Dissecting The Myths Of Merit And Meritocracy PART-X

By Narendra Kumar Arya 15 January, 2013 


Countercurrents.org:

Concentration of Merit:
The present Indian society exhibits a peculiar phenomenon when we see merit as trait concentrated into certain sections of Indian society which is easily identifiable on caste lines. Elsewhere across other societies globally too; it has got and shows strong links with dominant ethnic identities, In eastern Europe gypsies and Muslims, in USA whites that too, other than Hispanics (the case of newly migrated Chinese, Korean and Indian professionals is different as they are permitted only to immigrate on their high-tech professional qualifications) and African-Americans; in India Dalits, Backward Castes, Muslims and Women specially are said to be lacking merit .Is merit a castiest phenomenon? Is it racial, too? Why merit lands and persists in certain castes, ethnicities, why? It has to have; otherwise, it has to be just mythical. Either merit originates, flourishes or spreads on ethnic grounds or it does not exist at all, in other words than it is just not merit; it is not merit at all, it is a pure fallacy. It just an ethnic or castiest tendency which exists like a symbiotic parasite. It shows that institutionalization of merit has erected with bricks and mortar of ethnic favoritism, nepotism and partially – most of the times consciously with vigilant discriminatory mindset and practice and a few times unconsciously and routinely following the stereotypes and prejudices lent from peers and traditions. The belief that merit encircles around some specific communities and repels off some others is based on serious misunderstandings which have their roots in psychological perversions. Stereotypes act as devices of gross generalizations about a group or community on the basis of a member of it – a socio-cultural phenomenon. The heavy bias during growth period of concept formation regarding racial and caste groups etc. in process of categorization leads to prejudiced stereotypes. One such process is gating mechanism which involves selective filtering of perceptual inputs that is of our ‘liking' or ‘requirement'—two persons of equal abilities but belonging to different caste groups namely Brahmin and Dalit would elicit different perception regarding their almost equal abilities, in case of Brahmin these would be ‘pronounced' while in case of Dalit ‘denounced', in usual conditions usually, by upper caste dominated social institutions. This is how in our castiest societies consciously or unconsciously prejudices and stereotypes and perceptual deformations persist cyclically and support specific case of merit. Merit is simply not merit. Merit much more than merit judged on our own notion of merit. It is practically much more sophisticated phenomenon than we understand as a theoretical reality. It fetches and absorbs inputs and strengths from discrimination and inequality–operated social, psychological, cultural and economic environments to feed itself. Merit is not an absolute and empirically objective fact. In most of the societies and most of the times; it is fictitious and horribly a ‘false consciousness' or if insisted a fact jeopardized.

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