“The c-word: culture.” Finally, the American politician Vivek Ramaswamy has said it. “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.” Attackers have ignored the “our” in this X post, and it’s easy to see why: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
How can this not hit hard? Imagine if a prominent immigrant politician in India from a minority community (now don’t laugh) said something like this: “Lazy Indians, spending their days and nights in Bollywood dreams and dancing at weddings and festivals – why can’t we spend their time building better roads and hospitals and businesses?”
In the midst of the mayhem Ramaswamy’s comment has unleashed, one critic of the H-1B visa policy has worded the sober reminder that a society and a nation is more than just utilitarian labour: “Framing success as requiring the abandonment of social experiences or leisure is not only incorrect but also damaging. Balance and well-being are critical components of sustainable achievement. Moreover, your anecdotes about immigrant families restricting TV and prioritising STEM success propagate a narrow and stereotypical view of achievement, ignoring the variety of paths to success that American families foster.”
But the mutual independence of culture and merit is a delusion — evident clearly in the divisive issue of American college admissions. The sociologist Jerome Karabel has shown that before 1920, admission criteria to Harvard, Yale and Princeton were primarily centred on academic excellence as evident in subject tests. As Jewish enrolments grew, so did anti-Semitism, and the definition of merit shifted so that Jewish students could be excluded more effectively from admission, and White Anglo-Saxon applicants given easier passage. Admission criteria moved from being primarily academic to a focus on “character”, as evident through the candidate’s involvement in sports and extracurricular activities, and even a perceived sense of “manliness”. The upper edge of the math Olympiad champ or the valedictorian over the jock and the prom queen was not as sharp as you’d think.
The complex relationship of the c-word and the m-word has ensured that throughout the ages — and along the globe — human society has idealised different qualities in individuals. Howard Gardner, who dethroned IQ in favour of Multiple Intelligence theory, has reminded us of this classic but forgotten truth: The ancient Greeks valued physical agility, rational judgment, and virtuous behaviour. Romans prized the virtue of masculine courage. Islam cherished the holy soldier. And traditional Chinese society, influenced by the philosophy of Confucius, came to value the person skilled in music, chess, calligraphy and drawing. Intelligence, as we understand it today, was scarcely one of these classic qualities. In fact, Gardner argues persuasively, it is only in the last few centuries that the idea of the intelligent person has become central to Western culture.
Fireworks happen when culture and merit abandon their secret handshake and fight in the open. Whether the fight happens along the corridors of policy or the Metaverse, which increasingly clouds these corridors. The crossing of borders becomes the clash of civilisations, and the immigrant body, no matter how prominent, becomes stricken by these conflicts. No wonder this culture-merit fight is happening over the H-1B visa policy that affects immigrant professionals, a good many of whom are from India. Remember the days and weeks and months building up to November 2024, when Donald Trump couldn’t respond to any question without blaming it on the immigrants? The tech-billionaires powering Trump, most notably the fabled owner of the platform where this debate first exploded, were quick to convince the President-elect of the necessary apartheid in immigration — between the STEM professionals trained by the tax-money of other nations and the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free that the Statue of Liberty once sought to welcome to the American shores.
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The way it looks now, Trump has sided with Elon Musk, who has promised to throw his weight on the side of the high-performing immigrants without whom business and innovation hubs such as Silicon Valley might come to a halt. That’s the genius of successful populist dictators. Elected on the bedrock of poor White resentment, the sweeping mistrust of expertise and devotion to the messiah as the outsider. And backed by a multi-billionaire who emigrated from the most devastatingly segregated apartheid regime of the modern age, supporting the highly-trained elites from an equally divided country, India.
The US presidency has not necessarily been the seat of high intellect, training, or education – nor does it need to be, in the world of democracy. My American friends still remember well the Dan Quayle jokes, whether true or apocryphal — arguments made by the Vice-President to the Senior Bush that Americans should certainly learn Latin so that they can freely “communicate” with the Latin Americans, or that by the next decade, America would “send” astronauts to the solar system. But the Trump-Musk nexus looks far, far smarter than that. With spiritual support from poor White disenchantment, it looks all set to derive actual administrative energy from hi-tech elites. Supported by jocks, run by nerds.
Majumdar is the writer, most recently of, The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony
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