"Meritocracy"

Published at FPR: Susannah Black, Debating Conservatism: An Old Mistake in The New Inquiry

She refers to an exchange between Daniel Larison and Corey Robin: Redefining the Right Wing. No examination of that exchange here. Later, maybe.

Miss Black objects to Mr. Robin:

It was liberal reformers– throughout the nineteenth century, and earlier– who were keen to institute meritocracy in the civil services of various European governments. The struggle for existence is an essentially liberal way of conceiving civil society: that’s why laissez-faire capitalists, arch-liberals all, tended to be such fans of the eugenics movement.

Conservatives, by contrast, see social solidarity as the normal state of things, and the dynamism or creative destruction that the liberal order fosters, and in which natural law promotes the rule of the “best,” is really quite alien to the conservative mind. Those conservatives who are defenders of aristocracy do so not on the basis that the aristocrats are better than others, but on the basis that aristocrats fill a social role that someone’s got to fill, just as someone’s got to bake the bread and someone’s got to write for the feuilletons, and it might as well be this lot as anyone else.

It seems to me that at the very least, conservatives wish to preserve the constitutional order, even if it is imperfect or even has some evils, because to abolish it would lead to an even greater evil befalling the polity. I would agree more with Aristotle than Miss Black's conservative - those who rule should be qualified to do so precisely because they are better than the others. This is demanded by distributive justice and falls under the natural law. Therefore, liberal meritocracy is judged to be incorrect not because authority is given on the basis of merit but because how merit is ascertained is wrong or unjust.

One can hold that political office falls under the division of labor, but why can aristocrats say they should hold office rather than another group? Social inertia + the degeneration of an original republican organization because of conquest and the concentration of power in the hands of the few? (Did the barbarian peoples of Europe always have kings? Or were the tribes originally more egalitarian, to an extent?) The accidents of birth would not seem to be an adequate defense of the aristocrats' claims. Good breeding and education would be better, but are these not then arguments for merit? I find that G. K. Chesterton's discourse on aristocracy, which Miss Black uses in her post, to be rather lacking:

[T]he thing we call aristocracy in Europe is not in its origin and spirit an aristocracy at all. It is not a system of spiritual degrees and distinctions like, for example, the caste system of India, or even like the old Greek distinction between free men and slaves. It is simply the remains of a military organization… Now in an army nobody ever dreams of supposing that difference of rank represents a difference of moral reality… No one ever says, in reporting a mess-room conversation, “Lieutenant Jones was very witty, but was naturally inferior to Captain Smith.” The essence of an army is the idea of official inequality, founded on unofficial equality. The Colonel is not obeyed because he is the best man, but because he is the Colonel. Such was probably the spirit of the system of dukes and counts when it first arose out of the military spirit and military necessities of Rome.

The military leader is not qualified to be leader because he is a better person morally, but he should be better with respect to the military arts and the virtues proper to military command. (While the possession of the moral virtues may enhance one's leadership, charisma and other natural dispositions such as affection for the men under one's command probably suffice in most situations.) I think this is probably a decent account of political developments in the late Roman Empire and after the fall, but the rejoinder to this is that just because one excels at being a military leader does not entail that he will be a good ruler. The function of the two offices are different, as the ends are different. Having the power to coerce others to do one's will, as in the case of those who have armed men following them,  is not the same as having a just claim to rule. It might have been "natural" that military leaders be the first to fill in the political vacuum; once they were in place, social inertia, the natural "conservatism" of a polity, took over (though this does not prohibit the political order from gradually developing).

So do all "conservatives," Anglo-American or Western, really share Miss Black's understanding about the rationale for rulership?

On Polities and Warriors

Related:
John Derbyshire's review of Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.
The Guardian