"Meritocracy" and class warfare

I was going to write a discussion of this interesting Brooks article, but before I got around to it, the Z-man did, and Vox Day did. They both have something interesting to say about it, and it's both not only congruent with each other, but also approaching it from a totally different perspective to come to a similar conclusion. I'll quote sections of the Z-man's post on it.

Brooks speaks as a member of the meritocracy, which he defines as the highly educated and highly connected urban class that runs the institutions. His column is mostly a self-congratulatory call to action to address the growing unrest.

The place to start is the assumption on behalf of Brooks and no doubt his intended readership that he is a member of the meritocracy. He ticks many of the boxes he repeatedly insists are requirements of the meritocracy. He is the child of wealthy foreigners, and he went to the right schools. He has avoided anything that looks like productive labor. He has no loyalty to his host country. He sent his son off to serve in the army of a foreign country.

By the standards of the people who throw around the term “meritocracy” as a compliment, David Brooks is a good example. The question is what service is he rendering to the ruling class? He has no useful skills, and he has never tried to do anything that requires sacrifice on behalf of the ruling class. His career looks like the life of a self-indulgent fop from the British literature. What has David Brooks ever done to merit consideration of the ruling class?

The first clue is a quote from Thomas Edsall he uses in his post to explain why he and his fellow meritocrats aligned against Trump. “Republicans see a world changing around them uncomfortably fast, and they want it to slow down, maybe even take a step backward. But if you are a person of color, a woman who values gender equality or an L.G.B.T. person, would you want to go back to 1963? I doubt it.” That right there captures the Cloud People – Dirt People divide.

ed note: An admission that the "conservatives" of the Establishment are as progressive as the Left that they pretend to oppose.

Opposing Trump was never about practical things like the priorities of government or the general welfare of the people. It was class struggle. The meritocratic class view their membership in that class as a sign of their moral goodness. Their ability to worm their way through the labyrinth of credentialling mechanisms in order to fill up their resume with the best associations is proof of their virtue. A perch at the New York Times is no different from an assigned seat in the front pews.

Hatred of Trump, and it was real hate, was a defense of the optimates versus the populares on purely class grounds. The problem is the optimates are a polite fiction, a fig leaf for the tiny ruling elite at the top of the system. The role of thoroughly impractical men like David Brooks is to maintain both a moral code that benefits the ruling elite and to provide a barrier between the optimates and the populares. Trump crossing that barrier was viewed as a violation of this system’s integrity.

That is the heart of the Brooks post. The headline is misleading as at no point does he genuinely suggest the meritocrats are the bad guys. Instead, he explains how people could possibly make this mistake, because their highly exclusionary systems do seem to violate their alleged moral code. Note he quickly moves along to the part his readers expect from a Brooks column. That is the part where he says the Dirt People are undereducated rubes who need to be put in their place.

In fairness, he probably sensed this and finished with “We can condemn the Trumpian populists until the cows come home, but the real question is: When will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable?” Fools grabbed onto this thinking it revealed some genuine self-reflection and perhaps a sign that the managerial elite is coming around to the criticisms leveled at them. In reality, it was another blow on the shofar to rally the people of the meritocracy.

That is how the Cloud People view things. Like the children of Israel camping in the wilderness of Sinai, they await the final instructions. They have seen the destruction of the Dirt People and they can see the ultimate end of their leader. What comes soon is the Promised Land where the meritocrats will build a kingdom of priests and a holy nation that serves the gods of the new religion. The Dirt People will be gone and what will remain is the righteous led by the meritocrats.

That is the purpose of these men of the meritocracy. Their role is to keep the dream alive and encourage the elites to push forward and faster. Whether any of this is possible is never considered. Those debates are left to the Dirt People and once they are gone, all doubt will be gone. In the end, the meritocracy is nothing more than a cheering section for a system that serves elite interests at the expense of the people and nations on which they feed.

Genetics and doctrine

I'm often amused, bemused and a bit crestfallen when members of the Church are unable to (or more accurately, unwilling to) accept things that are real, data-driven, and yet which challenge beliefs that they cling to. Not doctrinal beliefs, but beliefs that are often just as core to their identity as doctrinal beliefs are, and which in their own interpretation, they've wrapped up with doctrine, or garnished their folk beliefs with a doctrinal flourish, so that they can't tell the difference between them. This leads them to dismiss or reject actual data, because they believe that it conflicts with doctrine, when in reality it does not; it only conflicts with their interpretive mingling of doctrine and whatever philosophies of men they've tied them too.

Often this segment of members is part of the big plurality of members (maybe even majority, sadly) that often fall under the rubric of something Nephi warned us of in 2 Nephi 28:21 "And others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security, that they will say: All is well in Zion; yea, Zion prospereth, all is well—and thus the devil cheateth their souls, and leadeth them away carefully down to hell." Those who refuse to acknowledge how thoroughly the devil has infiltrated and poisoned our society against righteousness are often blinded in many other ways too; usually because they're too caught up in their worldly identity of some kind. Although perhaps that's not entirely fair. Nephi also said, to his brothers after his own vision where he saw his father's vision, that the wicked take the truth to be hard. But aren't we all wicked, fallen, and in need of repentance? My experience is that everyone takes some truth to be hard, because we're just not in a position to accept it. In fact, quite clearly we cannot accept truth unless we are prepared for it. Not just doctrinal truth, but any truth. We reject political, ideological, social, cultural, or scientific proof that we're not ready to receive just as readily as we reject doctrinal truth we're not ready to receive. If we can even comprehend what is being said to us, we can't fit it into our existing framework or understanding, so we reject it or dismiss it rather than accept it and accept that our existing framework or understanding needs to adapt to accept this new data. It's the work of a lifetime to constantly grow, line upon line, precept upon precept, until we come to a full understanding, and we can't be expected to understand things that are beyond us until we've built up every line and precept necessary to accept the next one.

Anyway, that's a bit rambly, but I know what I'm going to post next is going to be controversial to many, because it won't fit with their framework. But... it's true nonetheless. Let me preface this just a bit by making an analogy. 

Abraham famously bore Isaac, right, his son and heir. Isaac himself bore two sons, Jacob and Esau, and Jacob, after being renamed Israel, bore twelve sons of his own, which are the basis for the tribes of Israel. God covenanted with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the Israelites became the covenant people, endowed with certain blessings. Abraham and Isaac obviously had other children as well, however. Abraham had children with Hagar and with Keturah. Isaac, as noted above, bore Esau, who was along with his uncles above, the father of nations. Did God love these people less than the Israelites? I believe not, because that would be contrary to God's own word. He loves all of his children, and puts all of them in the environment that they need to be in to reach their potential on Earth, and prepare themselves for the best eternity that they can. So, if one group of people, one genetic lineage, has access to blessings that another does not, it is because that situation will be of most benefit to both groups of people in the eternal long run. People and peoples are not interchangeable widgets, where one is the same as another, and God knows that even better than we do, tailoring the environment perfectly to the person who is to receive it in this mortal life. "All are alike unto God" should not be interpreted as "all are the same unto God." We are all alike in that God values us, and wants us all to flourish, and has tailored our mortal experience to best allow us to do so.

Now, of course, this doesn't justify ignoring the plight or suffering of people or peoples in hard times, but it does mean that we shouldn't engage in virtue-signaling hand-wringing about the lack of equity in the world too. People who take it upon themselves to "change the world" by trying to bring about equity and whatever in broad strokes tend to be arrogant and full of hubris and self-righteousness, so full of their own self-importance that they don't care that their crude "solutions" to problems like poverty, opportunity, or whatever are actually breaking more than they fix. In reality, it is beyond the reach of the vast majority of people to even fix themselves, and help their immediate family, friends and maybe community. The very tiny super-minority of people who can actually go abroad and make some kind of change for the better among strangers should be supported and applauded, but few of us should aspire to that. Beams and motes and all that. We've all got enough of our own problems still.

Anyway, all of this is to say that peoples are different. Not just in terms of culture and superficial physical differences, but in terms of actual genetics, behaviors, and capabilities. Again; does that mean God loves some people more than others? No, it means that some people need a completely different environment to flower spiritually than others.

Anyway, I'm not sure how much you're aware of PCA charts, but they are charts that use data points to map genetic difference. This is quite interesting:

From a doctrinal standpoint, I don't think it really makes any difference to notice that sub-Saharan Africans, i.e., the "black race" which is certainly very accurate in spite of the spirited denials that scientists will make about their being such a thing as race, are significantly separated genetically from a cluster or arc that includes literally every other population on earth. Africans in this sense should be seen as sub-Saharan Africans, as north Africans, while not shown, will tend to cluster with west Asians and Europeans. Which makes sense given that many millennia of interchange we know about between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

It also raises some interesting questions about the fact that the Lord did not see fit to give the Priesthood to the black race until the 70s, when the Brethren, in earnest prayer, finally felt that the time had come. Church historians, or at least many of them, including those who wrote the article on the Church website on Race and the Priesthood chalk it up to cultural views and a mistake on the part of early Brethren, who were unable to look past their own cultural perspective to see the current cultural perspective of people as interchangeable widgets. 

I'm not so sure. I don't think the Lord simply allowed a mistake to persist; I think it was his plan all along that things unfold the way that they did. The Lord is usually very efficient, and things that happen often kill many birds with one stone. Even if the cultural perspective of Brigham Young or others played a role in how it played out, it probably also met other needs that the Lord needed met. 

Anyway, that's really neither here nor there, other than that the knowledge that there's a big genetic rift between the black race and the rest of humanity as we know it today begs the question. If there's a genetic difference, with attendant genetic predisposition to different behaviors than everyone else (and there is voluminous data that there is), then does that mean that we shouldn't be surprised to see a different path to eternal glory? Heck, I see a different path to eternal glory between me and my own brothers. The Lord has an individual plan for each of us, but who we are genetically and culturally is part of that path. And who we are genetically and culturally makes a huge difference in our behavior patterns. Speaking of data: https://thosewhocansee.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-black-struggle-reader.html

I'm aware that the shallow will immediately dismiss all of this and suggest that its racist. Hence my lead-in; although I'm not a Ben Shapiro fan, he's right about one thing: facts don't care about your feelings. As a corollary, these facts don't interfere with doctrine either. God is no respecter of persons. In the parable of the talents, the guy who turned two talents into four got the exact same reward as the guy who turned five talents into ten. And I'm not suggesting that white people have five talents and black people two or anything like that. The reality is more nuanced than the parable; it's not that we have a different quantity of talents, but rather that our talents are different from each other's. But that doesn't matter; if we make the most of the talents and situation that we have, we can qualify for the same exaltation. On the other hand, if we covet the talents and situation of others, we are in a bad place with regards to eternal progression.

The data involved here is convincing to those who are prepared to accept the truth. And it does have consequences for what kind of society we can and should attempt to build that will be fair to all and have a shot at long-term success as a society. But if we persist in the delusional idea that we're just interchangeable widgets with no cultural, genetic or behavioral differences between us that are more than superficial, we're setting ourselves up for failure, because we're in denial about one of the most salient points of creating a successful society; how to account for diversity that actual means some kind of significant difference. (The data also strongly suggests that racism, as most people believe it to be, is a hoax and a shakedown racket. Similar data can be compiled for sexism, although that's beyond the scope of this blog post.)

I think the Nephites and Ammonites did it best. They had friendly relations with each other. They went to and fro between each others lands in trade and other travel. The Nephites gave the Ammonites lands of their own and protected them from Lamanite aggression, even as the Ammonites supported the Nephite armies. But they didn't just give up on their differences, either. The Ammonites had their own lands, in Jershon and later elsewhere, where they could practice their own culture and set up their own societies. Which, in many ways, were more successful than the Nephite ones, at least for a time.