WE LIVE IN AN age identified by meritocratic principles. Those aren't ones which describe the world as it is, since clearly the best people are not selected to the highest positions of privilege (I mean, look around), they're principles that describe the world as it ought to be, and which serve to justify what will be. The meritocratic model of the world is one in which it's the inequality of human achievements, intelligence, hard work, talents, that justifies the existence of inequalities of power and privilege, and which aims to exclude accidents of undeserved success. The meritocratic model says, good things should come to the good, and by implication, lays the judgement of failure on the failed. From here, let me introduce a seemingly irrelevant but actually critically relevant event: US President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden.
The Presidential power to issue pardons is a curious holdover from pre-modern ideas of what a sovereign is. In post-Roman Europe, the law came to be vested directly in monarchs, with the key virtue of the king or queen being their place as a political and legal head. Monarchs were ideally merciful, and were unequal parties in the law, judgements in this model went down. Kings pardoned, exercising arbitrary decisionmaking power, and the decision meant very little about the virtues of the pardoned, but a great deal for the worth of the monarch doing the pardoning. It did not go the other way. It was one of the key issues of the English civil war to what extent the King was bound by law or parliament at all, and modern legislation in Australia usually contains a clause 'binding the crown' because it used to be a very live question. Thomas Hobbes, stand-up-philosopher, wrote Leviathan in this context of English civil violence, and he picked human equality as the factor leading inevitably to bloodshed.
From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which neverthelesse they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End, (which is principally their owne conservation, and sometimes their delectation only,) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one an other. And from hence it comes to passe, that where an Invader hath no more to feare, than an other mans single power; if one plant, sow, build, or possesse a convenient Seat, others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united, to dispossesse, and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labour, but also of his life, or liberty.
From here, if you are familiar, you know the story. Because the consequences of statelessness are so horrible, Hobbes proposes-justifies investing political and legal power in an absolute sovereign power which is not equal to humans, in fact not really human at all: in the State, which draws legitimacy from the decisionmaking it has to exercise on our behalf. From here, we've really got the basis of the modern regulatory State in all its glory, which acts as an indifferent sovereign, stopping us from civilly warring, judging our virtues, embodying (and Hobbes was disturbingly literal here) our laws. Hobbesian societies are utterly unequal in power between citizen and State; but they are fair, and allow for meritocratic ideas, and for the development of human flourishing.
WORTHINESSE, is a thing different from the worth, or value of a man; and also from his merit, or desert; and consisteth in a particular power, or ability for that, whereof he is said to be worthy: which particular ability, is usually named FITNESSE, or Aptitude.
For he is Worthiest to be a Commander, to be a Judge, or to have any other charge, that is best fitted, with the qualities required to the well discharging of it; and Worthiest of Riches, that has the qualities most requisite for the well using of them: any of which qualities being absent, one may neverthelesse be a Worthy man, and valuable for some thing else. Again, a man may be Worthy of Riches, Office, and Employment, that neverthelesse, can plead no right to have it before another; and therefore cannot be said to merit or deserve it.
Hobbesian States permit no competitive loyalties except to the State itself. But there is another tradition, that didn't die with the emergence of modern nations, which has its own very different concept of human inequality. These are client-principal relationships, relationships of patronage and support, of getting along, of mateship, and of honourable corruption. The tradition values loyalty, needs of institutions, strong networks of trust, staunchness and collective identity. It identifies worthy people not by their intrinsic virtues, like ability to pass set tests, meet KPIs, or display objective measurable qualities, but by their ability to display loyalty and group solidarity, to exhibit unmeasurable characteristics like courage (or servility). This tradition is absolutely opposed to meritocratic principles, seeing them as pious liberal hypocrisies, used to self-justify the existence of elites unaware of their own lack of other abilities.
Does this sound like a familiar politics in 2024? It should. At best, it's part of a basis for thick civic links and the production and reproduction of values over generations. At worst, it's grotesque and nihilist gangsterism. As I wrote then, it is the tradition of 19th and 20th century Australian municipal and State politics. It is obviously also the grand tradition in which personalist rulers like Vladimir Putin work, and its values were absolutely crystallised in the TV show The Apprentice, starring Donald Trump. The Boss is the centre of things, the object of decisionmaking, not its subject, he dispenses law and fires people, but he is also merciful, and pardons.
And so back to Joe Biden pardoning Hunter Biden. The President justified his use of the Presidential pardon on the---correct---grounds that the charges faced by Hunter Biden were politically motivated. Critics point out---also correctly---that this kind of use of sovereign power for family benefit smells of corruption. Family pardons are opposed to the notion that the Hobbesian sovereign can be a disinterested creature above the individual interests of families, or sects, or companies, but then, has it ever really been such a thing? Marxists have long pointed out that the modern State is a committee for the interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Disinterested sovereign power doesn't have many backers these days. But elitism run riot, as I've written, is a key result of meritocracy:
Friends don’t help each other, nobody does favours, and each deserved outcome is the best of all possible worlds. Because merit must be imagined as an individual capacity (or else commit the error of bell-curvy prejudice) here is no, can never be any, meritocratic ‘we’ of belonging, or ‘one of us’. As the result, the fact of ruling class political and economic power, increasingly obvious to insiders and outsiders, threatens the whole ideology.
What would it look like to return to supporting a disinterested sovereign, a healthy regulatory State, a rule of law? Certainly not in the kind of meritocracy that justifies only power, praising the virtues of the self-selecting 'best'. There's a third grand political tradition, in Australia as in the United States and elsewhere, that offers a way out, I think: anti-corruption.
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