Some Thoughts About Genealogy

To state the absolutely obvious, every person living today is directly descended from the very first cells that lived billions of years ago. However, to make the time scale easier to grasp, let’s just state that every human alive today is necessarily directly descended from someone who was alive a thousand years ago, when, according to one estimate, the human population of the world was about 265 million.

Of those 265 million, we can assume not everyone managed to produce offspring, who, in turn, produced offspring, over forty-one generations (assuming four generations per century) between the years 1000 and the year 2000. Families were wiped about by wars, plagues, other natural disasters, and some people would have been celibate or infertile. However, a certain, evidently substantial fraction of those 265 million did manage to breed successfully, and today they have an estimated seven billion descendants.

From the perspective of a person concerned with genealogy, the important question is: which of the 265 million humans, who were alive a thousand years ago, are my ancestors? If you make a simple but fallacious calculation, you might be led to the conclusion that you are descended from them all. A person born in the the year 2000 has two parents who were born in 1975, four grandparents who were born in 1950, eight great-grandparents born in 1925, and sixteen great-great-grandparents who were born in 1900. Taking it back to the year 1000 would mean 2⁴¹ ancestors, which is 219,902,325,552,

or more than thirty times the present human population of the world. We could not possibly be not descended from two-hundred, twenty billion different people. Hence, many of our ancestors must, in fact, sit in more than once place on our family trees.

For example, suppose two of your great-grandparents, not necessarily a man and wife, were first cousins (let’s say your mother’s grandmother and your father’s grandmother). That would mean that two of your great-great-grandparents were siblings, and those siblings would, by definition, have the same parents. So instead of thirty-two different descendants in that generation, you would only have thirty. That’s the process that whittles down the number of our actual ancestors from the impossible billions that the arithmetic offers. In the villages where most of our ancestors probably lived, in times when people tended to live and breed close to the places where they were born, the pool of available spouses could not have been very large, so many of our ancestors were related to each other. Instead of fanning out more or less infinitely, our lines of direct descent overlap and tangle. Not only are we directly descended from someone who lived a thousand years ago, we are descended from that person (and from many of our other actual ancestors in that generation) along multiple paths.

Some people I know are very proud that they can trace their ancestry back several centuries, but, obviously, that usually means they can name one person out of the many from whom they are descended in each previous generation. I would be interested in my own genealogy only if I could discover more than a name and place of residence. If I knew what one of my ancestors did with her life in the twelfth century, that might be interesting.

In Praise of Mediocrity

If I weren't mediocre, you couldn't excel. Mediocrity is comfortable. If I don't make demands on myself or on you, we can all relax and enjoy ourselves. Don't expect too much, and you won't be disappointed. People who are content with mediocrity probably sleep well, have low blood pressure, and don't get tension headaches. They don't get angry at other people for being ordinary, a bit sloppy, a bit lazy. They live in a mediocre world and expect the world to be that way.

Mediocre doesn't mean “bad,” it means “good enough,” “decent,” “satisfactory,” “serviceable” – not the best but not the worst.

Of course mediocrity is relative. One of my college roommates was taken into a freshman physics class restricted to students who, like him, had received 800 on their college board tests in physics. In that context, he proved to be a mediocre student. Those who excel in one environment rise to a higher level, where they prove to be mediocre. As far as I know, my former roommate went on to have a happy and prosperous life.

Mediocre people run the risk of being overtaken by the excellent and left behind, but even mediocre sports teams sometimes beat the league leaders. Besides, at a certain level, mediocre people are kicked upstairs, where they can do no harm but still can draw a nice salary and feel happy with their lot. Mediocre workers are passed over for promotion, which means they have less responsibility, less pressure. Maybe they are wise enough to know they don't handle pressure well.

Self-satisfaction can be a symptom of mediocrity, bourgeois fatuousness, not realizing that one is mediocre. It takes the critical gaze of the outsider, who is superior, to discern mediocrity, to see that the person who fancies himself superior is far from that. But a mediocre person with self-knowledge, who doesn't imagine she is better than she is, can be satisfied with her lot without being proud of it.

Mediocrity might well be optimal in the utilitarian sense. What's preferable, a society of content mediocrities, without too many outstanding successes or miserable failures, or a society with a few anxious, insecure brilliant people at the top and a huge mass of unhappy nobodies?

Does the idea of mediocrity necessarily entail competition? Not in zero-sum games with only winners or losers. It definitely entails comparison: to others or to an ideal of excellence.

If you grade people's performance on a curve, the middle is, by definition, mediocre. What ever happened to the Gentleman's C? The idea was: it's bad form too try too hard. Why? Because you were born to privilege, and if you strove, it was a sign that you doubted your privilege. The idea was: ideas and knowledge aren't all that important. On the other hand, it didn't do to fail. You had to learn something. And perhaps accepting the Gentleman's C was a way of rejecting the standard of those who presume to judge, who presume to know what should be known, who presume to set standards. Plenty of very intelligent and creative people never cared what kind of grades they got in school or college, because they were deeply interested in other things. The stigma of mediocrity implies some absolute scale, against which everyone is measured, but if society no longer agrees on standards, or if there are many independent sets of standards, the man or woman who are judged mediocre in one area of their life might be highly valued by people in another area of their life.