Overcoming nepotism is what made us rich
Dan Hannan
Like every American disease, the obsession with “nepo babies” has infected Britain. If 2022 was, as New York magazine claimed, the year nepotism went mainstream in Hollywood, 2023 has been the year the Brits lumberingly caught up.
An article in Vice argues that “nepotism in the U.K. is different in the same way that Ricky Gervais’ The Office differs to Steve Carell’s: it’s subtler, nastier, and arguably more effective in achieving its aims.” It goes on to link nepotism to the class system and private education. This being 2023, it also, inescapably, makes a reference to colonialism and slavery. Back in the 18th century, apparently, Benedict Cumberbatch’s family owned a plantation in Barbados.
Heredity is a powerful force, and not just in the entertainment business. Lots of children follow in their parents’ professional footsteps, and plenty of parents are quietly pleased when they do. All over the world, family businesses are accepted as a normal and natural phenomenon. The difference between a family-run town store and Walmart is simply one of scale.
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None of this should surprise us. For some reason, talk of genetics has become unacceptable in polite society. But even if we disregard the possibility that people inherit the inclinations that encouraged their parents into certain lines of work, there are obvious environmental reasons why you might develop an interest in the things that surround you in early life. This is just as true for a baby Bush as for a baby Redgrave.
Ah, you say, but what if these family ties become a stitch-up? What if they come to exclude other, more talented people? Surely that would be unfair to the people who lose out, as well as bad for the economy overall, which expands when the most-able people are doing the jobs most suited to their abilities.
True. Indeed, a big reason why the West in general has prospered, and the United States in particular, is that their societies are unprecedentedly mobile. We are no longer expected, let alone forced, to do our fathers’ jobs. Caste has given way to meritocracy, status to contract.
Until an eye-blink ago, every society was based on the idea that we were born with an immutable place in the hierarchy. In Europe, Russia, India, China, Japan, and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas, the notion of a society ordered by degree, with the emperor at one end and slaves at the other, went without saying.
If you were, for example, born into the warrior caste, you were often prohibited by law or custom from engaging in commerce. As Charlemagne told his subjects in A.D. 800, their duty was to “serve God faithfully in that order in which you are placed.”
Kings ruled over their subjects, nobles over their serfs, masters over their apprentices, husbands over their wives, and all human beings over their animals. Your status determined what you wore, where you lived, and whom you married. To question this was unnatural. “God detesteth ambition,” as the authors of the Geneva Bible warned.
Shakespeare’s plays are shot through with the notion that a disturbance in the ordained hierarchy will bring chaos and ruin: “Take but degree away, untune that string, and, hark, what discord follows!”
What happened in the West, and particularly in the English-speaking nations, at some point after 1700 made the modern world possible. Adrian Wooldridge tells the story beautifully in The Aristocracy of Talent, explaining how competitive exams, entry by merit into universities and professions, and the use of IQ tests were, for a long time, championed by radicals and resisted by conservatives. Only recently, he notes, have we experienced a polar switch so that intrinsic talent is now seen as a largely right-wing obsession.
Even the most meritocratic society is bound to see some clustering by family, whether for reasons of nature or nurture — even in the U.S., which became rich and free precisely because it aimed to be a country where your life was not laid down from birth.
So, by all means, have a go at the nepo babies — they can handle criticism — but don’t lose sight of why we are suspicious of inherited positions, namely that they seem incompatible with a society that elevates individuals above collectives. Because we live in such a society, we notice the few instances of dynasticism, which, until an eye-blink ago, was normal everywhere. In an age when we are increasingly told that the most important things about us are our sex, our sexual preferences, and, above all, our race, that individualism is worth hanging on to.
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