【アメリカ語勉強日記】11/28

Tyranny of meritocracy

The title of second chapter of this book is "Great Because GOOD: A brief moral history of merit". 

According to Sandel, meritocracy of today's Western culture can be seen in the Bible. He explains two features of meritocracy appears in the book. First is emphasis on human agency. Second is harshness towards a unlucky person. 

In the book of Job, the God challenged faith of Job by not rewarding to his piety and depriving his children instead. Job's friends regards his misfortune as a result of his wrong doing.  (But the bible deny this way of thinking and teach humility for the fate.)

It starts to deal with history of discussion on free will. The paradox is something like this: If human effort matters, it is dubious that the God is omnipotent.

I couldn't read following names related to theology or Bible at the first sight; the book of Job, Martin Luther. I firstly thought the book of Job is books on jobs. Furthermore, I confused Martin Luther King, Jr and Martin Luther. I didn't know they have same spell because they pronounced totally differently in Japanese.

Protestantism denies the statement that we can win the grace of God, which is pretty anti-meritocratic. But it paradoxically cause people to work harder as explained in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber.

And Calvinism cause religious morality intrude into the dailylife including market place. And people started to have a contempt for who don't succeed in the work place. 

Some words I learned:

worldly: 世俗の
it is obvious that the word is related to the world, but I have never thought what "world" means in the context of religion. 

I forgot to mention the old  book of meritocracy mentioned in the book, which seemed really interesting for its foresight.

The Rise of the Meritocracy - Wikipedia

Conservatory:温室,音楽学校

conservative means holding traditional values so conservatory means the place to hold vegetables carefully, I guess.