![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsCrown subject John Derbyshire, who has had as much occasion to say idiotic things as I have, recently wrote a short article about how Americans are unhappy with meritocracies even while they live in the most meritocratic society on the planet.
Derb's essay is full of painful moments: he cites The Bell Curve, among other things, and repeats the far-right canard that if any member of an "oppressed minority" shows strong signs of talent and ability, the system will rush to that person's aid and guarantee a place in the highest rungs of our meritocracy, if only to assuage liberal guilt about all the rest that can't be saved.
But Derb does give one little point which may, or may not, be as silly as the rest. He writes down the four "kinds" into which he divides Americans, quadrants of lefts, rights, theists, and non-theists:
There's no punishment in the afterlife for failure, as the right believer would have; there's only the pain of failure in this life, which can be pretty harsh as it is.
Derb's essay is full of painful moments: he cites The Bell Curve, among other things, and repeats the far-right canard that if any member of an "oppressed minority" shows strong signs of talent and ability, the system will rush to that person's aid and guarantee a place in the highest rungs of our meritocracy, if only to assuage liberal guilt about all the rest that can't be saved.
But Derb does give one little point which may, or may not, be as silly as the rest. He writes down the four "kinds" into which he divides Americans, quadrants of lefts, rights, theists, and non-theists:
- Left Believer: Sinful human nature blinding us to the social justice ethic implicit in the Law, the Gospel, or the Koran, depending on your precise confession.
- Right Believer: Social pathologies — illegitimacy, easy divorce, feminism, a corrupt popular culture — arising from ignorance of, or wanton defiance of, the divine plan.
- Left Unbeliever: Oppression by the various types of human malignity that inevitably arise in capitalist society: sexism, racism, patriarchy, etc.
- Right Unbeliever: Insufficiently rigorous education policy, insufficiently family-friendly tax and health-insurance policies, excessive regulation stifling enterprise, etc.
There's no punishment in the afterlife for failure, as the right believer would have; there's only the pain of failure in this life, which can be pretty harsh as it is.
