The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Meritocracy and Its Discontents

The problem with the idea of excellence is that someone has to define it. And those with power tend to define it to suit themselves and their progeny. Aristocracy therefore becomes the natural order of society. And so long as there is someone lower down on the social scale than oneself, aristocracy can be generally satisfying. But beware the wrath of those who become conscious that there is no one left to despise. They could rally around the most unlikely leaders to redress their unrecognised grievances. No, that can’t be right. Surely that can’t happen in modern democratic society which celebrates competitive excellence... Or so we thought.

“We are at war with ourselves in the greatest calamity our nation has ever faced. We kill each other in deals gone wrong, in a black market of drugs plied in the shadow of our abandoned cathedrals... What we do now is eat.” Collins nailed it in 2001. While everyone else was worried about the dotcom crash, he saw the crash of a country. And he predicted how the country would react: by punishing itself. “There’s an indignation in this country at what has happened to us. We need to exact a brutalising punishment, indiscriminate and horrific, upon ourselves. We like to see ourselves mutilated. It’s part of our psychosis of dismemberment, deregulation, downsizing, cutting things.”

What a shame that these losers in the global game didn’t wake up to the politics and economics of their situation when something could have been done about them. When their rivers burst into flame from the petroleum waste dumped into them; when their factories pushed out waste into the air and the ground; when their rural tranquility was invaded by fast food outlets, shopping malls, and box stores, these were not symptoms of wealth but of profligate inefficiency and political indifference. They realised this when the only option left was to destroy the system that let it happen. So they did just that. And they feel proud of it, even if their own condition hasn’t improved at all. At least for the moment they can feel the thrill of power, however illusory.

“It’s not hard to find casualties, what’s hard is to get people to admit they are casualties. It’s hard to get them to admit there’s a war going on.” The war these people have is with the aristocrats who run the businesses and the agencies of government. But the war they want is with the people they feel entitled to despise. They want a scapegoat not an adversary. Mobs like scapegoats; they’re surer targets than men in suits or other men with guns. And scapegoats make good press. They unify the disunited like nothing else. Scapegoats restore the illusion of power to those who think they deserve it but leave those in control untouched. This is part of the national character not an occasional aberration: “It’s maybe the greatest secret we possess as a nation, our sense of alienation from everyone else around us, our ability to have no sympathy, no empathy for others’ suffering, a decentralised philosophy of individual will, a culpability that always lands back on each of us.”

The meritocracy is grounded on formalised education. No education, then no test results; no test results, then no political traction; no political power, then the extra-political will have to do: “The political was eclipsed in our America. What you usually saw was the image of a man waving a gun, screaming at police, a bullhorn in the hand of a negotiator behind a squad car, a crack SWAT team angling for a shot, and then the sudden eruption of gunfire, the slumped potato-sack body in a pool of his own blood as the SWAT team, dressed in fatigues and visors, showed themselves from alleyways and doorways and rooftops.” The powerful are confirmed in their presumptions to power.

The irony of course is that the powerful don’t feel themselves powerful. The meritocracy is itself strictly hierarchical. Those meritoriously inferior are subject to the meritoriously superior. They do have the occasional recognition of their position as ‘the keepers of truth’, that is as the arbiters of reality for those who have no place at all in the hierarchy. These are the American untouchables, the trailer trash and migrant workers who lack not just educational credentials but also even an understanding of how entitlement is created. Perhaps their ignorance is a blessing. Pity more the poor striver at the bottom of the meritocratic pile who knows the score but can’t pass the tests.

“All we could do was wait for the cowboy Reagan to come and deliver us. But that was all in the future, beyond our scope of understanding.” And Reagan begat the Bushes, who begat 45, each of whom defined excellence to suit themselves and their progeny. Hence the plaintive cry which forms the theme of the book: “Oh God, it’s hard work dispensing with our history.” The fictional mystery centres on an ‘ancestral farm’, clearly a metaphor for the country itself which hides so much of its past through obfuscating myth.

In scanning the reviews, I see that one of the meritorious strivers commented “What right does an Irishman have to call America a failure?” That was in 2012. She probably hadn’t even heard of Donald Trump. Collins could see what she couldn’t and it frightened him. “What we’re doing is creating a culture of psychopaths, plain and simple,“ he writes. Perhaps the Irish have seen it all before; or at least they maintain an historical sense absent in America.

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