Motus Mentis

A while back I quoted some passages from the book Before the Sabbath, which is a year-long collection of daily musings by the longshoreman and autodidact Eric Hoffer, written in 1974 and 1975, toward the end of his life. I was reminded of Mr. Hoffer again today, when I ran across an item by Matt Yglesias titled Scholarships Go Disproportionately To White Students.

In it Mr. Yglesias presents the following simple chart, taken from an academic study of scholarship grants:

As you can see, the majority of the scholarships represented here do indeed go to white students. They are merit-based scholarships, however, so presumably they are being awarded as intended: to foster the further development of those students who have demonstrated superior ability and academic discipline.

Mr. Yglesias doesn’t suggest that these scholarships are being awarded wrongly, in the sense of somehow being given to those not of demonstrably superior merit, and he makes clear that his complaint is not even really about race. But he doesn’t like it nevertheless, and sees this graph as “a symptom of the fact that the incentive structure of American higher education is totally screwy.” The problem, he laments, is that ” the way higher education works in America is to deliver the most resources to the people who need the least help.”

Well, that’s one way to look at it. Here’s another:

Civilizations, as they advance, create an ever-growing body of knowledge and lore that must be passed on to each new generation. Should a civilization reach a point where the succeeding generation has too few people of sufficient quality to receive that burden and carry it forward, it collapses. Because of this, it’s far more important for the survival of a high civilization that the men and women at its youthful vanguard be of the most superior quality possible than it is to lift a few more from lower to higher mediocrity. It makes sense for such a society to seek out the very brightest of its youth and give them all the support and encouragement it possibly can.

I’m making no point about race here, and Mr. Yglesias says he isn’t either (despite appearances). What he seems to object to is the very idea of meritocracy itself, presumably on the principle that the greatest good is rather to reduce inequality. Great civilizations build high towers, yearning for the stars — but those lofty parapets necessarily stand far above the warehouses, kitchens, armories, stockades and stables at ground level, and it seems Mr. Yglesias (along with, I think, many others on the Left) finds that objectionable.

These thoughts reminded me that Eric Hoffer had expressed just this idea, more or less, somewhere in his book, so I went looking for it. I found it on page 116, in a passage dated May 6th, 1975:

A nation is on its way out when it devotes much of its wealth and energies to the care and welfare of the least-endowed segment of its population and puts a low ceiling on those who ceaselessly strive and achieve.

Before the Sabbath is rich with such aphorisms and insights. I’ll offer some more excerpts shortly.