Dartington and the Gnome

When one trawls the archives, one learns the most amazing things. This is a tale of Lord Dartington before he became a Laboured Peer, and how he met a Gnome to surprising effect.

It seems that one Young, an inquirer into the lives of those in Londinium's sunrise quarter (what we would have called a muckraker, but now call a sociologist), dug deep into the past and decided (a la Marx) that the sad and sorry state of these lives was based on the fact that they were tagged as people of insufficient merit. Essentially, the apparatus that defines merit, and the delivery of labels of merit, had bypassed them to their everlasting disadvantage.

Young went to the Economic School of Londinium (as did the Gnome); his doctoral exercise was about these lives and was duly traded in for the doctor's cloak in 1955. The Gnome, as you may recall, received his a year later, in 1956, for his work on guessing how much income a nation might have.

Three years later, in 1958, Young, still not Baron Dartington, published a powerful satire called The Rise of the Meritocracy, in which he predicted that birds giving themselves more exotic plumage would feather their nest at the expense of birds who did not know how to capitalise on their own plumage. In 1959, the Gnome started a country on the road to meritocracy. He seems to have convinced the Thunderer of the merits of meritocracy.

And so, Atlantis was founded on the misconception of a satire. Or so it seems. Myths are hard to work out, sometimes.