CJC 2023 JC2 GP Prelim P2 Insert

Passage 1. Adrian Wooldridge argues in favour of meritocracy. 1 It is now commonplace that the ideas which have shaped and sustained Western societies for the past 250 years or more are faltering. Democracy is in retreat. Liberalism is stru ggling. Capitalism has lost its lustre. But there is one idea that still commands widespread enthusiasm: that an individual’s position in society should depend on his or her combination of ability and effort. M eritocracy, a word invented as recently as 1958 by the British sociologist Michael Young, is the closest thing we have today to a universal ideology. 5 2 The definition of the word gives us a sense of why meritocracy is so popular. A meri tocratic society combines four qualities which are each in themselves admirable. First, it prides itself on the extent to which people can get ahead in life on the basis of their natural talents . Second, it tries to secure equality of opportunity by providing education for all. Third, it fo rbids discrimination on the basis of race and sex and other irrelevant characteristics. Fourth, it awards jobs through open competi tion rather than patronage and nepotism. Social mobility and meritocracy are the strawbe rries and cream of modern political thinking, and politicians can always earn applause by deno uncing unearned privilege. Meritocracy’s success in crossing boundaries – ideological and cultural, geographical and political – is striking. 10 15 3 However, some argue that meritocracy is now the opposite of what it was intended t o be: a way of transmitting inherited privilege from one generation to another through t he mechanism of elite education. Members of the elite spend millions of dollars purchasing educational advan tage for their children, sometimes by moving to the right school districts, sometimes by sending their children to the right private schools, but always by providing them with a rich diet of extracu rricular activities. At the same time, poorer children are trapped at the bottom of the ladder, weighed down from the get-go by poor infant care, poor schools and general lack of opportunity. This palace of illusi ons is also a factory of misery. 20 4 We should nevertheless be cautious about rejecting an idea that is so central to m odernity. The relevant question is surely not whether meritocracy has faults. It is whet her it has fewer faults than alternative systems. Meritocracy’s advocates do not argue that it is perfect. They argue that it does a better job than the alternatives of reconciling various goods that are inevi tably in tension with each other – for example, social justice and economic efficiency and individual aspiration and limited opportunities. 25 5 Meritocracy succeeds because it does a better job than the alternatives of reconciling the two great tensions at the heart of modernity: between efficiency and fairness on the one hand, and between moral equalit