Are Hierarchies Natural?

We live, supposedly, in an egalitarian meritocracy — especially if we go solely by our laws and stated values. In practice, however, the picture is a little less picturesque.

As the story goes, meritocracy, that ‘momentous intellectual revolution’ (Adrian Wooldridge), brought about a comprehensive change in the way we think about the world:

Examine the basic building blocks of the meritocratic world view– assumptions about individualism, intelligence, hard work, the family, social mobility– and you discover that they are at variance with the attitudes that dominated most previous societies […] For millennia, most societies have been organized according to the very opposite principles to meritocracy. People inherited their positions in fixed social orders.

These ‘fixed social orders’ form the hierarchical view of the world, which was ‘the dominant view in Europe until relatively recently’. In this feudal era, it was ingrained in every individual that there was a divine order, from heaven to earth, with everyone organised according to rank:

Charlemagne instructed his subjects in the early 800s to ‘serve God faithfully in that order in which he is placed’. The 843 Treaty of Verdun, which divided Charlemagne’s empire between his three sons, proclaimed the principle that ‘every man should have a lord’ with the same certainty that…