The issue with meritocracy is that merits are fundamentally against the concept of equality and human dignity. In an ideal world everybody should be perfect.
This is the problem with using "equality" when one means "fairness". The facet of equality encompassing rights, opportunities, &c. -- YES! That is good and right, we need that. The facet of equality encompassing the idea of "people should be given positions and tasks even if others are available and better able to perform them" is not. That's the issue. All people should be treated
fairly, with the aegis of fairness including equal treatment under the law, equal access to public goods, &c.
Because
people are not equal. People do not all do things exactly as well or poorly as each other. They do not all have the exact same physical and mental capabilities, nor the interests and inclinations to use them in the pursuit of. People
should be given the same opportunities and rights, but that does not include access to earned positions, advanced opportunities, rewards, &c. which they did not earn.
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Take this as an example: all people in a state should have full, free access to public schooling of the same quality as that afforded to all of their cohort. That's pretty much universally accepted in the first world through secondary school. There's some debate about university being included, but lets' assume that it is. So then, a student has completed their schooling and is ready to move into the next stage of their life.
Maybe they want to go to graduate school and pursue further education. If they demonstrated the skills demanded by their program of choice, as measured by whatever metrics are in place, they will likely be accepted and be free to attend classes, eventually obtaining a degree. If they did
not demonstrate those skills (say, they barely scraped through their undergraduate work with a 2.0 GPA and didn't take any courses relevant to the Masters program they applied for), they should not be given access to the program in the name of equality.
Obviously, they should not be rejected for any reason
other than a lack of merit, but lack of merit alone is enough. And they were not treated unfairly or as less than others of their cohort. They had the same opportunities and resources, but some combination of low talent, unwillingness or inability to apply themselves, poor attention to their work, &c. relative to their peers meant that they were less qualified--so much so, in this case, that they failed to gain entry at all.
That's the fundamental delusion behind the notion of absolute equality, that the discrimination of ability is negative. It's not. It's even present at the most basic level in our evolutionary development and instinctive reproductive urges. If someone cannot competently perform a function, they should not be allowed to try if any other option exists. If they are less competent than another individual, they should not be chosen unless the other person carries baggage sufficient to outweigh their competence.
It's also why affirmative action is a slapdash band-aid solution; the source of the issue is that minority groups are often treated unfairly at much more basic levels. Their family may have been broken or impoverished, the public goods available to them worse than those available to others in their generation, and related issues which set them behind in fundamental ways--lower interest, underdeveloped knowledge, less access to professional and academic social networks, &c., such that they are often less able and less motivated to seek out higher-level opportunities, not because of their own fundamental abilities and nature, but because their development was curtailed and stunted by a flawed system which treated them unfairly in their foundational years.
IOW hiring quotas treat a symptom, not the illness. It makes people concerned with the problem feel better without actually resolving it.
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On a related note, you can see how things tend to progress when the problem
is addressed at the root in the American legal system in the context of gender. Obvious there is and has been a very heavy male majority in the legal profession. Among the senior ranks of law firms, judicial positions, &c. that's still true. But in the past decade or so, that's actually
flipped among law students, with a current female majority (at least as of a couple years ago when I was researching this), and the gender split of practicing lawyers was within a percent or two of 50-50.
That's what real progress looks like. The process starts at a very young age, so you won't even begin to see results until a decade or more after changes are implemented, and you'll still have decades more where the old guard are still working. I think it's not really that surprising that the "ALL the change, NOW" demographic is mostly among my generation and younger, given that we're generally impatient entitled idjits. Not excluding myself from that either, by the by. :V