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Let’s talk about mediocrity. Let’s talk about art, too. I’m looking at the charts for the week of April 30, 2016. The song at the top is a song by Rihanna (feat. Drake) called “Work”. Let’s take a look at the lyrics.

Work, work, work, work, work, work
He said me haffi
Work, work, work, work, work, work!
He see me do me
Dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt!
So me put in
Work, work, work, work, work, work
When you ah gon’
Learn, learn, learn, learn, learn
Meh nuh care if him
Hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurting

Now, let’s take a look at the song that was at the top of the list in the same week 30 years ago. I discover it was “5150” by Van Halen. Let’s take a look at the lyrics of that song.

The love in me is never straight and narrow
Unless the love is tried and true
You take a chance with new beginnings
Still we try, win or lose, take the highs
With the blues

It might not be something that would raise Samuel Coleridge from his grave, but hey, I doubt it would make him roll over in it, either.

Mediocrity is not just acceptable; it’s fashionable

This is only a random example, but it’s not an isolated case. Take any song you want, from any genre. Take a sample of books, photographs, art in general.

You will discover that we have a great number of talented artists lost in the noise, and a sad number of utter trash floating on the surface like flotsam from a ship that went down.

Moving beyond art, the spotlights are often on people that are… what exactly? Go to Google News and google “Kim Kardashian”. You will get tons of results, from the past 24 hours. Do the same for “sovereign debt restructuring”. Hell, what am I saying? Ask 100 people on the street, 90 of them wouldn’t even know what sovereign debt is…

We live in the times when mediocrity is not only accepted but fashionable. Intelligence is snubbed, superficiality glorified. Visit Rome or Athens, the Colosseum or Parthenon. There are hordes of tourists in front of each, wanting to find out more about the history of these monuments take selfies. Lots of selfies. The more I, me, myself, I, me, myself, the better.

Mediocrity and Selfishness

Perhaps there’s the key, perhaps that’s the explanation behind the trendiness of mediocrity: we truly live in the era of I; worse still, we live in the era of I want.

Some time ago I attended a lecture given by Adam Roberts. An interesting element in the discussion that followed was the realization that a certain kind of paradox is present: we live in the era when young people are in a much, much better position than ever before, having access to goods and services never dreamed of by youth in, say, the 1950s (not to mention the 17th century). And yet, they are the most stressed, upset, medicated (there’s a topic for another day) than any of their ancestors. Why is that?

Here’s a thought:

Perhaps because nowadays, more than ever before in history, teenagers and young adults are offered everything on a platter. On average, a Western-world twenty-year old has had computers, mobile phones, tablets, on which he has watched movies and listened to music (more rarely: has read books), without having to struggle for any of those.

No effort, no patience, no character

When I was a kid, which was before the Internet, if you couldn’t afford a certain LP album, tough luck. About your only chance to listen to your favorite song was to spend hours in front of the radio, hoping it would get played – I remember how I had a 90-min tape always ready in my cassette player for such purposes; it was entertaining to create such “playlists”, consisting of entirely incongruous songs and genres!

Well, let me tell you: That effort meant reward, meant appreciation, meant patience. Nowadays, if your Internet connection is oh-so-slightly slower for a couple of seconds, you begin to swear and yell and throw a tantrum. 

And so, we have an entire generation of people who haven’t learned what it is to be patient; what it means to have to be innovative in order to get what you want (as a kid, I had discovered that putting folio around the antenna of the little TV in my room improved the signal).

A recipe for mediocrity

We have an entire generation of people who not only want everything (without even knowing why), but who have lost all sense of perspective about the world.

Just go to any random app on Google Play or the Apple Store and read the reviews. Notice how, invariably, you will see many people writing something like “It doesn’t work! Fix this NOOOW!!” How hopelessly stupid, superficial, and self-centered can you be, to even assume the universe will stop revolving, holding its breath, so that you can play Candy Crush? 

Expand this to other areas of your life, and you have a recipe for mediocrity waiting.

And so, we have mediocre “artists” because we have lost the ability to understand anything beyond the limited horizons of our individual self. Moreover, we have mediocre leaders because they, too, are appealing to mediocre people who cannot understand anything more sophisticated than a simplistic, linear explanation. Bertrand Russell, in his The Triumph of Stupidity, put it aptly:

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

Or, as I mentioned in the very first post of this blog, “there have always been stupid loudmouths and intelligent but, alas, silent sufferers”.

Wanna know why mediocrity is so fashionable?

Because the war against stupidity is over; and we have lost.