Inchoate Thoughts About Meritocracy

Fisher Island, Florida

Where the Ragged People Go

Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters 
Where the ragged people go 
Looking for the places only they would know 

--Paul Simon, "The Boxer"

The Phantom apologizes for throwing down thoughts without organizing them, but three reports have been bouncing around inside his head: The first, a report about Fisher Island, outside Miami, which is the ultimate in a gated community, reported on NPR on Friday. The second, an article the same day by David Brooks about "The Great Migration" in which he ruminated about the futility of the idea--which he says is the motivating basis for President Obama's progressive agenda--the idea that you can redistribute wealth and those stuck in the lower classes can be brought up and society can be remade into a sort of egalitarian Utopia, or a workingman's paradise to borrow from the imagery of Marx and Engels. The third, an episode of This Old House, where workmen measure, measure and then cut using high tech computer driven tools to produce dazzling craftsmanship, transforming a house into a work of art.

Citing statistics about educational levels and where people live, David Brooks points out there are places like Flint, Michigan and Yuma, Arizona, where only 15% of people have college degrees but places like Washington, DC and Raleigh-Durham, where over 50% do. In San Joaquin, California only 2.9% have bachelor's degrees and 80% have not even graduated high school. He says educated, talented people flock to be with each other and the detritus drifts down to the bottom dwelling areas.  

Then, there is Fisher Island, the ultimate in flocking, where the vast majority of home owners have their 4th or 5th home, where you cannot even set foot on the island without permission of one of the owners, because you are not allowed on the ferry, where people travel not in gas driven automobiles, but in golf carts, where the yachts are enormous and a slip to park yours will cost $1 million.

It is not a new observation there are rich parts of town, rich parts of the country and poor parts. What David Brooks is saying, is once you leave your under educated turf in Nebraska, you never go back because you want to live among the people you met at the elite institutions which drew you away from Nebraska in the first place, and you can never go home again to the dull, ignorant, poor and boring people you grew up among.

When he lived in New York City, the Phantom dated several women who had moved to New York from Kansas and other remote states. "The best thing about being from Kansas," one told me, "Is being from Kansas." These ladies, who had moved to New York were a self selected population, who found their home states boring, restricting, claustrophobic, smothering. Their magnet was New York. But in New Hampshire, the Phantom meets people all the time who find small town life enriching, and who like the idea of roots and who play baseball or go hiking in the White Mountains with people they have known since childhood. They find value in that. They are not here because they have to be. They are here because they want to be here. Not that they never travel, but this is where they want to live.

Brooks says the magnet draws the talented among us first to elite colleges, mostly in the Northeast, and from there, the talent is drawn to New York City, Washington, San Francisco, Boston.  This is because the elite, now reprogrammed, begin looking for places and mates where they find stimulation and excitement. There is some evidence about this phenomenon, found in the pages of the New York Sunday Times wedding announcements and in observations from my children about friends who went to Princeton who would never consider marrying anyone who had not gone to Princeton, unless passion overwhelmed them over someone from Harvard, or maybe even Stanford.

What a loathsome idea. The idea that elite educational institutions have figured out what "talent" is, that their metrics, their SAT tests, their admission committees somehow have adequate tools to select from among the 16,000 applicants, by the numbers, the "talent." 

At this point in the Phantom's life, all this has got to jive with his own experience. 

The Phantom remembers seeing fraternity brothers at his semi-elite college spending their 4 years among the upper class drinking on their fraternity house porches, and he thought at the time what a joke the whole idea that a college education at an elite institution prepared you for anything more than cocktail hours at the country club, but certainly not for any productive life. And the Phantom saw, at virtually every elite college, from Harvard to Princeton, people who wound up in the bottom half of their pre med classes, going off to state medical schools, no name medical schools. So there was "downward" migration on the elite scale. Of course, even the last member of a medical school class is still called, "Doctor."

But then there were those who could not gain admission to medical school and settled for schools of osteopathy, and they too are called "Doctor." But, consistent with Brooks' thesis, they usually wind up practicing in smaller towns, less glamorous places, places where their DO degrees place them at the top of the socio-economic scale.

The Phantom saw in the definition of "talent" at Yale the idea that whatever talent is, it is here at Yale. In fact, by definition, if you have been selected for Yale, then you are, by definition, talented.  How far is that from the old idea of the "elect."  If you have succeeded on earth, it is because God looks upon you with favor. Your success is the evidence of your worthiness.  

This is the essence of Mr. Romney's view of life, and it is shared by many at Yale and Princeton and widely in the Republican party and even by Rush Limbaugh, who flunked every course at the one place which would admit him, but who proclaims his worthiness in terms of his success.

And the Phantom well remembers his own choice of Washington,DC, which, after looking at practices from Boston to Atlanta, he chose because, in no small part, he remembered the people there were smart, engaging, analytical  and he knew he would be frustrated dealing with people who were slow, who asked no questions, who could not remember their medications and never knew what their medications were for and had no interest in what was wrong with them, but only in what you could do to make them better.

The Phantom moved from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he had done his medical training, to southern Rhode Island, a rural area, where education levels were low, and found working with the patients there frustrating because people seemed passive, uninterested in understanding what they needed to know to get better. So, ultimately, he gave up and went back home to the "magnet" Brooks describes of a highly educated population.

Truth is never so simple as Brooks formulates these demographics. Eventually, after years of dealing with highly educated, highly "entitled" often obsessive and neurotic people, the Phantom moved to coastal New Hampshire, where the percentage of people with college degrees is around 30%. But the percentage of high skilled workers in this area is closer to 80%. These are the people who work at the Boat Yard, who do the sort of work you see on This Old House. They never would , never could go to Harvard. If and when their kids go to college, college is Hesser College, Keene State, or for the really ambitious, the University of New Hampshire, the sort of school David Brooks says looks for faculty from the elite institutions and would never even consider hiring a graduate of their own institution. 

There are a mix of people here, not the clean divide Brooks describes, or the gated communities of a Fisher Island. Drive down the road to York, Maine and you see magnificent mansions built on the rocky cliffs overlooking the ocean, but right next to those are trailer parks with the most modest homes.

There are people here whose eyes glaze over whenever the Phantom tries to explain why insulin works, how a diagnosis is made. All they want is a simple instruction: Take this pill and don't worry your head about why. But there are far more who listen carefully, have read on the internet about their problem and come to the office with good questions and who go back to their jobs as computer workers, skills they learned on the job or in no name community colleges, not in elite institutions. They are self taught or taught on the job and they earn solid livings and they are bright in ways people from Princeton and Harvard and Stanford are not bright. 

There are many sorts of intelligence, but for most of them, humility is part of the mix. The willingness to sound stupid to ask a question which allows you to learn is part of that mix. The curiosity, but first the belief that curiosity will be rewarded rather than derided or frustrated, is essential. The belief in yourself which allows you to learn, to want to learn new stuff every day, is part of most intelligence. The capacity to allow yourself to become excited about things is part of intelligence.

My son had a girlfriend who taught him how to be a successful student. He had a tendency to read and to get excited about something and to get distracted by reading more about it. His girlfriend stopped him. No, you read just enough to write the report and get your "A" and then you move on. Don't get bogged down with wanting to know more, with getting all excited , just read it, write it and move on. She was valedictorian at her college, Phi Beta Kappa, an Ivy Leaguer.  When she got hold of him, he was floundering. Once she arranged his thoughts he never got less than an "A."

But something was lost along that road, for him, as he moved from the unsuccessful student to the ruthless grade grubber. Before he met his girlfriend, he had been assigned a book report on the biography of a famous American and trolling in the Sidwell Friends School library, he came across a very slim volume on Benjamin Franklin, written by none other than D.H. Lawrence, in that breezy British style. Lawrence thought Franklin  a Luddite which would not have bothered Lawrence, but what he hated about Franklin was his hypocrisy.  My son had picked up the book for the sole reason that it was very slim and would take no time to read, but he fell in love with the whole idea of critical history, of thinking, judgmental history. He wrote his own report, trying to echo that breezy style. 

He was crushed when his teacher gave him a C-, which at Sidwell was next to failing. She had been incensed at his insouciance, at his lack of respect for a founding father. She could not understand the style he aspired to and took it as a sign of disrespect for the assignment, for her, for Franklin and for the United States of America, so help us God. She was a graduate of the Columbia School of Education and she could plainly see he had not taken his assignment seriously, the most important part of his semester's grade. 

That is meritocracy for you.