The Case for Mediocrity

The last week of August, when nobody seems to work very hard, is a moment to consider mediocrity’s underrated but central role in American life. It’s a topic with which our American meritocracy has never come to terms. Put your feet up, pop open a beer (no locally-brewed artisanal IPAs, please), and hear me out.

Nobody coasts more during the run-up to Labor Day than America’s newspapers. The lead story Wednesday in the print edition of The New York Times (which I’m too lazy to cancel) reported that both Democrats and Republicans are receptive to tariffs, which they weren’t as recently as 2016. Raise your hand if you didn’t know that. The Washington Post, meanwhile, fronts the story that, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukrainian troops’ incursion into Russia is part of a broader strategy to end the Ukraine war. That would be big news if Zelensky felt ready to announce what that strategy is, but he isn’t and he didn’t. He’ll present his plan, whatever it is, to the Biden-Harris administration after Labor Day, when people are paying more attention.

Which brings up a sore point from my days, 30 years ago, reporting for a daily newspaper (The Wall Street Journal). The last week of December and the last two weeks of August, I noticed back then, were easy times to scoop the competition, because practically nobody else was working, and those few who were weren’t working very hard. But whenever I took advantage of this opportunity and broke news during these sleepy weeks, I came to regret it. That was because (a) nobody noticed, and (b) some competitor invariably recycled my scoop a week or two later and claimed all the credit.

Speaking of the Journal: On Wednesday it posted a story about a poll it conducted, a whole month ago, with the University of Chicago’s NORC (formerly the National Opinion Research Center). Why did the Journal let this poll lie around so long? Because what it reported wasn’t really news. According to the results, Americans—especially younger ones—felt pessimistic about the prospect that they will ever be financially secure. That’s a serious social problem, of course. But it is not a new one. The majority of Americans have been telling pollsters they feel financially insecure—even during times of enormous economic growth, like the late-1990s tech boom—at least as far back as the 1970s.

It was in August of 2010, my editor reminds me, that Terry Jones enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame. The Jones of whom I speak was not the brilliant late comedian who, in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, memorably declaimed: “E’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” Rather, I refer to an obscure evangelical minister in Gainesville, Florida, who had no following to speak of. This Jones attracted international attention by threatening to burn a Koran on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Jones eventually cancelled his plans, which in any other month would have attracted no attention at all (and therefore risked no violent response), only after the Secretary of Defense called Jones up and asked him, pretty please, not to burn the most sacred text in Islam. Jones was later reported to be working at a french fry outlet in a suburban food court and, still later, as an Uber driver.

My point—which I make at excessive length because it’s the last week of August—is that standards slip this time of year. Yet we all manage to survive.

Even the great ones coast. Perhaps you’ve heard of the nineteenth-century composer Ludwig von Beethoven. The Washington Post this week published an op-ed arguing that music should be a tool in diplomacy, noting that Beethoven performed his seventh and eighth symphonies at the Congress of Vienna, which, perhaps as a result, seemed to go reasonably well. Play pretty music at diplomatic summits? Sure, why not.

But here’s something I learned last week, while on vacation in the Berkshires, reading the program for an outdoor performance at Tanglewood of Beethoven’s Seventh. The Seventh debuted, it turns out, one year before the Congress of Vienna, at a concert to raise money for soldiers wounded in the Napoleonic wars. At this concert, the Seventh, which is surely one of the most sublime pieces of music ever conceived, attracted much less attention than a piece of kitsch that Beethoven tossed off called “Wellington’s Victory.” The latter was written to commemorate the Battle of Vitoria (1813), which evicted Napoleon from the Iberian peninsula and helped set the stage for the Duke of Wellington’s decisive victory over Napoleon at Waterloo two years later.

The crowd at the 1813 benefit went wild for “Wellington’s Victory,” but Beethoven well understood that his tribute fell far short of the thing it celebrated. Today “Wellington’s Victory” is seldom performed, but I invite you to listen to it. It’s only 15 minutes long. You will find that it sounds uncannily like somebody else writing a parody of Ludwig von Beethoven. This is what it sounds like when a genius for the ages phones it in.

If you’re a small-minded person like me, knowing this will make you feel just a little bit better about yourself, because compared to Beethoven, we are all of us (pace the great Chuck Berry) mediocrities. When a more discerning critic criticized “Wellington’s Victory,” Beethoven replied: “What I shit is better than anything you could ever think up.” Which is rather splendid in a Nietzschean sort of way, but not true. Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” may fall short of Beethoven in general, but it beats the crap out of “Wellington’s Victory.”

If geniuses sometimes produce mediocre work, it’s also true that mediocrities sometimes produce works of genius. “Le Marseillaise,” according to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (in his 1940 book Shooting Stars) was written by an “amiable dilettante” with a “petty mind” named Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, who never did anything else worth remembering. The one-hit wonder is a well-known phenomenon in pop music, producing such hits as “The Book of Love” (the Monotones), “Just One Look” (Doris Troy), “My Sharona” (The Knack), and the great camp classic “Afternoon Delight” (the Washington D.C.-based Starland Vocal Band, which took the name from a dessert offering at a local restaurant called Clyde’s—which, unlike lead singer Bill Danoff’s own D.C. eatery, the Starland Café, is still around).

Most mediocrities, of course, do not produce works of genius, or even briefly popular crap like “Afternoon Delight” (which for some inexplicable reason topped the charts in early July 1976). Yet in merit-obsessed America, we are all of us expected to be above average. Equality of opportunity is valued more highly than equality of outcome, even though only a fraction of us will ever take hold of the brass ring. “Average is over,” the conservative economist Tyler Cowen pronounced in a 2013 book with that title. Never mind that most of us are average. That’s what average means.

Another stop on my recent vacation was at the Chauncey Hotel and Conference Center in Lawrence Township, New Jersey. One of my in-laws was getting married nearby, and she reserved a bunch of rooms there for her guests. The hotel is situated on the grounds of the Educational Testing Service, or ETS, which administers the SAT, the GRE, and various other tests dedicated to separating the college- or graduate-school-bound wheat from the chaff. As Nicholas Lemann documents in his 1999 book, The Big Test, the SAT was created after World War II amid great concern that American dominance on the global stage required a more robust elite culled from across the country.

What I noticed driving to and from the Chauncey Hotel and Conference Center during my weekend of wedding-centered activities was that in performing this culling, the ETS accumulated an enormous quantity of meticulously maintained acreage just outside Princeton, New Jersey (which somehow is ETS’s mailing address). The bright-green grounds, my son Will observed, looked eerily like the Village in the late-1960s cult TV series The Prisoner, wherein our hero (played by Patrick McGoohan), a former spy exiled to the Village and renamed Number Six, wails, “I am not a number! I am a free man!”

Land in this part of the world is very expensive. From this I conclude that the (nonprofit) business of culling America’s elite is much more lucrative than it would be in a society that balanced merit more effectively against other values.

In business, we prize “creativity,” when we should prize more highly reliability and decency. In politics, we prize “vision,” when we should prize more highly common sense and responsiveness to the problems of ordinary people. (One of the highest compliments I can pay to Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz is that he isn’t a visionary—but if you can get him on the phone to help solve a simple, relatable problem, he’ll rise to the occasion.)

In 1986, a law professor named Daniel Farber published an essay titled “The Case Against Brilliance” that argued:

“brilliance” should count heavily against an economic or legal theory. The same traits of novelty, surprise, and unconventionality that are considered marks of distinction in other fields should be considered suspect in economics and law, in which thoughtfulness may be a more important virtue.

That Farber’s argument was itself brilliant (which it was, prompting this magazine to invite Farber to adapt it for a wider audience) was a complexity that he addressed in a footnote:

(1) the charge that this Article is “brilliant” is damaging but unproven; (2) the thesis is that most brilliant articles are false; this could be one of the rare exceptions; and, most importantly, (3) this Article does not present a first-order theory about economics or law, but rather a meta-theory about scholarship in those areas. The Article’s thesis, therefore, does not apply to itself.

Because it’s the end of August, I will conclude by quoting something else I published three years ago under the headline “Mediocre Man: Who Speaks for the Undeserving Meritocrat?”:

In a world with more equality [Mediocre Man] would be no more able to climb the greasy pole than Mediocre Woman. But in a world with even more equality—let’s call it Stage Two—the rewards for climbing that greasy pole would be greatly diminished. And in a world with even more equality than that—let’s call it Stage Three—we’d have to find some way to make it matter less whether a person was mediocre or not.

Average isn’t over. Average is here to stay. The sooner our American meritocracy makes peace with that truth, the sooner we’ll create a society that can make life better for everybody, and not just the A students. And now, if you don’t mind, I’ll retire to my hammock.