Our Age Of Mediocrity - But Hasn't Society Always Been Mediocre With Excellence Only An Outlier?

Millie Francis always considered herself  hors-série, someone unique, special, to be reckoned with.  She felt that her life had meant something to others if not society at large.  She had always done the right thing, taken the road less travelled, excelled in her profession, and gathered around her a coterie of the best and the brightest. 

No one would have dared call her ordinary, pedestrian, one of many; but in fact she was as mediocre as they come, a woman with no particular talent, genius, creativity, or recognizable virtue.  She had raised two children of rectitude but limited promise, had married her childhood sweetheart, a man of capability but no vision, and had folded into the prescriptive and predictable community of a modestly wealthy Washington suburb. 

How could there have been such a disconnect between self-image and reality, so wide a gap between what is and what was supposed?  Parents, perhaps, who in the interests of promoting the cause of women led Millie to believe that she was one of a kind, a woman that no glass ceiling could hold and that every boardroom would welcome. No pinafores and princess costumes for Millie who was sent off to violin lessons and drama school, who was taught poise and confidence, and who was treated as one in a million. 

As a result she was a stuck-up little girl that no one could stand - the one whose hand always shot up first in English class, the one simpering around Mr. Steege, the math teacher begging him for analysis not praise, sniffing and huffing at her classmates who thought she was a pinched and ugly faux prima donna. 

Better to be overconfident that a whimperingly shy wallflower, said her parents who had gotten wind of their daughter's unpopularity. What disturbed them even more was her report cards which were decidedly mediocre, middle of the class and never varying year by year.  

At some point her unique intelligence would express itself and she would rise to the top; but by the end of sixth grade, then middle school, and finally high school she was as mired in the middle as ever before they wondered if all her presumptions of superiority were just Sturm und Drang. 

The problem, however, might not have been with Millie herself but society in general.  Wasn't America a middle class, middle brow, middle of the road country?  While it had its remarkable men, they were outliers.  Just how many Rockefellers, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, or Musks, Huangs, Pages, and Brins could there possibly be in Walmart Nation? 

The former Fashion Editor of the New York Times, Vanessa Friedman, wrote an article about mediocrity and how we seem to be mired in it.  Everywhere she looked, she saw nothing but reruns and cultural retreads in art, fashion, and literature.

That feeling of browsing your Kindle, or standing in your local Barnes & Noble, faced with yet more young adult trilogies about dystopias and tough-girl heroines, or soft-porn-for-grown-ups trilogies (or just trilogies, period), and thinking, “What is there to read?” The new mediocre.

That harrumph when you peruse the movie listings and find yourself choosing between comic-book-hero action films and old-guy action films — unless you want to go way, way across town to the one surviving and obscure art-house cinema that values conversation over abs? The new mediocre.

But is she right? Are the 2000’s any more mediocre than any other decade?  The Roaring Twenties were great for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crowd, John D. Rockefeller, and J. Paul Getty, but have never been characterized as the efflorescence of American culture. 

The Forties had classics like Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Great Dictator, and Citizen Kane. Fashion in the 40s was classic, European-American in grace, simplicity, and elegance. The Fifties, although characterized by a general social conservatism are also  remembered for Abstract Expressionism, and the paintings of Pollock, Kline, Motherwell, and Rothko were anything but ordinary. 

The Sixties produced a dramatic shift in cultural, social, and political values. The Sixties were by no means quiet, but just as mediocre as any decade.  Demographers point out that the young, post-war generation was as large as any in history.  America was a nation of young, adolescent idealists who all embraced a particular ethos.

'Love the One You're With', communalism, and rejection of capitalist excess were adopted by millions.  There was no particular creativity at Woodstock, marches on the Mall, solidarity against the war in Vietnam.  It was just groupthink, a kind of Orwellian herd. 

The Seventies produced some great Hollywood movies. Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I and II, Nashville, Chinatown were Academy Award winners. The Eighties were not so much creative than an era of aggressive energy after the lassitude and disappointments of the Seventies.  “It is morning in America”, said Ronald Reagan, ushering in an era of neo-laissez-faire capitalism.

Yet culture like everything else follows the precepts of the bell curve - there will be clusters of unusually smart, creative, and innovative at one end and inconsequentially dumb at the other.  The rest of society will fall under the great, high curve - ordinary, mediocre, capable of reacting not acting, happy in security and reasonable health, and totally unremarkable.  Ninety percent of the American population is an off-the-rack, uninspiring, dutiful, law-abiding and thuddingly dull.  

Perhaps now in the age of Artificial Intelligence, virtuality, and recombinant DNA, the age of mediocrity is past.  We are on the cusp of the post-human generation where anything is possible.  Mediocrity can be filtered out, expunged from our genes, tossed aside forever.  

The cracking of the genetic code will take creation out of the hands of God.  Any one of us will be able to select the offspring we want from an archive of DNA strands from Marilyn Monroe, Einstein, and Michael Jordan.  Scientists will be able to weed out the bad genes of cancer and schizophrenia and replace them with high intelligence, visual acuity, and sensual sensitivity.

Virtual reality is only just beginning, and within a few decades complete mind-computer interface will be possible.  We will not be confined to the ‘real’ world but will be able to wander in a virtual world of our own making.

Taken together – recombinant DNA and virtual reality – represent fundamental, structural change in human nature.  We will soon no longer resemble any human generation before us. If this is not an explosion of creativity and the end of mediocrity, then what is?

There will be no one ‘mired in mediocrity’. We will live in the worlds of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Vermeer, Bacon, and Kiefer and know nothing of mediocrity. Not only will the greatest works of art, literature, film, and thought be instantly available, but we will be in them along side Marlon Brando and Marlene Dietrich. 

On a scale of mediocrity, there are three classes in America – the well-bred, well–educated, and affluent for whom historical culture will never be boring and is never mediocre; the creative geniuses of Silicon Valley, bio-engineering, genetics, and IT; and the rest of the consuming public.

High culture – excellence – has always been the preserve of the wealthy and high-born. The Church alone with its bottomless treasury commissioned some the greatest art works of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The nobility has always supported the arts and appreciated the results.  T

The courts of kings were rich in high learning, music, fashion, and artistry. Private wealth built Florence, Venice, and Paris. The Roman nobility taught according to the educational precepts of Cato the Elder studied philosophy, mathematics, science, and literature – elements thought to be necessary for the future leaders of the Empire.  Wealth generates culture and then purchases and enjoys it.

In the post-human generation in which excellence, creativity, innovation, taste and high culture will be at the fingertips of all, not just the privilege, mediocrity will disappear.  

Well, if that ain't whistlin' Dixie, nothing is. These same Walmart shoppers will search the now limitless, seamlessly brain-interfaced web for just the same dreck that they have in the real world.  Mediocrity is the stabilizing force of human society.  The middle class, middle brow demographic middle is what holds society together, gives it a moral foundation unpolluted by outrageous ideas and values. Genetics, that wonderful mechanism so aptly described by Darwin, will assure that most of us will always be mediocre.