Source: Wikimedia, CC 4.0 There could be no more apple-pie value than “excellence.”
Yet, quietly, excellence is being attacked by society's core mind-molders: the media and the colleges.
For a current example, let’s consider the four films that an 18-expert consensus deems as having, by far, the best chances of winning the 2018 Oscar for best picture. All feature a less-accomplished person bringing down a more-accomplished one.
The Shape of Water, the odds-on-favorite, is about a mute cleaning woman who topples a scientist.
In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a working-class woman takes down the chief of police.
Get Out tells of a neurosurgeon who steals brains. The person who, all along, suspected that something was fishy is a low-level airport TSA worker.
Lady Bird. The eponymous character is a high school senior from the wrong side of the tracks, with average-to poor grades and whose only extracurricular activity is exploring her sexuality, yet she gets into, with a scholarship no less, a prestigious private college.
In each case, the filmmaker makes us root for a person who had achieved far less than the person or entity s/he took down.
And last year’s Oscar winner? Moonlight, about a low-income, shy kid who makes great strides in coming of age.
I don’t see a movie about Jonas Salk who cured polio, about Larry Page or Sergey Brin who invented Google, or about Ben Franklin who invented, for example, the postal service, bifocals, and lending library. Does every movie have to pander to the masses: “You can beat people who are much more accomplished than you!?”
It’s odd that, on one hand, activists for society’s have-nots stress the importance of successful role models, for example, in the school curriculum, yet those same activists go strangely silent when the media lauds the unsuccessful over the successful.
Speaking of education, grade inflation is a pervasive example of society's now devaluing excellence. A study revealed that 77 percent of college grades now are A’s or B’s, with the percent of A’s rising more than five percentage points per decade. A's are now are three times more common than in 1960! And that study was conducted three years ago. Today's percentage of A's is almost certainly still higher. And that can hardly be attributed to a stronger student body. Indeed, U.S. colleges are admitting the highest percentage of high school graduates in history: 70%. And today’s college students spend only 2.76 hours a day on classwork and homework combined, and three times as much time on leisure activities! Can anyone credibly assert that the average college student deserves mainly A's and B's, when “A” is supposed to signify excellence?
Drop down to K-12 and recent decades have also seen massive redistribution away from excellence. Funding for the gifted has been eviscerated while money and focus on disadvantaged and special education students has skyrocketed.
Broadening to the larger society, changes in our day-to-day language mirrors our changing values. Take mercy and justice, which historically have been viewed as deserving equal weight, per the classic balance scale above. Yet increasingly, we speak more positively of someone who bestows mercy rather than justice. We might well term the mercy-oriented person as kind, sensitive, or empathic. In contrast, the justice-oriented person is more likely deemed unkind, insensitive, lacking empathy, mean-spirited, unfeeling, cold, or hard-hearted.
The takeaway
Today’s egalitarian ethos is kind in intent but brings a risk: the danger of reducing society toward its lowest common denominator. It may be wise to restore balance between justice and mercy, egalitarianism and excellence.
I read this aloud on YouTube.