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.