” When we want we can ! This is a phrase that I often heard in my childhood. And which was undoubtedly intended, in the first sense, to value the effort. ” Help yourself and heaven will help you ! concludes La Fontaine’s fable. “Hercules wants us to move, then he helps people”, writes the poet in The bogged down charter.
Moral of the story, which Lucien Bouchard would not deny: before complaining, you have to ask yourself if you have worked hard enough. “Between two joints, you could swarm your ass,” wrote Pierre Bourgault. Amat victoria curam (victory loves effort), considered another poet, Catullus, Roman that one. Certainly, to conquer without danger, one triumphs without glory, as Corneille underlined. But to win, it is not enough to make efforts.
To decree that “when we want, we can”, is to disregard social determinism, multiple discriminations, class privileges, unfavorable contexts. It’s conveniently forgetting the obstacles that stand in the way because you have a disability, because you’re poor, because you’re an immigrant, because you’re black, native, Muslim, because you’re is a woman trying to break into a traditionally masculine universe.
“When we want, we can” is a tenacious myth, an illusion well anchored in our psyche, a false promise and a pretense. We do not all start from the same footing, from the same starting line, with the same capacities and the same possibilities of success. When you want, you can’t always.
Not everyone has a place in the elevator of social mobility. Some have to take the fire escape, on crutches. Equal opportunity is a decoy. So is pretending hard work is always rewarded. Extricating oneself from one’s cultural and socio-economic condition is not as simple as saying: “Make an effort and you will succeed; the rest will follow. »
“The meritocratic conviction that individuals deserve the rewards that the market allocates to their talents makes solidarity an almost impossible project,” concludes Harvard University political philosophy professor Michael J. Sandel, in his essay The tyranny of merit (translated into French by Albin Michel in 2021).
The lie of meritocracy undermines our social fiber, by dividing us, by dissociating us, by creating castes. This is exactly what Michael Young denounced with irony, in 1958, when he invented this word in his novel The rise of meritocracy, to better reflect on the notion of merit and on the very idea that to want is to be able. The hierarchy of merit favors the status quo for the benefit of those who benefit the most, for example by justifying the salary differentials and the advantages granted to the “best performers”.
“You are the elite of society,” we were told when I entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Montreal more than 30 years ago. This sentence made me wince at the time and still makes me wince today. Students tell me that the faculty greeting hasn’t changed much. What he insinuates, what he instills in the minds of these young adults, is that they are better than the others. Without specifying that it is undoubtedly because they have had an advantage, because they have been able to attend the best schools or follow the best programs that they are considered the crème de la crème.
This is the favorable a priori with which they will be perceived throughout their career. The advantage they will have over others. Not because they deserve it more, but because society has decided so. Because they are destined to hold influential positions in legal, political or business circles, and often to reproduce the favored social context in which they were born and for which, precisely, they have no merit.
Maybe they will get a prestigious internship thanks to a friend of the family? Perhaps they will one day be appointed judges by a former classmate? Others will succeed in climbing the social ladder by the sweat of their brow, by sparing no effort, by dint of determination, supported perhaps by parents who have sacrificed themselves for them so that they transcend their condition. . They are the exception that proves the rule.
Some obstacles are insurmountable, no matter how hard you try to get there. Meritocracy is like Hercules and his promises to help those who move. It does not exist. It’s magical thinking. Just because we want doesn’t mean we can.
The origins of meritocracy
Spring 2033. This is the time of trouble in England. The working class is revolting. The president of a major trade union has just been assassinated, a bomb has blown up the offices of the Ministry of Education, a general strike has paralyzed London. It is insurrection and consternation in a society that believed it had adopted a foolproof system: meritocracy, according to the formula “intelligence quotient + effort = merit”.
This is the plot of the dystopian and satirical novel by British sociologist Michael Young, The rise of meritocracypublished in 1958. “The carapace of merit had inoculated the victors against shame and reproach”, writes Young about the ruling class of this fictitious Britain, which claims that its privileges and its power are absolutely deserved.
The concept of meritocracy, a neologism of which he is the author, was of course pejorative for Michael Young. Faced with the social caste system that prevailed in Britain in the last century, this left-wing intellectual proposed his own quiet revolution. Reluctantly, meritocracy – the idea that the efforts made alone determine the success of individuals – has become a kind of ideal to be achieved in Western societies. The opposite of what this visionary, who died in 2002, wanted.