Cognitive ability has become the gold standard of human esteem
Too many very clever people who are not very collaborative, in a room together could block the prospects with their love for complexity and conflict. What they have in their brainpower, lack in empathy. In our meritocracy IQ is valued much more highly than EQ (Emotional intelligence) or most physical ability.
Political analyst David Goodhart whose book Head, Hand, Heart delves into why smart people have become too powerful which created a dangerously unbalanced world by rewarding a small sliver of brain workers so disproportionately.
The Coronavirus pandemic has highlighted how essential another type of workers such as nurses, caregivers, supermarket shelf-stackers, cleaners and delivery drivers can be, who kept us all alive fed and cared for. Until recently much of this work was regarded as menial by the same society that now lauds them as key workers. We laud these professions on the signs we post in our windows during the quarantine. But the society’s winners are highly educated global elites – like people who crunch numbers, trade stocks, programme software, write newspaper articles and often speak in officious and emotionally distant jargon of their breed and represent the new ruling class who may be more toxic than the hereditary upper crust that came before them according to David Goodhart.
Meritocracy was supposed to be better than restrictive social structures of the past when family and social ties determined the outcomes. Over the past several decades as traditional class structures in US and UK began to break down, they were replaced by a new system of educational and professional advancement based on test scores, grades and intelligence determined by IQ, and suddenly smart working-class kids could become part of the meritocratic elite.
British sociologist Michael Young said “ Now that people are classified by ability, the gap between the classes that have inevitably become wider. The upper classes are no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism”.
Parts of our tax, finance policies that benefited those who made their money from investments rather than income were created by technocrats who worked at an algorithmic remove from the lives of real people.
Goodhart explains, Trump won in part because he bypassed the usual heady and alienating technocratic policy language favoured by the Clinton or Barack Obama and went straight for the gut, thereby driving home the painful truth that elites of all political stripes tend to look down on poorly educated. Market forces may come to favour heart and handwork as more brain work is done by artificial intelligence.
These days even a college degree will only take you so far, thanks to the education arms race at the heart of the meritocracy.
The idea that everyone needed such a credential, whether or not the job required it has led to a “professionalisation” of jobs such as nursing. And according to Goodhart it neither improved outcomes, nor job satisfaction which is largely due to the way professionalisation has decreased the time spent on low-status tasks such as caring, and increased the amount of bureaucratic paper-pushing. In recent years high-level knowledge workers have enjoyed increased levels of autonomy in their jobs, but routine or semi-routine jobs have seen it decrease it radically. That increases stress.
The cognitive class now shapes society largely in its own interests by prioritising the knowledge economy, ever-expanding higher education and shaping the very idea of a successful life. The cognitive takeover has gathered pace over the past forty years, as now 40 per cent of all jobs are graduate-only. The people who work their hands and hearts are valued alongside workers who manipulate data. Our society needs to spread status more widely, and provide meaning and value for people who cannot, or do not want to, achieve in the classroom and the professions as the struggle for status and dignity in the twenty-first century goes on.
David Goodhart in this timely analysis, divides human aptitudes into three Head (cognitive), Hand (manual and craft) and Heart (caring, emotional). It’s common sense that a good society needs to recognise the value of all three. Cognitive ability has become the gold standard of human esteem. The cognitive class now shapes society largely in its own interests, by prioritising the knowledge economy, ever-expanding higher education and shaping the very idea of a successful life.
Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st century by David Goodhart, Allen Lane £20/ Free Press $27, 368 pages.