This post was originally published on Kronika: Filozofski magazin and has been republished with the permission of Kronika and the author.
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of “ordinariness.” All the powers of the new Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Brussels bureaucrats and Davos visionaries, national presidents and ministers, corporate managers and university rectors, innovation gurus and startup evangelists, research councils, leadership coaches, and lifestyle magazines. “Excellence” is no longer an ideal or an inspiration, but instead an imperative, a universal norm: we must all be excellent! This cult (almost a terror) of “excellence” has seeped into every pore of our lives and work. Children must achieve “excellent results” already in elementary school. Moreover, competition is encouraged already: in preschool in what ought to be their free and creative play, in sports where there is no recreation anymore, etc. Everyone must train like “top athletes,” artists must “make an impact” and be “recognizable on the art market,” scientists must constantly “produce excellence” just to survive, and even in modern spirituality—which is increasingly becoming a corporate variant of traditional opium for the people—there reigns the compulsion of constant “self-improvement” and “working on oneself.” Everyone must constantly prove themselves on this universal market of “excellence”—in front of employers, audiences, and even in front of themselves—since in such a world even our emotions have their own Key Performance Indicator. To be “average,” to be “ordinary,” now means not merely to be invisible, but to be doomed to career failure. “Ordinariness” simply has no place in this polished “society of excellence.” The modern successful human is either an Übermensch of “excellence” or does not exist at all.
One elementary semantic, logical, and mathematical fact, however, is forgotten here: if everyone is excellent, then no one is. Excellence is a human phenomenon that arises in the creative dialectic between the usual and the extraordinary; it is a space of difference, departure, and breakthrough. But when the market logic of universal normativity demands that all its participants be “excellent,” excellence loses its point of reference and thus its meaning. Formally speaking, excellence is a departure above the average, an exception within the arithmetic mean of a given community’s results—whether scientific, entrepreneurial, athletic, or otherwise. But if all members must be excellent, comparison itself disappears. The average, as a measure of central tendency, can exist only if there are differences: higher and lower values. A community in which every member is above the average is a mathematical contradiction. Without relative difference and variance, excellence becomes an empty slogan: seemingly noble, but logically hollow and mathematically impossible. That is the fundamental paradox of the modern universal norm of excellence, if it is measured in relation to the average within a community, group, or context.
Admittedly, from a mathematical point of view, there is a way to avoid this paradox—that is, a way in which everyone allegedly can (and thus must be able to) reach the threshold of “excellence.” All that is sufficient is for it to be “measured” against some predefined, absolutely external criterion, standard, or threshold of quality, regardless of how others are doing. But once we move from relative to absolute excellence, the standard is no longer logically or statistically objective; it becomes conventional (and therefore arbitrary). But who defines this standard? Usually, it is defined by various social institutions—for example: in schools, hospitals, universities, and elsewhere by various ministries, in sports by national associations and international federations, and in art by critics and juries. Arbitrary as they are, these standards still create powerful normative frameworks: all those who reach them are judged (according to them) as “successful,” while all others are judged as “failures.” However, this type of criteria for excellence clearly reflects the values and priorities of those who have the authority to define them. This in turn enables social control and selection of the “excellent” that does not necessarily recognize real qualities and creativity beyond the defined criteria. Of course, absolute standards and criteria hide the fact that by their very nature they are not objectively relevant for evaluating excellence, but rather are the product of contingent social, political, economic, and ideological values and interests.
Authentic excellence within a particular community, group, or context (or in relation to any ability, competence, or productivity) cannot be a socially flexible and dictated absolute “excellence.” Excellence, if it is authentic, cannot be prescribed—much less imposed—as a universal norm according to some external, supposedly objective standards and criteria. Nor can it be a mathematically impossible relative “excellence” in which everyone can and must be excellent. Authentic excellence is always a unique event of a step out of the known, a rare but far-reaching emergence of new ideas, views, and risks of horizons. And this step has meaning and purpose only because there is a wide space of human diversity, everyday work, attempts, average results, uncertainty, unpredictability, doubts, and mistakes—or simply, a wide space of ordinariness, which modern “society of excellence” easily labels pejoratively as “mediocrity.” However, authentic human ordinariness is not a lack of value and virtue but the vital and creative foundation of every community, and authentic excellence occurs precisely in those communities where this space for ordinariness is allowed. If this space is abolished—if everything is measured by market metrics of success—then we do not actually have and do not create excellent scientists, athletes, entrepreneurs, employees, excellent children, pupils, and students, but only “standardized” contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers of “excellence.”
Authentic human ordinariness is not the opposite of excellence, but the background against which excellence becomes visible, the soil on which it grows—or, in Kantian terms, the condition for the possibility of experiencing authentic excellence. Without average, ordinary days, there are no extraordinary moments; without ordinary, completely unspectacular work, there are no spectacular, extraordinary discoveries; and without the many who persistently build with small steps, there are no rare ones who make the big leap. Ordinariness is an expression of human and social naturalness, a sign that a community is alive, diverse, and organic—and not the mechanical sum of its parts in mad competition with one another. Progress, therefore, does not happen in blindness to everything else except “excellence,” but in a system that has its eyes wide open for the value of each individual within it. Only then can excellence again become what it naturally is: a privileged moment in the long-term duration of dedicated work, and not a slogan masking the pressure of markets and bureaucratic whims disguised as historical necessity. Without ordinariness, there is no context, contrast, standard, or reason to call and recognize something as excellent. And this is not a call to flatten distinctions, nor to excuse laziness or irresponsibility, but the natural structure of every authentic, human-appropriate, and natural (and non-bureaucratic) valuation.
Ordinariness is a space of peace and tranquility between extremes: between modesty and ambition, between the possible and the impossible. It is a reminder that life and work are not, nor can they be, a permanent spectacle of outstanding achievement, but a steady rhythm of thoughtful persistence. It contains what the ancient Greek philosophers called σωφροσύνη (sophrosyne)—common sense, moderation and prudent restraint—one of the four cardinal virtues, along with justice, courage and wisdom. It is the virtue of the golden mean: the ability to avoid harmful extremes of both excesses and deficiencies in our feelings and actions, the desire to choose inner harmony and prudent self-control—as opposed to excessive and unrealistic ambitions, passions, and impulses. From Socrates through Aristotle to the Stoics, the consensus is clear: σωφροσύνη is, simply put, the virtue of moderation that preserves the measure of humanness. But when we celebrate only “excellence,” we deny everything that is authentically human; we deny progress as a process, as a duration, and growth—in small, but certain steps. Excellence may be the flash, but ordinariness is the light that holds and pushes the day. Without ordinariness, the world would be an exhausting drama of evaluation and self-evaluation, promotion and self-promotion—instead of a community of learning, support, and growth.
Although seemingly paradoxical, ordinariness is a refuge: an oasis of respite and tranquility, even for the excellent. Perfectionism is accompanied by: excessive self-criticism and fear of mistakes; long-term tension accompanied by emotional exhaustion and loss of motivation; anxiety and a sense of worthlessness in the lack of success (which will eventually be absent due to the nature of our physical and psychological limitations); isolation and disruption of relationships with colleagues, friends, and family; hypertrophy of competitive (rather than cooperative) relationships; neglect of one’s own needs and health; and, in general, a loss of balance between work, rest, and life. All of these are recognized, well-documented, and diagnosed side effects of the compulsion to “excellence”—even though young “hopes for excellence” are still rarely or almost never introduced to them. In the long run, however, this seems quite clear, even if it is unspoken: the pursuit of excellence without limits most often leads not to real success and excellence, but to inner fatigue and alienation, with which everyone loses—both individuals and society as a whole.
A world in which no one is allowed to be content with their own rhythm—but must agree to the prescribed one—is a world that transforms excellence into a form of control and into a measure of value that no longer encourages growth, but instead produces anxiety and a sense of inadequacy—resulting in a world that breeds collective fatigue. Admittedly, preachers of the “liberation of excellence” try to be as convincing as possible and many rhetorical, legislative, and financial resources are invested in that “mission”—but, in its essence, stripped of its external facade, it is actually just one of the newer forms of slavery: the slavery of constant comparison, competition, and recursive validation. In such an atmosphere, joy in the average (meaning in the everyday) and peace in the ordinary—in other words, everything that constitutes the human measure—disappears. The possibility of a person being good enough—and not always “the best” or “the most excellent”—disappears. That is why today perhaps the most excellent act would be precisely a radical one: giving up the obsession with excellence. This is not out of cynicism, but precisely out of the need for meaning—not to strive for less, but so that we can love what we do again (and not just how what we do is valued).
The defense of ordinariness is not a call to give up on excellence, but to free ourselves from its tyranny. For only when we accept our own ordinariness, when we allow ourselves to be good enough, do we reopen the space in which authentic excellence can arise freely, unobtrusively, and almost accidentally—as a consequence of a meaningful life in which everyone has their own valuable place. Ordinariness is not laziness and indifference, it is not abdication of responsibility and avoidance of work, but a return of man to his own natural measure, his finitude, and awareness of his own (and other people’s) limits. It is permission to be imperfect, but real human beings. Finally, the defense of authentic human ordinariness is the best possible and most sincere defense and appreciation of authentic excellence.
Boris Kožnjak
Boris Kožnjak is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of the History of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb, Croatia. Holding a degree in physics and a PhD in philosophy, he primarily focuses on the history and philosophy of science, while also maintaining a keen interest in the sociology and psychology of scientific and philosophical knowledge.
