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Excellence: A Vanishing Virtue?
SEPTEMBER 26, 1969
1969This article is part of CT's digital archives. Subscribers have access to all current and past issues, dating back to 1956.
Some years ago John W. Gardner, former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, produced a stimulating and somewhat unusual little book. In a single sentence he explained what had prompted it: “I am concerned with the fate of excellence in our society.” Added Gardner, who is now chairman of the Urban Coalition: “If a society holds conflicting views about excellence—or cannot rouse itself to the pursuit of excellence—the consequences will be felt in everything that it undertakes.” There is no doubt that our society does in fact have conflicting ideas about excellence—if it gives thought to the subject at all. One wonders indeed if here we do not have a vanishing virtue, the casualty of a secular age.
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The very meaning of excellence has been eroded by the years, its depreciation due in part to the fate of its adjective: “excellent” can now convey no more than a vague sense of worth. Like the resourceful Humpty Dumpty, we might assign it meaning according to the need of the moment. And what it is applied to is often transitory, too—some such feat, perhaps as rowing solo across the Atlantic or jogging from coast to coast, two exploits that made headlines recently. The pitcher honored in the Hall of Fame, however, might not manifest excellence outside the baseball diamond; excellence is not necessarily regarded by him as a way of life.
Jonathan Edwards not without reason complained of the difficulty of defining the term. We might tend, indeed, to put it within Augustine’s timely category: “I know what it is until you ask me.” Our dictionary puts it tersely: “the state of possessing good qualities in an eminent degree.” These are words, however, that fall strangely on the ears of restless youth contemptuous of the past and conspicuous for unteachability—youth who are, in one man’s phrase, “neither dupes nor imbeciles like us,” and who “believe in nothing, not even in atheism.”
It was not ever thus. “I assure you,” said Alexander the Great, “I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion.” In Plato’s Republic, provision was made for an élite who, excelling the others, would have special education and privileges, and also special responsibilities. The whole thing turned sour with Nietzsche and his doctrine of Superman, when the idea was given a sinister twist seen eventually in the rise of fascism and racism.
It is one of the blights of modern democratic societies that excellence may be stifled and reduced to tedious mediocrity. As John Aiken so aptly put it long ago: “Nothing is such an obstacle to the production of excellence as the power of producing what is good with ease and rapidity.” With the demand for an ever increasing number of highly skilled workers comes the problem of arbitrating between the claims of excellence and the claims of equality. It is a problem which no one with any experience of industrial relations is likely to minimize. It is seen just as much in the field of education, where the pace of an overcrowded classroom is inevitably dictated by the plodders. Equality must be maintained even though some are more unequal than others.
In some Western countries it is not unusual to find that welfare handouts and social benefits have taken away from many the incentive to work, and have encouraged a new and alarming breed of loafers. As Enoch Powell, that enfant terrible of contemporary British politics, has said: “The trouble about State money is that experience shows it is often a bridge to nowhere.” The answer to our problems does not lie in the availability of more and more state money, or in the diversion of such money from space exploration projects. Vice-President Spiro Agnew has said: “We do not need a transfer of dollars from the space program to other programs. We need a transfer of its spirit—an infusion of American dedication to purpose and hard work.”
Returning to industry (for it is here that the issue is writ large), we might discover that it is not only controversial divinity that has fallen a victim to the so-called acids of modernity. Certain skills appear to be incompatible with the highly developed commercial instinct that is characteristic of, and perhaps inseparable from, the affluent society. Officials of the National Cathedral in Washington, D. C. have been compelled to reconsider their policy of not borrowing money to complete that splendid structure because the carvers with their exquisite art are dying out and are virtually irreplaceable.
In past years boat-builders along the Clyde had an unsurpassed reputation for turning out magnificent ships, but these last decades have seen a sad decline. Lamented an old gateman at one of the yards: “Once iron men came in here to build wooden ships, today wooden men come to build iron ships. Once men came here to build ships, now they come to collect pay pokes [envelopes].” In England a boy was recently given an aptitude test on applying for factory work. He was asked to fill in the missing word in “More hurry, less—.” He thought for a moment, then instead of “speed” wrote “overtime.” In the sort of society that no longer sees that approach as incongruous, we have reason to fear for the fate of excellence.
The malaise is not confined to those quaintly referred to as the working classes. Nor is it pertinent only to the philosophy of labor. It has spread through every level of society. Said Gardner in a Time essay (“Toward a Self Renewing Society,” April 11, 1969): “The courts are crippled by archaic organizational arrangements; the unions, the professions, the universities, the corporations, each has spun its own impenetrable web of vested interests.”
The consequence of all this is not merely that mediocrity is imposed but that conformity is required. That remarkable Frenchman Charles Péguy, who died in 1913 at the age of forty, had this to say once in a slightly different context: “The life of an honest man must be an apostasy and a perpetual desertion. The honest man must be a perpetual renegade.… For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, indefatigable renascent errors. And the man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must make himself continually unfaithful to inexhaustibly triumphant injustices.”
No one would wish to deny that without religious belief man can achieve excellence of a kind, though this be regarded merely as “the touching memorial of a lost Eden.” It will fall short, however, of the “more excellent way” outlined by Paul, as even Christian work and achievement fall short (a Christian profession in itself is no guarantee of excellence). Man’s labors and man’s explorations are ultimately ineffectual unless they bear testimony to the Infinite Workman, who, mindful of us, fashioned all things “in the beginning.” It is he of whom the Scriptures speak when they proclaim: “His name alone is excellent.”
Reparations In Black And White
Seeing it in black and white sent a shock wave through delegates to the special general convention of the Episcopal Church. There it was in cold print in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times: “Episcopalians Vote $200,000 as Reparations to Blacks”; “Legislators of the Episcopal Church submitted today to a demand of the Black Economic Development Conference …” (see News, page 42). Then the National Observer carried a page-one story with a picture of a sullen James Forman standing in front of Episcopal headquarters in May, when he made an initial reparations demand on Episcopal leaders.
Could this really be what we did? many delegates began asking themselves in the sobering light of retrospect. Yes, the Episcopal Church did vote the money for the BEDC, although a compromise measure attempted to blunt the sharp reality of the action by making the more acceptable National Committee of Black Churchmen the conduit for the funds.
What the black militants wanted and made crystal clear was that the money was to go straight to the BEDC without strings. The gut issue: Would the church support a militant organization that has refused to repudiate the Black Manifesto and is willing to use violence if necessary to pull down the American government in order to gain economic equality for blacks?
Canon Junius Carter, a black Episcopal minister from Pittsburgh, put it succinctly: “If you follow our advice, then, and only then, will we know that you trust us.”
We believe that both the black militants and the Episcopal Church have erred. The church is to be commended for coming to grips with what surely is the number-one social issue of America. But its fancy footwork in setting up the NCBC as a fence has fooled—and pleased—almost no one. The church should have responded to the demand just as unequivocally and pointedly as it was made. If it was trust, honesty and forthrightness the blacks wanted, they deserved an answer in those terms.
The black militants, we believe, were wrong in assuming that love and brotherhood could be proved only by an affirmative answer to their coercive demands and threats. That is not love; it’s extortion. And if it were right for the blacks to say they would accept money from the church only on their own terms, why would it not have been right—by the same reasoning—for whites to demand that the BEDC first repudiate the manifesto ideology (a move the BEDC refused to make)?
The love Christ taught cannot be coerced. Nor does love always signify giving in at any cost, no matter how great the need for justice. The basis for brotherhood is not complete agreement.
The Episcopal Church showed courage in agonizing over the vexing and momentous problem of black self-determination. But it should have firmly refused to capitulate to persons whose only document of record was well described in the ironic words of Presiding Bishop John E. Hines to the Executive Council May 21:
The language and basic philosophy of [the manifesto] are calculatedly revolutionary, Marxist, inflammatory, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian-establishment, violent, and destructive of any democratic political process—so as to shock, challenge, frighten, and, if possible, overwhelm the institutions to which it is directed. It was no surprise that throughout the white establishment the immediate response was—with few exceptions—one of outrage, furious hostility and disbelief.
Woodstock Weekend
Time magazine called it “history’s biggest happening.” One day the New York Timesreferred to it as “so colossal a mess”; the next day that same newspaper likened it to the Tulipmania or the Children’s Crusade and designated it “a phenomenon of innocence.” The fact is that the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, held at Bethel, New York, last month, defies description. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the festival was not so much the constant beat offered up by a number of outstanding rock artists, or the casual display of nudity, or even the free-wheeling use of illegal drugs. Rather it was the overwhelming sense of community experienced by the more than 400,000 young people jammed on the 600-acre farm for the weekend. They came in search of peace, of love, of oneness, of community, of a sense of belonging. And, in some measure at least, many claim to have found what they were looking for.
It is at this point that the Woodstock Art Fair—and others like it that on a following weekend drew additional hundreds of thousands of young people both in the United States and in England—levels an indictment at and issues a challenge to the Church of Jesus Christ. We claim to have in Jesus Christ the peace, love, oneness, community, and acceptance these youth are seeking. But many of them have looked in vain to find what they seek in the Church. They have heard a great deal about these virtues, but they have not seen them practiced in the lives of professing Christians. As a result, they are seeking elsewhere. It would be too easy to say that this is the only reason why the young so often turn away from the Church (the problem is more complex than that), but insofar as we in the Church may be a stumblingblock to the young we must answer for our failure.
We can express our dismay and disapproval at the tremendous traffic in drugs allowed to flourish at Woodstock. We can register our displeasure at the almost amoral attitude evidenced in the nonchalant indulgence in nudity and sex. We can remind the Woodstock gathering that almost any group with a certain amount of common interest, freed from the hard realities and responsibilities of day-to-day living, can exist peacefully in community for a short while. But the most effective ministry to the youth of our world will be a demonstration that in Jesus Christ they can find that which they seek.
There are hundreds of thousands of young people who have found the meaning of peace, of love, of oneness, of purpose, not in a weekend happening, but in a day-by-day life of submission to Jesus Christ. They have learned to be “real people” not through the delusion of a dangerous drug but through the reality of a living Christ. They have found real freedom not by “doing their own thing” but by becoming servants of Christ to do his will. They have discovered genuine openness with others not by a superficial shedding of clothes or a childish playing with sex but through that love and respect for others that Christ brings into life. Whatever the kids found at Woodstock falls far short of what they can find in Jesus Christ.
Pike, Ho, Dirksen, And Pearson
Death has recently removed from the world scene four men who had little in common except their individuality. At this they excelled. If someone wrote a novel with a man like James Pike as the hero, it would be considered preposterous (see News, p. 42). His continual change of religious beliefs; the personal tragedies that surrounded him; his death in the desert—all show that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Perhaps James Pike can best be seen as a highly visible representative of the plight of all men. His desire to be up to date led him to throw overboard what he considered to be the “excess baggage” of Christian orthodoxy. In the process he lost the Gospel. Yet Pike’s enchantment with spiritism reveals the incurable religiosity of man. The contest of the modern world is not between belief and unbelief but, as it has always been, between belief of the truth and belief of the lie. James Pike demonstrated this in a flamboyant way that we are not soon likely to see again.
In his own way, Ho Chi Minh was a believer. His faith in Communism was misplaced; his belief that his people could wear down the mighty United States has proven to be rather accurate. Perhaps his successors, despite pledges to continue his policies, will prove more willing to negotiate an end to this tragic conflict. One thing is certain: no successor can hope to maintain the aura among the Vietnamese that accompanied “Uncle Ho.”
Senator Everett Dirksen will probably prove to be the last of the old-style orators. In other ways as well, he represents the end of an era. Two causes for which he was contending earnestly in his final months may not survive without him. There are few dwellers in the cities and suburbs who long for a return to the day when the rural population controlled at least one house of the state legislatures. While many Christians did support the late Senator’s campaign to permit officially endorsed prayer in the public schools, these same persons would doubtless not want such a measure if they lived in a country where some other religious tradition were dominant. Senator Dirksen was a dedicated politician; he took his duties as minority leader seriously and sought to fulfill them responsibly.
Drew Pearson was the acknowledged journalistic master of uncovering corruption. Public officials from presidents on down feared and denounced him. Many a public figure has been kept close to the straight and narrow out of fear of the kind of exposure that Pearson began decades ago, in contrast to the submissiveness then practiced by the Washington press corps. Regrettably, Pearson often went into print with inaccuracies. However, he would not have published nearly so many mistakes if authoritative news sources were not so tight-lipped. Pearson felt that it was better to publish an incomplete and imprecise exposé rather than let truth be suppressed altogether. As long as sin persists, we will need such watchdog journalists.
Pike, Ho, Dirksen, and Pearson were all transitional figures whose deaths remind us that the world is in many ways changing. They also illustrate a basic truth: zeal for a good cause can be tarnished or spoiled by wrong presuppositions or methods. Because all men are sinners, none of these men will enter history with unblemished reputations. Each of them had fervent admirers and equally fervant detractors. Each pursued his goals with dedication and style, accompanied by fame or notoriety. But death is no respecter of persons; the powerful and influential fall before it just as must the rest of us. None of us, no matter how well we are known, are prepared to live until we are prepared to die.
