Excellence: A Vanishing Virtue?

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.

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.”

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