and:
Say which word, or both or neither, has the same meaning as the first word:
impregnable terile terilevacuous
nominal terileexorbitant teriledidactic
Those who correctly met such challenges could be counted upon to merit academic success, jobs in Wall Street firms and ensuing membership in country clubs. In Conant’s words, the SAT was “a new type of social instrument whose proper use may be the means of salvation of the classlessness of the nation … a means of recapturing social flexibility, a means of approximating more nearly the American ideal.”
This American ideal did not, of course, entail actual equality but merely an initial period of strictly policed equal opportunity. If all citizens had the same chance to go to school and find the antonym among a list of words and enter university, there would be justice in any aristocracy that ultimately emerged among Americans.
By 1946, the year of the publication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the promise of its twenty-sixth provision had become, at least in many parts of Europe and the United States, more or less a reality: “Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.”
Alongside these educational reforms came legislation fostering equal opportunities in the workplace. In Britain, the landmark meritocratic measure was the introduction, in 1870, of competitive entrance examinations for the Civil Service. For centuries, the service had been home to the penniless and dim-witted relatives of aristocrats, with some catastrophic results for the empire. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the costs of employing these well-mannered, partridge-shooting fools had grown so high that two government officials, Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan, were asked to devise an alternative system of recruitment. After studying the bureaucracy for a few months, Trevelyan remarked in a letter to the Times,“There can be no doubt that our high aristocracy have been accustomed to employ the service as a means of providing for the waifs and strays of their families—as a sort of foundling hospital where those who had no energy to make their way in open professions might receive a nominal office for life at the expense of the public.”
Seventy years later, in The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell was still protesting against the ingrained evils of nepotism. Britain needed a revolution, he insisted, but one without “red flags and street fighting;” instead, what was required was “a fundamental shift of power” towards those who deserved to wield it: “What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the old. Right through our national life we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion that a halfwitted public-schoolboy is better for command than an intelligent mechanic. Although there are gifted and honest individuals among them, we have got to break the grip of the moneyed class as a whole. England has got to assume its real shape.”
Throughout the developed world, replacing the undeserving with the able became a leading ambition behind employment reform. In the United States, equality of opportunity was pursued with a special intensity. In March 1961, less than two months after assuming office, President John F. Kennedy established a Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and charged it with ending employment discrimination in all its forms in government departments and private businesses. A series of specific laws followed: the Equal Pay Act (1963), the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Equal Employment Opportunity Act (1964), the Older Americans Act (1965), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967), the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1976) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). With such legislation in place, it was plausible to believe, however old one happened to be and whatever one’s religion, colour or sex, that one would be guaranteed a fair chance of success.
Although progress towards a purely meritocratic system may have been slow, at times haphazard and as yet incomplete, already from the middle of the nineteenth century, especially in the United States and Britain, the trend had started to influence public perceptions of the relative virtues of the poor and the rich. Once jobs and rewards began to be handed out on the basis of dispassionate interviews and examinations, it could no longer be argued that worldly position was wholly divorced from inner qualities, as many Christian thinkers had proposed, nor could it be claimed that the wealthy and powerful must a priori have attained their station through corrupt means, as Rousseau and Marx had suggested. Once the partridge shooters had been ejected from the Civil Service and replaced with the intelligent offspring of the working classes, once the SATs had emptied Ivy League universities of the witless sons and daughters of East Coast plutocrats and filled them instead with the hardworking children of shop owners, it became harder to maintain that status was the result entirely of a rigged system.
Faith in an increasingly reliable connection between merit and worldly success in turn endowed money with a new moral quality. When riches were still being handed down the generations according to bloodlines and connections, it was natural to dismiss the notion that wealth was an indicator of any virtue besides that of having been born to the right parents. But in a meritocratic world in which prestigious and well-paid jobs could be secured only through native intelligence and ability, money began to look like a sound signifier of character. The rich were not only wealthier, it seemed; they might also be plain better.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, many Christian thinkers, particularly in the United States, revised their views on money accordingly. American Protestant denominations preached that God demanded of his followers a life of achievement both temporal and spiritual; the possession of riches in this world, it was suggested, was evidence that one deserved a good place in the next, an attitude reflected in the subtitle of the Reverend Thomas P. Hunt’s best-seller of 1836,The Book of Wealth: In Which It Is Proved from the Bible That It Is the Duty of Every Man to Become Rich. Wealth came to be described as a reward from God for holiness. John D. Rockefeller was unabashed to state that it was the Lord who had made him rich, while William Lawrence, the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, writing in 1892, avowed,“In the long run, it is only to the man of morality that wealth comes. We, like the Psalmist, occasionally see the wicked prosper, but only occasionally. Godliness is in league with riches.”
Thanks to the meritocratic ideal, multitudes were granted the opportunity to fulfil themselves. Gifted and intelligent individuals of the sort who for centuries had been kept down within an immobile, castelike hierarchy were now free to express their talents on a theoretically level playing field. No longer was background, gender, race or age an impassable obstacle to advancement. An element of justice had finally entered into the distribution of rewards.
But there was also, inevitably, a darker side to the story for those of low status. If the successful merited their success, it necessarily followed that the failures had to merit their failure. In a meritocratic age, an element of justice appeared to enter into the distribution of poverty no less than that of wealth. Low status came to seem not merely regrettable but also deserved.
Without doubt, attaining financial success in an economic meritocracy, without the benefit of inheritance or advantages of birth, provided a measure of personal validation that the nobleman of old, who had been given his money and his castle by his father, had never experienced. But at the same time, financial failure became associated with a sense of shame that the peasant of old, denied all chances in life, had also, and more happily, been spared.