Who Gets to Be Smart and the shared delusion of meritocracy

When Bri Lee’s friend Damian is awarded a Rhodes scholarship, she jumps at the chance to observe in situ ‘the smartest people in the world’. The result is enough to make your blood curdle.

Author Bri Lee. Picture: John Feder

When Bri Lee’s friend Damian is awarded a Rhodes scholarship, she jumps at the chance to observe in situ “the smartest people in the world”. To Lee, the hallowed grounds of prestigious Oxford University are akin to Disneyland. Damian, a fellow Queenslander, guides her through the beautiful architecture, arcane customs and intellectual vitality afforded to the cream of the crop. They pass the looming statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes and walk by Magdalen College, wealthy, even for Oxford.

“The whole thing about Magdalen Tower,” Damian said, pointing to it, “is that you have to be shown how to get up there by someone who already has been.”

 The tour provokes in Lee immense insecurity about her own intellect. She learns via a casual aside from Damian that she is now too old for the Rhodes accolade; a vibrant dinner with other scholars leaves her feeling despondent, like a “delusional Cinderella” post-ball.

 “But now midnight had come,” Lee writes, “and I was alone in my room with my not-good-enough brain.”

 This self-doubt triggers the titular question in Who Gets To Be Smart, which is Lee’s third book. Her journey to an answer begins with Omid Tofighian, the translator of Behrouz Boochani’s award-winning No Friend But The Mountains.Tofighian introduces Lee to the concept of kyriarchy, a theory of how power works in society that can be likened to a pyramid.

who gets to be smart

 “The top of the pyramid is about exclusivity,” Lee writes. “The more people there are in the middle and lower sections of the pyramid, the higher the people at the top are elevated. Our society is shaped in such a way that only a few may ever reach the top.” Lee positions herself in the middle, scrapping with peers for a dubious legitimacy achieved through assorted awards and gold stars.

 Challenges to this system are fiercely opposed because they up-end a shared delusion of meritocracy among those at the top, compellingly termed by Lee as “the right to believe in themselves”. Much of the book is spent scrutinising this elite cohort and how the universities, schools and think tanks they run serve to stratify and exclude, rather than enrich and enlighten. Lee presents the brouhaha over the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation as a microcosm of kyriarchy in action, and reserves particular disdain for white men such as Tony Abbott, himself a Rhodes scholar. She devotes significant space to the structural barriers faced by those generally excluded from the pyramid’s apex: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, people with a disability, the lower socio-economic classes.

 Despite the title, Who Gets To Be Smart spends more time on education and access to its highest echelons than it does on the concept of intelligence. There is some mediation on different ways to be smart, and if comparing social or sporting genius to straight As is even useful, but the predominant narrative is one of Lee unravelling her own deference to educational institutions.

There is a lot to unpick: she has a law degree, a masters, and is working on a PhD. When Tofighian sharply criticises Western universities as colonialist, capitalist projects, Lee is rankled. “I had spent a huge amount of money and multiple years of my life accumulating accreditations based on an invisible but omnipresent ledger of legitimacy that someone I respected and admired had just said he did not really believe in,” she writes.

“He had infringed upon my right to believe in myself, and my first response was the defensive spark.”

 Lee’s self-awareness throughout, while genuine, doesn’t quite succeed in squaring her impressive resume with her regular confessions of feeling insufficiently smart, which began to wear thin after a while. Her angst about missing out on a Rhodes scholarship was, at least for this reviewer, unrelatable, but more importantly, it was an unconvincing anchor for the discussions in this book. This may explain some of Who Gets To Be Smart’s inconsistencies: in some parts, Lee deftly weaves together personal recollections and research to unpack complex topics; in others, particularly those where she quotes heavily from numerous other texts — the book is left wanting for lyricism.

Her Ramsay Centre argument was fully fleshed, but a chapter on science only scratched the surface of some fascinating topics. Lee’s journey to academic disillusionment will no doubt speak to many, but her wide-ranging book may have benefited from either a paring down or a stronger tie that bound.

Lane Sainty is a Sydney-based journalist and critic.

Who Gets To Be Smart

By Bri Lee

Allen & Unwin
287 pages, $29.99