No Promotion According to Merit

"NO PROMOTION ACCORDING TO MERIT" -- JUSTUS MOESER

To an Officer:

While it touches me, dear friend, that your merit is so little recognized, still, your demand that the State should solely look to true merit is, if I may have your kind permission to say so, the strangest product of an hour’s idle contemplation. I, for one, should—paid or not—never remain within a State in which it is a rule to award all honors solely on the basis of merit. Rewarded, I should not have the heart to appear before a friend for fear of humiliating him; and unrewarded, I should live under some sort of public calumny, because everybody would say of me, That man has no merits. Believe me, so long as we remain human, it is better that from time to time fortune and favor distribute the prizes, than that human wisdom award them to each according to his merit—birth and age are better determinants of rank in this world than is true worth. Yet, I shall dare to say that public service could not even exist if every promotion were based solely on merit. For all those who shared the hopes of the promoted—and this would quite naturally include all who had any sort of a good opinion of themselves—would consider themselves offended and calumniated. Their minds would turn against him, against the service, and even against their chief; they would erupt in hate and enmity; and within a short period, all civil and military services would witness those resignations which can now be observed only in the courts or the universities, where the fame of personal merits is more closely considered and consequently produces all the above faults. On the other hand, contemplate the case where this man is promoted because of his high birth, that man because of his seniority in service, and from time to time, other men are promoted by happy chance: Here, everybody will be free to flatter himself that merit is not the measure of the world; nobody can regard himself as calumniated; self-love acquiesces, and we think that time and fortune will bring up our turn, too. With these thoughts, we drive away our grief, get new hopes, continue to work, suffer the fortunate; and public service is not impeded. The ensign does not attempt to harm the lieutenant secretly, and the latter does not try to harm the captain, because superior has not been placed above inferior merely according to merit. The greatest measure of discord is found among generals, because the conduct of campaigns often requires great merit. But this discord would be pervasive if all officers were promoted in accordance with the principles that govern the choice of generals for operative tasks.

And how many injustices would be perpetrated by a state in the guise of furthering merit! The prince is not always a judge with deep insight; even from his vantage point, he cannot see everything. One prince would see merit in a favorite, another in a mistress; and probably the bland dilettante would replace the modest artist, the pleasant flatterer would win out over the quiet man of integrity, the feverish maker of projects would replace the experienced economist, and glamour would always win out over truth. The prince, if against all probability he is the most excellent man in insight and righteousness, would at the least find himself in the greatest embarrassment, or, under the pretext of rewarding merit, would have to act like an oriental despot who made a slave his first minister, confused all classes of men, and made himself a monster. Whoever wants to live quietly in the world, to taste the sweetness of friendship, he who desires to retain the approval of the righteous and to further great causes, would have to deny his own merit and to guard carefully against all external recognition of it.

If we humans were not constituted so that each has the best opinion of himself, it might of course be otherwise. But so long as we retain our present nature and passions, and so long as it is, so to speak, necessary that each retain a good opinion of himself, promotion based on merit seems to me the very means of bringing confusion into everything. Even today, it is a sort of law in the military that the older officer has to seek retirement when a younger one is advanced over him. What, then, would happen if advancement went according to merit—if suddenly the adjutant who now is attached to an older general as an adviser were placed ahead of the general and of everybody else? Would they not all be publicly condemned and incapacitated from further service if merit decided everything?

Granted, a great king of our times has found a means for putting minds at rest in cases such as these. He often bypasses the order of seniority, prefers a more capable person to an older one; and some time later, he promotes the person passed by in such a flattering manner that every man who is passed over for promotion is always in doubt whether the king is only saving him a better promotion or is passing him over for lack of merit. But this device will ever have to be regarded as exceptional; it only serves the prince who is qualified by insight and experience to use it wisely. For in the hands of any other man, it would be most dangerous for the tranquillity of men and a clear path to most extreme slavery.

You answer that great merit is always accompanied by modesty and moderation, and that with the aid of these virtues, the fortunate would easily placate the unfortunate and smother the feelings of hatred and envy which to the detriment of the service could develop in the hearts of all persons passed by. However, as soon as merit is publicly recognized and rewarded, modesty and moderation are taken to be mere acts of political wisdom; and they will be of no effect. I would even say that modesty often increases the offense to the unrewarded, because he not infrequently wishes to find fault with the fortunate in order to be able to hate him with more righteous equanimity; that is the way men are. Besides, the State does not weigh merit as a teacher of morals would. The former justifiably gives great talents, even if accompanied by pride and lack of modesty, preference over less talented modesty.

A State that does not have many more men of merit than can be rewarded with public office would be a very unhappy one. If this be so, it would always be unpleasant for many people to have to imagine that those receiving awards are also the best among them and that each decoration also designated the best knight. Now people can think to their comfort: fortune and not merit has elevated these; or to speak the words of the poet: a great star covers that small heart. But if everything went according to merit, this so necessary comfort would completely disappear, and the cobbler who is happy to hammer at his lasts so long as he can flatter himself that he would be doing something entirely different from mending the Lady Mayor’s slippers if merit were respected in this world could not possibly be happy.

Therefore, dear friend, give up your romantic thoughts of the happiness of a State where everything goes according to merit. When men rule and where men serve, birth and age, or seniority of service, are still the safest and the least offensive rules for promotion. The creative genius, or the man of real virtue, will not be harmed by this rule; but an exception of this kind is very rare and will also only give offense to evil souls.