In Praise of Mediocrity

We can't all be geniuses. Even Beethoven was known at least once to phone it in.

I’m just back from vacation and I don’t feel much like working. Yesterday my editor suggested that I write a piece on a topic with which I am unfamiliar. Researching it would have required a great deal of effort, and I just didn’t feel like it. So instead I wrote a piece about slacking off, and on mediocrity generally, a topic with which I am perhaps more intimately familiar than I ought to admit. Faithful Backbencher readers have likely noticed that I judge our meritocratic society to overvalue excellence, creativity, “vision,” and ideas for their own sake. It’s seldom remembered today that the word “meritocracy” was coined, in the 1950s, as a pejorative term. We can’t all be “above average,” and the (one hopes, diminishing) appeal of Donald Trump rests to some extent on this under-appreciated fact. Resent Mediocre Man all you like, especially if you’re a mediocre woman making less money. But he can’t be wished away, because there’s at least a little mediocrity in all of us.

So, yes, these are themes I’ve considered before. They are, I believe, especially relevant to the last week of August,* and this time I add information on Ludwig von Beethoven’s little-known dalliance with phoning it in and a smidgen of on-scene reporting from the Educational Testing Service’s preposterously verdant headquarters just outside Princeton, New Jersey. You can read my piece here.

* Except for my wife, a professor of English who started classes this week and is working her ass off.