Wilfred Mark McClay

[...]because of its openness to new talent wherever it appears, a true meritocracy could plausibly claim to be more fully the "rule of the best" than any hereditary aristocracy. [...]after one generation a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class. [...]the families in which such children are raised will likely impart to them the habit of reading, study, learning, and discussion, as well as a fairly uniform set of social skills and approved attitudes, tastes, and political views, thus bestowing upon them a cluster of advantages that those without such advantages will find hard even to comprehend, let alone duplicate. [...]does the meritocratic elite glide into being an enclaved elite, one that can claim with utter sincerity, even though the system of selection is absurdly skewed, that it is still a genuinely meritocratic elite. [...]when one considers the steep decline of opportunity for those Americans who must live outside the magic circle of meritocratic validation — those middle- and working-class Americans who must deal with the steady erosion of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs, the downward pressure on wages and employment caused by the steady export of jobs and steady import of immigrants competing for the diminishing number of low-skill jobs that remain, and the open condescension with which such people’s anxieties and fears are regarded by meritocratic elite culture — it is not surprising that a growing edge of bitterness and anger, even rage, has crept into what passes for our national discourse. [...]is a situation from which we are still emerging, in which the putative experts turned out not to be experts at all.

[...]despite all the wonderful possibilities that beckon from the sunlit uplands of technological progress, the digital revolution that is upon us threatens not only to disrupt the economic model of higher education but to undermine the very qualities of mind that are the university's reason for being. The first part of my title not only refers to the man and his unique biographical context, but also uses his name to label something more general : aparticular kind of pivotal moment in human history, somethingthat he both described well and experienced fully- a moment of profound social transition in which an entire way of life is in the process of being inexorably transformed, but in which the precise shape of this transformation is yet to be fully determined. A leveling democratic regime would have sweeping effects in every facet of human life: not merely in politics and institutions, but also in family life, in literature, in philosophy, in manners, in mores, in male-female relations, in ambition, in friendship, and in attitudes toward war and peace.

The commonest definition in circulation is a long sentence from a congressional statute-the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, the legislation that established the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.\n One of the most powerful witnesses to that fact was Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World (1932) continues to grow in stature as our world comes increasingly to resemble the one depicted in its pages.