What Will It Take to Unlearn Meritocracy?
Behind the Material Girls Episode: The Notebook x Melodrama with Vanessa Zoltan (or rather, more on why Hannah hates a certain type of guy...)
from Hannah McGregor
In our Material Girls episode about The Notebook I briefly described author Nicholas Sparks as one of my least favourite kinds of guys. Now, I don’t know Nicholas Sparks personally. Prior to doing research for this episode, the only thing I knew about him was that he puts 16 packets of Splenda in his chicken salad which, while disgusting, is certainly not a cancellable offense.
But then I read this profile of him and I was immediately filled with a visceral dislike. Part of that is certainly the masterful snark of author Karen Valby, as seen in this stellar opening:
Before author Nicholas Sparks even takes a seat at his small-town North Carolina country club, he’s happily ticking off his latest triumphs. ”The Notebook is coming out in CliffsNotes,” he says. ”I think the only other contemporary author they’ve done that for is Toni Morrison.” (And Amy Tan, Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver…)
Obviously my first reaction was “get Toni Morrison’s name out of your Splenda-coated mouth” but then I found myself getting curious. Why Toni Morrison? What exactly was he trying to get at with this comparison? The answer comes when Valby asks him about whether he thinks of himself as a romance writer.
‘Would Tom Clancy go to a legal thriller writers’ convention?’ he asks in the patient tone one might assume with a naughty toddler. … ‘I write dramatic fiction. If you go into a further subgenre, it would be a love story, but it has its roots in the Greek tragedies. This genre evolved through Shakespeare. He did Romeo and Juliet. Hemingway did A Farewell to Arms. I do this currently today.’
At this point it’s clear what Sparks is trying to say about himself: he is one of the all-time great writers. What’s intriguing is the way he draws on different forms of capital to make his point. Tom Clancy transcends legal thrillers due, presumably, to his market success. Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway were certainly not airport bestseller writers, though, so that’s a different kind of capital, cultural capital as Pierre Bourdieu would call it, meant to indicate that his work is not just successful but culturally significant and enduring. The logic here is simple: by virtue of his financial success, he is more important than other writers.
That, my friends, is some classic market-driven capitalist thinking, and one of capitalism’s favourite things is the fantasy of meritocracy. The basic premise of meritocracy is this: under free market capitalism, everyone has the opportunity to work very hard and eventually succeed. Because the free market offers an equal playing field, everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed, which means that if you succeed it isn’t luck or privilege or structural inequity, it’s merit. By extension, meritocracy suggests that those who fail (whose books don’t sell well, for example, or whose chicken salads only have 12 packets of Splenda) do so because they weren’t trying hard enough. And those who succeed are, of course, better people.
Sparks’ adherence to this kind of thinking comes through in the story he tells about himself. He is successful because he works hard, and because he works hard he would have been successful at anything he did. Before he was an author he was a pharmaceuticals rep (cursed), and according to Valby, “If he hadn’t gone on to be a best-selling author, Sparks says he might have ended up a hedge fund manager. ‘I think I’d be good at it,’ he says. ‘In fact, I know I would.’”
That’s because, to this kind of guy, everything is a perfectible system. His days are regimented, and the success of that regimen is once again meant to draw a direct line between his hard work and his success:
“I’m efficient,” he clarifies, with an amused smile. On his official website, the numerically specific description of the author — “He’s 5’10” and weighs 180 pounds. He is an avid athlete who runs daily, lifts weights regularly, and competes in tae kwon do. He attends church regularly and reads approximately 125 books a year” — squares with his similarly methodical approach to writing. A novel takes him a few months to conceive and then five months to write. He sets a daily goal for himself of 2,000 words. He writes for five to six hours a day and types approximately 60 words a minute, which he says leaves him with 54 minutes an hour to stare at the computer and six minutes to actually write. “See,” he says, with a friendly shrug of his shoulders, “it’s not an unbelievable pace.”
Combined, the portrait cohering in my mind was enough to drive me back to Google (I gotta get off Google, the AI results are killing me) this time to ask “does Nicholas Sparks suck?” And lo and behold, I learned all about how he tried to prevent a “gay club” at his fancy Christian school. You know how I knew? Because meritocracy is, by its very nature, indivisible from the abuse of power.
If you believe that any power you have was earned by the fact that you worked harder and deserved success more than other people, then your power is a natural extension of your superiority as a person. And if you believe that you’re better than other people, then you’re likely to believe that you know better than them about how the world should be run. That’s how thin people end up being diet gurus and rich people end up being investment experts: the assumption that success is definitionally earned and thus that success is equivalent to expertise. From there it is, unfortunately, a slippery slope into an oligarchic worldview, in which the wealthiest people in the world have the inherent right to run the world.
But wait, Hannah, you might be saying. Are you implying that Nicholas Sparks’ perspective is an example of the proto-fascist underpinnings of free market capitalism that are playing out in real time on the global stage right now as we witness the rebirth of oligarchies?
Hey, you said it, not me. I just think he sounds like an asshole.
Said beautifully!