Simon Cooke
posted 21 December 2005

George Steiner's lecture, 'On Meritocracy', was an erudite, entertaining, and combative critique of the social and intellectual currents prevailing in the era of late capitalism. But if you'd expected a discussion of the merits of meritocracy, you'd have been disappointed.

This was one of a series of lectures marking the launch of the Young Foundation, a social research organisation formed by the merger of the Institute of Community Studies and the Mutual Aid Centre to continue the legacy of the founder of both organisations, Michael Young. As the pioneer behind an astounding number of other bodies - including the Consumers' Association, Which?, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Open University - and as one of the main authors of the 1945 Labour Party manifesto, Young's influence runs, in the Foundation director, Geoff Mulgan's phrase, like 'a multiple seam through 20th century history'. A work for which Young is less well known, and to which the esteemed literary critic Professor George Steiner was invited to respond, is his dystopian novel, The Rise of Meritocracy, published in 1958, and with which its author is widely credited with coining the term 'meritocracy'.

The event organisers, then, might have expected their guest speaker to champion their guiding father's book; to explore, perhaps, Young's satirical intent in the term 'meritocracy' against its subsequent co-option as the unequivocally positive watchword of New Labour's social manifesto. (The central concern of the book is that educational meritocracy would create a new elite under the equation, Intelligence + Effort = Merit, leaving those without academic ability by the wayside. Much later in 2001, Young wrote a corrective commentary in the Guardian on New Labour's use of the term 'meritocracy' .) But Steiner took to the lectern with no intention of compromising his own meritocratic literary judgement, to the visible reddening of the chair's cheeks: 'there are books which shape you and shape their moment in history; and there are books which last, which are inexhaustibly open. It is dangerous to return to the former kind of book, and I regret having returned to Michael Young's.'

The vigorous lecture that followed concentrated less on the contents than the oracular oversights of Young's novel, combining a cursory critique of Young's 'absurd and mistaken' book - the predictions in which were 'almost all entirely wrong' - with Steiner's own diagnosis of the current (dystopian) state we - Britain and the world - are in.

As for the critique, Young's 'sour and sardonic' book chiefly strikes the reader as containing phrases quite 'unthinkable' today - the development of a 'paranoid underclass of inferior man'; the 'servant isolated in her meritorium': 'Imagine,' Steiner invited the audience, allowing little room for satire and with an incredulous shake of the head, 'anyone saying that today...'. Most gravely, however,Young failed to foresee the three central 'revolutions' that would characterise the late 20th century, posited through the course of the lecture as: the ascendancy of role of money; the omnipotence of the media; and the implications of scienctific and technological advances for the notion of self. And, by the way, it was an (unspecified) 'French 18th century philosophe' who coined the term 'meritocracy'. So there.

Nor did other writers escape. Prophecies, as Steiner conceded, are always tested in 'the rear-view mirror', and are 'rarely accurate'. Seemingly taking for granted that dystopian novels aim to forecast an inevitable future and should therefore be judged according to their accuracy, George Orwell's 'exalted' status in England is unfounded: he got it wrong (it did not take '200 years to lift the boot of Stalin off the throat of Europe') and hindsight reveals Aldous Huxley as the most prescient of writers in the dystopian vein. Provoking this listener to feel a sudden pang of jealousy, Steiner has found that the predictions in Brave New World - of drug-induced well-being, 3D TV, organised sexual commerce - have all been proven 'clairvoyant.'

The fact that Huxley also imagined a world in which one's place in society is genetically engineered and and politically enforced, in which the struggle inherent in meritocratic competition is pre-empted, went unnoted. The demonstrably plausible idea of the rise of meritocracy was brushed aside at this point as a non-question, with the first of several pro-USA, anti-UK jokes: in the US, the 'only democratic success, the inferior feel worse because they had every chance to succeed...' The serious questions raised by this joke, and the aptness of Young's book as a platform for their discussion, gave way instead to Steiner's dissection of Young's first oracular shortcoming: his failure to foresee the money 'revolution': The Rise of Meritocracy is bereft of financial transactions. (Though there is, to be fair, a short chapter on pay packets, 'Rich and Poor'.)

The contemporary world according to Steiner is driven primarily by money and the desire for wealth, even as money itself has become insubstantial and unreal, a figure stored on a microchip. Marx's prophecy has been proven 'tragically accurate': 'there will come a day when we trade not merchandise for merchandise, nor money for money, but trust for trust.' Hedge funds are a case in point: wealth is a 'mere symbol' in 'technologies of unreality' controlled by a - delightfully dubbed - 'small minority of crooked wizards', most of whom have 'never seen a single commodity they trade in every day... Wealth never touches the ground.' And the biggest sources of revenue? Another weary, incredulous shake of the head: pornography and drugs.

Steiner took his porn fact as a link to our worship of this strange, insubstantial thing - money - invoking Thorstein Veblen's idea of 'money libido' and 'conspicuous consumption beyond need' (though the nature of the correspondence between monetary and sexual libido, 'insubstantial' wealth and simulated sex, were left tacit). Rather taken by judging thinkers according to their forecasts, Steiner saw this as putting Veblen ahead of Freud, who, Steiner argued, failed to see how money would become the libidinal drive of culture. But pride of place in the intellectual bookmakers' hall of fame goes (for now) to Georg Simmel, one of the founders of modern sociology, who paved the way for future analyses with his book, The Philosophy of Money.

We might question whether Steiner has described a 'revolution' here - money has been around for a long time; the 'revolution' is in form, not substance. And, as Steiner pointed out, Marx was thinking about it in the 19th century. But Steiner might be right about what he called the 'hallucinatory power' of money: one has only to look, he suggested, at the newspapers. Rich Lists and the business sections with detailed and regular reports of City bonuses and pay packets. Again, The Times listed stocks and shares in 1805, never mind 2005, but no matter. Cue revolution number two: the Omnipotence Of The Media.

The 'third culture' of the electronic web and Google, in which information is 'transmuted by the logistics of total communication', marks the revolution of the media - not foreseen, of course, in Young's book. Steiner's jaw dropped - he is as animated and captivating a speaker as one would expect - on the announcement that the founders of Google are worth $13 billion each, and that Microsoft owner Bill Gates, 'unquestionably the most powerful human being on the planet', could make the remark, 'morally scandalous, but irrefutable in his case', that 'the best thing I ever did was leave university.' Steiner was most nettled, then, by Gates' success in transforming the very insitution he deserted: that 'computer literacy is now a condition of entry into higher education' was lamented. Steiner then noted the 'profoundly scandalous' (and, again, literally jaw-dropping) statistic that Rupert Murdoch owns three fifths of the world's knowledge,' ie he controls the sources (the satellites, the stations etc..)

From here Steiner reflected usefully that the importance of the 'ownership of information has usurped that of knowledge,' something that endangers the attentive respect of traditional learning. Further, this represents the hegemony of the West, a technological colonialism of Boolean logic: every code speaks Anglo-American, fulfilling in reality the vision of Pascal's calculating machine. Thinking further back still, Leibniz's idea of a 'meta-mathematical language accessible to all' has now become 'a fact of daily life.' Citing an as yet unpublished paper being produced at the University of Edinburgh, on the possibilities for 'implanting memory - packaged memory - and encoding experience in the structure of the human cortex', Steiner moved on to his third, perhaps most profound concern: the domination of culture and psychology by science.

The three 'holy grails' of science, Steiner submitted, drawing on the testimony of various friends in the fields, are now within reach. They are:
1) the creation of life in vitro
2) the understanding of the origins of time and the universe, or the discovery of the 'parameters beyond which no experimental research can be conducted' (Stephen Hawking)
3) an explanation of consciousness, caught in sinister phrase: 'the chemistry of the self is very near.' (Francis Crick)

If 'the secret of structural consciousness is an arrangement of sugar and carbon', Steiner asked, what happens, then, to the 'I'? To the ego? What are the legal implications of a determinist mental science, and how would this affect moral responsibilities? What are the political dangers of the possibility of controlling mentality and behaviour? (It might have been apt in a lecture titled On Meritocracy to bring up the pharmaceutical work being carried out into IQ-enhancement drugs, but let that pass). Steiner wisely refrained from drawing conclusions here, opting instead to lay the possibilities before the audience and ask, returning to the ostensible subject of his lecture: 'was it simply bad luck that Young failed to see these things coming?' Unlike Fred Hoyles in The Black Cloud and other sci-fi writers, who, as a group have always been ahead (pace Simmel and presumably the majority of Steiner's audience) of sociologists and political theorists?

But Young, as a 'Victorian humanist', was stuck in the 'archaic' concern for the 'nucleus of public behaviour' based on a 'rational society and system.' Had he looked up from Britain to America, he might have seen Steiner's 'revolutions' coming. But, Steiner concluded, Michael Young's book failed to do so. Young remains a 'figure of the first stature at a difficult moment of transition', but not a prophet, rather a 'memory of something we have lost.'

Steiner too, however, seemed to present himself as the 'memory of something we have lost.' The latent arghument of his lecture, expressed with each gesture of shock, was that education and learning should not be degraded by pursuit of false gods (wealth), its fruits (intimate knowledge) should not be replaced by information (speed of access), and we should be wary of reducing human consciousness to chemical or mechanical formulae. Essentially, each drop of the jaw represented the disbelief and disapproval of a scholar who has dedicated his life to learning and high culture on finding that, to children who can read fractals before they can read literature, he is, in fact, 'illiterate'.

Here, as at many junctures in the lecture, Steiner could have addressed his title question, and, for all that the professor provided much food for thought and a prodigous reading list, the criticism of Young's omissions could equally be levelled at his critic. The two forms of 'illiteracy' he mentioned point up the fact that merit itself is a conditional term: meritocracy is meaningless until the criteria of merit and reward have been defined. And while meritocracy, like democracy, may be the 'least bad' option - the only viable alternative to patronage - as with any ideology, it is potentially dangerous if allowed to become so hubristic as to seemingly require no debate at all. Exactly those foregone conclusions demand the most sensitive attention, and Steiner's charming, spiky lecture was a refreshing reminder that the familiar culture we inhabit is contingent and shocking. But meritocracy is part of that culture.

The studious avoidance of the question heading his lecture belies Steiner's own often-stated sense that greatness is the important feature of literature, and learning the most meritorious value in culture. But, if we accept the sorting of the great from the good as the proper work of the literary critic, it still does not defuse the issue in the political sphere. As the philosopher Sydney Hook has written on the Western 'cult of excellence': 'to couple a natural aristocracy of talent with a natural aristocracy of virtue ... is questionable.' Steiner may well be right that Young's strengths lie elsewhere than in the novel, but not because his predictions were wrong (would Steiner really dismiss Zamyatin's genre-founding We because we have not been issued numbers in place of names?).

Young's novel was really a vehicle for the work of drawing attention to the potential repetition of the exclusivity of patronage in following this 'cult of excellence' as a social, as well as intellectual, ideology. As Young wrote in the alternative manifesto in The Rise of Meritocracy, problematically perhaps, but sounding a long way from 'sour and sardonic' and providing a point of departure for a debate which yet merits our attention:

The classless society would be one which both possessed and acted upon plural values. Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupation, and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and their sensitivity, their sympathy and their generosity, there could be no classes... Every human would then have equal opportunity, not to rise up in the world in the light of any mathematical measure, but to develop his own special capacities for leading a rich life. (p169)