Have We Abandoned Excellence?

By LANCE MORROW

A new biography of Admiral Hyman Rickover records a Navy captain's assessment: " 'Look around. Do you see excellence anywhere? In medicine? In law? Religion? Anywhere? We have abandoned excellence . . . But Rickover was a genius who gave a generation of naval officers the idea that excellence was the standard.' " Only the nuclear submarines ran on time."

"Abandoned" seems a little strong to describe what we have done to excellence. But of course a note of elegy always haunts discussions of excellence and quality. It is human nature to imagine that our present reality is squalid, diminished, an ignominious comedown from better days when household appliances lasted and workers worked, and manners were exquisite and marriages endured, and wars were just, and honor mattered, and you could buy a decent tomato. The lament for vanished standards is an old art form: besieged gentility cringes, indignant and vulnerable, full of memories, before a present that behaves like Stanley Kowalski: crude, loud, upstart and stupid as a fist.

Americans seem especially wistful about excellence now.

Standing waist-deep in a recession, after 20 years of change that hurled the cultural furniture around and turned much of it to junk, they are apt to think longingly of excellence. They may watch a film like Chariots of Fire, for example, with a nostalgic pang for the simplicity of its moral lines, its portrait of excellence unambiguously pursued.

Is the Navy captain correct? Has a quality called Excellence gone under like Atlantis in an inundation of the third-rate, a deluge of plastics, junk food, bad movies, cheap goods and trashy thought? The question has been asked since well before the decline of Athens; the answer is generally yes--but wait. There is an enduring ecology of excellence in the world. It is a good idea to remember Thomas Merton's question: "How did it ever happen that, when the dregs of the world had collected in Western Europe, when Goth and Frank and Norman and Lombard had mingled with the rot of old Rome to form a patchwork of hybrid races, all of them notable for ferocity, hatred, stupidity, craftiness, lust and brutality--how did it happen that, from all this, there should come the Gregorian chant, monasteries and cathedrals, the poems of Prudentius, the commentaries and histories of Bede... St. Augustine's City of God?"

A couple of rules may apply to generalizations about excellence: 1) all recollections of past excellence should be discounted by at least 50%; memory has its tricks of perspective; 2) what might be called the Walt Whitman Rule: exuberant democratic energy usually finds its own standards and creates its own excellence, even though the keepers of the old standards may not like the new. A Big Mac may sometimes surpass the concoctions of Julia Child.

Of course, much that was once excellent has fallen into disrepair, or worse. The dollar, for example, New York City, American public education, Cars from Detroit, Standards of civility (which may not have been as civil in the past as we imagine), Public safety. But who said that any excellence is permanent?

Excellence demands standards. It does not usually flourish in the midst of rapid, hectic change. This century's sheer velocity has subverted the principle of excellence; a culture must be able to catch its breath.

In America and elsewhere in the industrial world, the idea of excellence acquired in the past 20 years a sinister and even vaguely fascistic reputation. It was the Best and the Brightest, after all, who brought us Viet Nam. For a long time, many of the world's young fell into a dreamy, vacuous inertia, a canned wisdom of the East persuading them -- destructively -- that mere being would suffice, was even superior to action. "Let It Be," crooned Paul McCartney. Scientific excellence seemed apocalyptically suspect -- the route to pollution and nuclear destruction. Striving became suspect. A leveling contempt for "elitism" helped to divert much of a generation from the ambition to be excellent.

The deepest American dilemma regarding excellence arises from the nation's very success. The U.S. has been an astonishing phenomenon-- excellent among the nations of the world. But as the prophet Amos said, "Woe to them that are at ease in Zion." It is possible to have repose, or to have excellence, but only some decorative hereditary monarchs have managed to simulate both. Success has cost Americans something of their energetic desire.

And those Americans not yet successful (the struggling, the underclass) are apt to aim at ease, not excellence: the confusion contaminates character and disables ambition.

The manic overstimulation of American culture also makes excellence rarer. The great intellectual flowering of New England in the 19th century (Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, Longfellow, et al.) resulted in part from the very thinness of the New England atmosphere, an under-stimulation that made introspection a sort of cultural resource. America today is so chaotically hyped, its air so thick with kinetic information and alarming images and television and drugs, that the steady gaze required for excellence is nearly impossible. The trendier victims retreat to sealed isolation tanks to float on salt water and try to calm down.

Yet excellence remains. The U.S. has won 140 Nobel Prizes since World War II -- although cuts in Government research grants will reduce the level of that particular excellence in the years the come. American medicine, biology and physics lead the world. American politicians (that least excellent breed) may be better educated, more honest and industrious -- more excellent -- than ever. Vermont maple syrup is excellent. American agriculture is excellent. Ted Hood's sails are excellent. American telephone service is excellent. American professional sports would be excellent if they were not so drenched in greed. Look abroad: the French language is excellent. Some would argue that the entire country of Switzerland is excellent (if somewhat savorless), from its unemployment rate (.3%) to its scenery to its national airline.

Americans have historically allowed themselves to become confused by the fact that their practical excellence has been so profitable. But the meaning of excellence (serious excellence, not Big Macs) is essentially metaphysical. Excellent things are constantly destroyed, of course-- bombed, defaced, or else misunderstood; a conquering army may some day bivouac in the Sistine Chapel and take idle target practice at the ceiling. But excellence is essentially invulnerable. It carries the prestige of the infinite with it, an ancestral resemblance to the ideal. It is ecstatic. For an irrevocable moment, it gives the mind what Melville called "top-gallant delight."

-- By Lance Morrow

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