Whatever it’s flaws, here is what I like about meritocracy: it says we should honor and reward those who work hard and encourages the pursuit of merit in individuals.
In contrast, the central comment of DEI is that groups who do relatively well don’t deserve it, that their gains are ill gotten. Members of these groups who work hard should not be rewarded. In fact they deserve less than equal treatment by society.
I am confident that this latter system if followed would result in much worse outcomes, discouraging individuals to work hard. It is an ugly, negative philosophy.
We should honor the strong and hard working and successful, encourage them to share their methods with others so that they might also succeed, help the weak, and ostracize the lazy.
The term meritocracy has often been by people who have a very clear view on what contribution and reward mean and they typically assume a closed and fair system where everyone already agreed on the meaning of those terms and on the rules on how to evaluate those things on a case by case basis.
To be honest I'm just not sure whether it is a useful term at all outside of games, sports and other controlled systems with predefined and agreed upon rules.
Perhaps this system does not have a built in mechanism for empathy… that’s a stronger argument against it in my view.
Tenure or background based systems are far less desirable - wouldn’t you agree?
I think you hit the nail on the head with empathy. Empathy is contextual, subjective and real. It cannot be pinned down with rules, it’s too humane and powerful for that.
The other good merit function we have is one vote per person, that is how we elect national leaders, this doesn't have some of the abusive loopholes as the capitalist merit function, but instead it has other abusive properties which is why every modern country choose to do a mix of both.
To me the term meritocracy just seems too idealist and it assumes too much in relation to complex and varied systems like economy or politics.