There is no merit in having merit

I have the doubt that in the debate on the merits – to which the government has dedicated half of the Ministry of Education and which in the newspapers every day receives public praise and historicization, also in relation to the history of the Italian left, as in the beautiful article by Giovanni Belardelli published two days ago by the Gazette – no one has yet really asked what we mean by merit and if a shared definition is possible. The concept of merit was established with the rise of the bourgeoisie, to affirm the right of everyone to conquer power and wealth based on his abilities, and not on the titles inherited at birth by divine right. In our culture, therefore, merit is the right of everyone to an earthly reward for what he has done, the relationship between ability, effort and result. Merit legitimizes success, of which it appears both cause and moral justification. In football it is very clear: when we say that a team has won with merit, we say that its victory is right. In short, the idea of ​​merit inscribes the acts of men in a frame of values. The merit is the secular concept with which we have replaced Fate, Providence and Grace to convince us that there is justice in what happens.

Its ambiguity consists in the fact that the characteristics that define merit have very little moral, that is, they do not concern the good or the just, but what is functional and suitable. We could reduce these characteristics to five words starting with F: Fatigue, Strength, Fortune, Cunning, and Ferocity, understood as determination to achieve a result. It is evident that there is no moral merit in being more resistant and available to fatigue, strong, able to seize luck, smart or bad than others. On the contrary. “The capable and deserving”, cited by Article 34 of the Constitution which links, in fact, the “school open to all” to merit, are not necessarily the best, or at least not in a moral sense. They are the best suited to compete. Since article 34 states that “the capable and deserving, even if without means, have the right to reach the highest grades of studies”, to these five Fs we could add another, Hunger, which in fact is often cited among the winning characteristics of a person. In this way, however, we would arrive at another paradox: the favored would be those who have less, because they are more eager to conquer what they do not have.

In short, the concept of merit, from whatever side you look at it, implies the acceptance of conflict as the law of human societies. And it reaffirms the law of the strongest because it considers it right (i.e. natural) that the stronger (or suitable) prevail over the weaker (or unsuitable). Merit, that is, is deeply connected to Darwinism and liberalism, and constitutes the ideological core of capitalism because it offers a moral justification for competition, accepted as the natural condition of the world. To do this, however, he programmatically confuses the best with the most suitable. In what sense, for example, would those who are more ambitious be better than those who have no ambition? And why is it that those who are successful are better off than those who are not? However you turn it around, there is something monstrous about the quasi-religious faith, in the fact that the value of an individual can be measured on the basis of what he gets, even to the detriment of those who have not made the same effort, had the same determination, intelligence or cunning, in short, of those who did not deserve.

Every conquest always corresponds to a loss, and every merit is not a choice but something to which one is obliged by nature, just as idleness belongs to the idle and fear to the fearful. It will be said, the merit consists precisely in the ability to react to one’s defects. But what merit would there be in having this ability? The truth is that there is no merit to have merit, because merit depends on nature or education, that is, on factors for which there is no merit. Nature is the way you are born, and there is no merit in being born in one way or another, and education is what you learn from the environment in which you grow up, which again does not depend on merit. Meritocracy only prescribes that the strong prevail. He doesn’t care about protecting the weak. Article 3 of the Constitution states: “It is the duty of the Republic to remove the obstacles of an economic and social nature which, by limiting the freedom and equality of citizens, prevent the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers to the political, economic and social organization of the country “. If the obstacles must be removed it is to mitigate the competition, not to enhance it, because “the full development of the human person” cannot consist only, and for anyone, in the possibility of competing and succeeding.