How to Make Canada Better

 

Taking the Confucian civil service exam

I find myself growing impatient that the governments of Iran, Russia, and China have not yet fallen. But this is naïve. Even if they do, in all likelihood, we are not going to get much better government soon. There is an inevitable limiting factor.

It is that the average person is average. The social world, all government, is built by and for average people. 

In a democracy, the government is not going to be any smarter, on average of the population. Nor has anyone come up with a better system. As Churchill observed, democracy is the worst possible form of government—until you consider all the others. 

It is not just that no other system has reliably produced leaders smarter than the average. We are not democracies because we believe the average person is always right. We are democracies because each individual is sovereign, and has the right and duty to decide, as much as possible, for himself. Human dignity demands that he have some input.

China for millennia did rather well on something like the Platonic system: government was in the hands of those who could pass a comprehensive examination. It was in the hands, in theory, of the intelligentsia. That ought to lead to government by the more intelligent, and for many centuries it did seem to. But that began to falter about five hundred years ago. This system could not compete with the Europeans, either in terms of organization, economic prosperity, or military power. 

We are seeing the same collapse in the modern Western academy. The system is producing dumber and dumber results. It depends, after all, on those already there setting the tests and choosing who joins the cabal. There is nothing to ensure that those already there know what they are doing.

When Europe pulled ahead of China, it was snot because of democracy. Europe was not yet democratic. It was aristocratic. The old European upper class was based on the idea that people could be educated from birth for government. That worked well for a time, driven, I would argue, by a strong and consistent Christian ideology of service, the chivalric ideal. But this system too could not successfully compete with democracy. Rulers would still be of only average intelligence, and with a failure of faith, class interest could easily come to supersede the general good.

Modern dictatorships are worst of all: those who rise to the top are those most driven by an urge for power and prepared to be most ruthless.

One solution that could be better than democracy, in producing good government, might be to appoint to office based on IQ. Unlike the old Confucian tests, IQ tests are objective and have the benefit of the scientific method of data collection. Contrary to much uninformed and envious opinion, IQ is the most reliable data point we have in all of the social sciences. It correlates well up to a fairly high level, well above average, with such other checks as academic and business success.

But could a subset of the highly intelligent be relied on to govern in the general interest, instead of for their own interests as a group? Perhaps not. And we still have the issue of human dignity, the right and duty of the individual to choose for himself.

Perhaps the best solution of all is available to a country like Canada, because of our high levels of immigration. Retain democracy, but accept immigrants based on IQ.

Currently, Canada chooses based on income and education. This means Canada is skimming off the upper classes of the Third World. But the Third World is poor because it has a corrupt upper class. The best do not rise to the top, and those who do will probably be corrupt.

IQ would be better, fairer, and would, over time, ensure that Canada is more prosperous, better governed, and a centre for world culture.

Nobody has the never to suggest this, even though it would be in everyone’s best interest.

Why? I credit envy of the more intelligent. Everyone resents anyone smarter than themself.