Sublime

The great ambition of modern societies has been to institute a comprehensive reversal of the equation, to strip away both inherited privilege and inherited under-privilege in order to make rank dependent on individual achievement – which has primarily come to mean financial achievement. Status now rarely depends on an unchangeable identity handed d

Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith, a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army, we may ask under the corresponding heads—

Recall that the two defining assumptions of the Age of Average are Quetelet’s conviction that the average is the ideal, and the individual is error, and Galton’s conviction that if someone is Eminent at one thing they are likely Eminent at most things. In contrast, the main assumption of the science of the individual is that individuality matters19

These data make a strong case that, as human social networks grow, they necessarily lead to systems that require fewer resources per person, and produce more per person. In other words, the benefits of scale for human groups have always been there.

Like many nineteenth-century reformers, what Carlyle wanted was not a world in which everyone was financially equal, but one in which both the elite and the poor would merit their inequalities. ‘Europe requires a real aristocracy,’ he wrote, ‘only it must be an aristocracy of talent. False aristocracies are insupportable.’ What Carlyle wanted – tho

But as Peter Turchin has argued,11 in his book End Times, the unintended result of the country’s focus on higher education, as opposed to birth or caste, as the new means of constructing an overclass was an “overproduction” of elites that created too many qualified candidates for too few jobs.

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