The merit privilege

‘Personally, I rather look forward to a computer programme winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility’, said Richard Dawkins, author and biologist, whose witty ripostes delivered with a signature smirk, typically directed at the religious, captivated my rational mind. These were the late 1990s. We were in our medical college hostel’s chit-chat corner where some of us with wide interests in science gathered every evening. Under the medical college men’s hostel banyan tree, our discussions typically focused on the latest sample of writing that dismantled foolish arguments of naive (religious) believers. Dawkins’s books and writing provided plenty of such material. Here was an intellectual behemoth often pitted against hobnailed ignorami bringing cheer to us young professionals, looking up to him, as if one from our own team had scored a winning goal. Today, as a doctor and a public health researcher, I look back at this chit-chat among the then doctors in the making. The higher knowledge that accrued to people like me, doctors, scientists and academia, gave us access to pedestals from which we could now be the new saints : rational and legitimate preachers unlike the ones we aim to displace, the ones we would like to call out for their boorish, irrational and unscientific foundations. In fact, I realised it was our meritorious ascent that is foundational to our pedestal. But how strong and deserved are our own foundations, I wondered. Should we not, before calling others out, examine our own backyards? So emerges the tale of two merits: science itself as an act of merit and the scientist professional’s aspirational society where people rise to the top based on well-deserved fruits of their labour through merit and nothing else. Could a well-designed meritocracy then help us overcome centuries of social baggage in

Humanity · Humility · Media studies · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · Law · Psychology · Public Health Policies and Education