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| Fatalism, Calvinism, The Courtier, and Merit by jeep 02/13/2005, 7:49pm PST | ||||
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| Stupid Calvinism. This whole thing is a weird holdover from feudal times, I figure. Back then you had to have the blood to be considered worthy of notice, then these protestants come along with their 'aristocracy is bullshit' theory, but in the end they don't have the saq to just say "well it's pretty much random and no one has any idea if it's nature or nurture that makes people good at anything or successful at anything, so who knows?" All they can do is go halfway, "some people are chosen by God before they are born to go to heaven, and you can tell who they are because they're rich and smell like baby powder all the time, while everyone else is poor and smells like creamed corn."
Every once in a while the culture slips backwards...sometimes to the 50s, sometimes to the 30s, and sometimes to any one of the million periods that were, for a moment, just like the Holy Roman Empire. Your parents were famous actors? Well, you'll just be a natural, then. You went to Harvard? Clearly you need to write for the Simpsons. Your daddy was a CIA scumbag and useless president who went to war to close an oil deal and boost his portfolio? SIGN US UP FOR TWO TERMS OF THAT. Just when you're done laughing at Fitzgerald's East Egg/West Egg shit, you see it in the "Hollywood Aristocracy" that's being marketed, and in politics it's just another tool. I'm not sure if it's an instinctive thing, to look at the family history as a "blood record" for someone. There was a time when it was considered evil, and you see that theme pop up in weird places, even recently: Preacher and The Matrix have it, both portray certain villians as having power due to being descended from Christ. Of course, both portray their heroes as being created by gods, so there's no answer there, either. Basically at this point I figure cultures go through something akin to 12-step programs to deal with things like this. They start with the assumption that blood alone carries superiority. That's disproven by the first generation of drooling inbred retards any would-be Hapsburgs spawn (Daddy and Grandaddy are the same person! He was a great war hero and I won the bronze medal in the Special Olympics!). So the next assumption is that some Deus Ex Machina comes along and dictates who's cool and who's not, but it's hard to tell since nonexistant entities tend not to ask for reciepts for their gifts, so now you look for some quick external sign, in our culture's case, Calvinism chose money. So that's where we are now, it's been 400 years and no one can get past this. Granted it led to one of my all-time favorite logical fallacies (the Argument from Wealth: "Mike Tyson is a rapist asshole." "Yeah, but he's worth millions.") but that doesn't help, really. I know that people who talk about "Meritocracy" are just as bad about it as anyone else, so I'm thinking that it's something inherent in the culture. I don't know what the next step is (though it would be cool if Clay were to step in with another power curve here), it's sure not going to be quick and easy. What is easy is spotting the remnants of the last two steps: inheritance, direct comparison of value without adjusting for environmental factors (ie not using "park effects"), and assuming a causal relationship between parent at age X and child at age X. The next step is NOT handing someone her late husband's congressional seat as a consolation prize. I'm pretty sure that's exactly the wrong way to go. Anyway, kudos to Matt Damon for reading The Courtier and figuring out the new Hollywood Star System, may your future children inherit the action movie franchises you pretend not to work so hard to establish. /jeep/ ...has never been bad at anything he's tried. One anecdote does not make a rule, though. |
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