted it.

We hold these truths as self-evident but generally without acknowledgement. And yet in the economic domain, at the moment when our intuitions have some practical consequence, we swerve irrationally away. Suddenly we are blind to fate, determinism and randomness, and cleave instead to claims of “merit”.

The meritocrat embraces blank slate ideology or else is totally blind to social injustice. He assumes, either, that each man or woman is born with an equal degree of control over their economic future and therefore it is justified to allocate resources to those who (somehow) choose to be better; or he simply does not care whether the allocation is unjust.

This seems to be a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the social and political discourse. On the one hand, our scientists and philosophers reveal the bleakness of determinism. On the other, our politicians and economic elites extoll meritocracy as the framework for our social advancement.

Abandoning the myth of merit strikes fear into contemporary hearts. For the wealthy, whose guilt is assuaged by the consolation that their gains are hard-earned and therefore deserved, it would threaten to dismantle their entire worldview. (A moment’s analysis reveals that very few fortunes are either hard-earned or deserved, even under the assumptions of meritocracy).

But like free will, meritocracy is an illusion. To take credit for vast wealth implies the inverse: that poverty is also deserved, an abominable idea.

Postscript

The so-called mainstream media deliver a well-worn script that conforms to (so-called) establishment values. In parallel they invariably caricature those who do not conform, for instance, labelling as racists those who support Nigel Farage.

Occasionally, representatives of the media encounter a civilian who actually lives up to the caricature (they actually sound racist and plan to vote for Nigel Farage). Intriguingly, the media representative is invariably shocked! They cannot fathom the depths to which someone must sink in order to hold such opinions. And yet they have spent much of their time, accusing their opponents of holding such views.

It seems therefore, that the mainstream media makes the accusation, without actually believing it to be true. When they then meet a real-life example in the wild, their brain cannot compute the stark reality.