ENGLAND EXPECTS. 4/8 The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, by Adrian Wooldridge Hardcover
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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ENGLAND EXPECTS. 4/8 The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, by Adrian Wooldridge Hardcover
https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern-World/dp/1510768610/ref=sr_1_2?qid=1658009977&refinements=p_27%3AAdrian+Wooldridge&s=books&sr=1-2
The Times (UK) book of the year! Meritocracy: the idea that people should be advanced according to their talents rather than their birth. While this initially seemed like a novel concept, by the end of the twentieth century it had become the world's ruling ideology. How did this happen, and why is meritocracy now under attack from both right and left?
In The Aristocracy of Talent, the esteemed journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge traces the history of meritocracy forged by the politicians and officials who introduced the revolutionary principle of open competition, the psychologists who devised methods for measuring natural mental abilities, and the educationalists who built ladders of educational opportunity. He looks outside western cultures and shows what transformative effects it has had everywhere it has been adopted, especially once women were brought into the meritocratic system.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye in the World. I'm John Batsch, speaking with Adrian Wuldrich, the author |
| 0:06.9 | of the new book, The Aristocracy of Talent. We're going through the several thousand years |
| 0:11.4 | of the search for talent and the combination of honesty and philosophical thoroughness |
| 0:22.4 | with the same time of prejudice in everybody who is looking for talent to maintain governance |
| 0:29.2 | and to achieve prosperity. The blindness of everyone until the 20th century is the mother they've |
| 0:38.0 | had, the sister they have, and the children they want to have. That's the blindness. And I don't |
| 0:45.1 | know other than the fact that I'm sure we're blind to something here in the 21st century, |
| 0:49.8 | and in the 24th century they will laugh and say something like, can you imagine they thought so |
| 0:55.3 | well given that they were meaders or something equally unexpected to condemn us. So I'm not seeking |
| 1:02.3 | to condemn, but Adrian, it is amazing to me now to consider that women did not come to a man |
| 1:09.8 | called clever Tom McCauley. Given his genius for reforming the Indian civil service, he did not |
| 1:17.2 | see his own mother as someone to participate in decision-making. It is absolutely extraordinary. |
| 1:24.8 | You have these great reformers in the middle of the 19th century who develop extremely sophisticated |
| 1:31.6 | theories of why we should have open competition and why talent is, you know, if not quite democratic, |
| 1:39.6 | is why you distributed the population certainly doesn't just reside with the aristocracy, and it |
| 1:44.5 | doesn't occur to them to say well what about them? And it doesn't occur to them to think well wait a |
| 1:50.9 | minute, my wife is quite intelligent or my daughter is quite intelligent, she should be allowed |
| 1:55.4 | to join in this competition, but here we have one of the paradoxes of meritocracy. There are a lot of |
| 1:59.9 | people who say well the point of meritocracy is that it's just designed by the powerful to preserve |
| 2:06.4 | their positions, but in fact what meritocracy does is to open the way for other people to use |
| 2:13.0 | meritocratic arguments to say what about me? So women come along and say well wait a minute, |
| 2:18.0 | you argue for open competition, you argue for objective measurements, you argue for examinations, |
... |
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