Quote: (09-30-2014 12:24 PM)Sp5 Wrote:
Quote: (09-30-2014 12:13 PM)Feisbook Control Wrote:
Quote: (09-30-2014 12:07 PM)Sp5 Wrote:
Quote: (09-30-2014 11:31 AM)Feisbook Control Wrote:
Quote: (09-30-2014 08:37 AM)Sp5 Wrote:
Equality of opportunity is absolutely essential to a dynamic and healthy society. I do not mean equality of outcome. Ideally, every kid should have the opportunity to attend schools which educate them and gain the opportunity to compete for spots their natural talents and hard work qualify them for.
How soon we forget the problems with inequality. 100 years ago, the ruling class of the dominant power on earth, the British Empire, was largely hereditary. For a long time, officers in the British Army bought their commissions and promotions. Pedigreed social class and connections were far more important than performance. For an entertaining look at that system see the Flashman novels.
The promotion of pedigreed incompetents to senior rank led to several military disasters, including Balaclava and the Somme. Eventually the British Empire bled itself into morbidity until the system changed somewhat during and after WW II out of necessity and the lower classes were given some opportunity to rise.
How's that worked out for Britain then? I mean comparing where they were at -- militarily, scientifically, economically, culturally -- in the nineteenth and twentieth/twenty first centuries?
They were a crippled nation by 1919. They've been hobbling along since then, with the USA's help. Now they're another European nation, not an empire.
The Great War hurt them a lot more than any post WW II social changes did. The lingering effect of debt, disillusionment and destruction of resources.
The Great War is a great argument against the concept of aristocracy.
And the nineteenth century? e.g. this rather unimpressive aristocrat.
By "aristocrat" I do not mean people honored for achievement, like Isambard's father was. I mean hereditary privilege. I doubt hereditary peers would consider the Brunels as "members of the club."
Scientific endeavor and business were among the only means for commoners to rise.
I was being somewhat sarcastic. I know Brunel didn't come from an aristocratic family. I actually think that you're off by about a century with the UK (the eighteenth century being much closer to your characterisations of the pernicious influence od decadent and corrupt aristocracy). The nineteenth century was an amazing century, one in which men not from the aristocracy could do virtually anything. If you think about the great Britons of the nineteenth century, very few of them were aristocratic. I'm thinking of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, David Livingstone, Shackleton, Kitchener, Gordon, etc. Some came from upper middle class families, some were born into poverty. Yet the nineteenth century really was a time of massive achievement and an explosion in standards of living (despite the image many have of it), scientific progress, etc. It was surprisingly meritocratic. What they didn't have, of course, was universal suffrage, but I believe that was a good thing. Even in the case of the aristocracy, not all of them, maybe not even many of them, were complete bumbling idiots. Remember that both Nelson and Wellington were aristocratic. Britain in the first half of the 20th century still skated by on a lot of the traditions of the past. Yet in talking about Britain in the modern era, you couldn't have chosen a worse poster boy for modernity and postmodernity. Britain after 1945 has been an unmitigated disaster. Could we find a worse example of such a fall from grace? I can't think of one. Maybe Turkey/Ottoman Empire or Austria, though I don't think they quite measure up, and the Ottoman Empire was certainly on the slide for a long time prior to its demise.
