Davison's Doodle

Interesting Analysis

I read David Brooks column in the New York Times.  He is what I call a thinking person’s conservative.  Given all the talk about leadership, quality and the less than qualified, his latest column is an interesting analysis of where the country is and has something to say about leadership in our denomination.  Here are a few paragraphs.  Click the title to read the entire column.

The Power Elite
by David Brooks | The New York Times Online | February 18, 2010

One of the great achievements of modern times is that we have made society more fair. Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite. If your father went to Harvard, you had a 90 percent chance of getting in yourself, and the path upward from there was grooved in your favor.

Since then, we have opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and members of many other groups. Moreover, we’ve changed the criteria for success. It is less necessary to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working.

First, the meritocracy is based on an overly narrow definition of talent. Our system rewards those who can amass technical knowledge. But this skill is only marginally related to the skill of being sensitive to context. It is not related at all to skills like empathy. Over the past years, we’ve seen very smart people make mistakes because they didn’t understand the context in which they were operating.