Excellence

The quality of being excellent is purely contextual. Something is said to excel when it rises above its surroundings, its context, or its neighbours. It follows therefore that nothing can be excellent unless it is compared to something else. Indeed, excellere is the Latin for 'to be made loftier (than something else)'.

In that sense, it is related to another Latin word, excedere — 'to go or pass beyond (something else)'. It is where we get the words 'exceed' and 'excess'. If something is excellent, it is excessive in the vertical sense.

Excellence, therefore, is excess. It may be useful to strive for excellence, but excellence in itself relies on comparison. Take away the context, and excellence fails in itself.

But this is true of many other things. Perhaps it is good to compare the words 'abnormal' and 'enormous'. Both are comparisons with 'normal' — the former means 'away from the norm', while the latter means 'out of the norm'. I leave you to decide which is better.

Subcompetence and Splinter Cultures

The last few days have been days in which I've managed to catch up with old friends as well as young friends. I've also managed to make ends meet by sitting around at the local Starbucks and dispensing advice for a fee. This has not been easy, since I am normally pretty serious about the advice I dispense, and I try my best to give useful material.

But in between sessions of advice-dispensing and consequent fee-taking, I found myself musing on two tangentially related themes. Subcompetence is one; the Dicksonian idea of 'splinter cultures' is the other.

Subcompetence is an interesting word; it is related to both 'competition' and 'competence' through the common Latin origin competere, which means 'to strive together (towards a common goal)'. When one says a person is 'competent', we mean that his faculties are coherently focussed when he undertakes a specific task. Nowadays, it also implies that he is able to carry out that task, whatever it is. The odd thing of course is that modern competition is far from a common striving; perhaps it is antagonistic striving towards the same prize, which only one competitor can win.

But what is subcompetence? It is the state of being just about unable to complete or excel in one's chosen task, or the task one has been given. I was thinking about it because there are a whole bunch of people out there who have seemingly been dragooned into teaching a subject that none of them is fit to teach (as far as the evidence seems to show). They all come from one discipline, in which it is possible to believe they are competent, and inflict themselves (or are inflicted) upon innocent students who find that they have not learnt very much from the experience.

How do I know this? I know this because whenever I ask the students why they don't seem to have learnt the right stuff, they keep referring to the same people. And these people all have at least one thing in common.

It put me in mind of the Splinter Cultures first described by Gordon Dickson in his Childe Cycle, beginning with 'The Tactics of Mistake'. In that sequence, humanity forms highly specialised cultures which farm out their skills with varying degrees of success. Since specialists are paid so much more than general 'baseline' humans, the market drives ever more specialised culturalisation. Eventually, the cycle shows that this results in peculiar dysfunctions, as the specialists prove incapable of holistic synthesis (or anything remotely similar).

When faced with a subject like 'Theory of Knowledge', which by its nature requires the ability to roam back and forth comfortably across the world of all the disciplines and areas of knowledge, people with a highly specialised training tend to fail. They can only see things from their specialist perspective, which makes their ability to educate others somewhat lacking.

The whole thing leads to one thought. If you claim you are going to try to provide (or worse, that you DO provide) an holistic education, you cannot afford to dispense with a) skilled generalists, b) structures that bring specialists together in common endeavours of cross-disciplinary learning. If you make such an error, you might possibly still claim multidisciplinarity, but you certainly will not be able to provide an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary education. And once you go there, there is no way you can even claim an holistic perspective or pretensions to providing an holistic education.

Beyond Excellence

The recently-concluded European football championships saw Spain scramble to a lauded victory over perennial title-chasers Germany. I watched that final match and saw little to applaud except that the 'nearly men' of European soccer had finally won something. Spain have too often flattered and frilled; even those who conceded that they were an excellent side in this year's proceedings worried about that at the end.

But really, the match was a terrible one. If anything, Holland's ruthless dispatching of championship pretenders Italy and France made for better theatre. In fact, the whole tournament was an expectedly patchy affair with brilliance far outweighed by mediocrity and uncertainty. Which is a lot like life. And so, this thought came to mind...

Maybe, excellence is not what we find at the end, at the peak, zenith or pinnacle. Maybe everyone exhausts themselves by producing excellence, and by the time we 'make it' or 'succeed' or whatever, it's only because we were once excellent and held an edge long enough to see off the opposition. Often, the opposition are better, but we are luckier or more stubborn or more favoured by powers beyond us, and we win. But we attribute this to our own excellence, since it would be painful to admit otherwise.

After all, success is only the outcome of process. A success is that which is logically expected as the decedent of process, and if the outcome is not to be logically expected from the process, it's only a fluke, a flash, a folly elevated to the realms of miracle.

So, when we say that the best is yet to be, we yearn for a just process that yields success. But we will take anything, of course. Even if what we get isn't excellence, but a miracle we never had any right to expect.

A Roman Devotional

Sometimes, one is driven by the exigencies of service to speak about things that come abruptly to one's sparsely prepared mind. The response is difficult, the pressure is dire, the words seem too small to convey and contain what is too large. And thus it came to me while in the shower today, that the Romans have a lot to answer for, and have a lot of answers for which there are no questions.

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Here is the Roman meditation that I am about to say something about. It comes from the letter to the Romans, chapter 12, verses 1-6a.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgement, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given us.

What is clear is that we are all gifted. And the tragedy on display is that this is masked, defeated, debilitated. By conforming to the statistical, logical, socially-constructed patterns of this world, we ensure that the laws of 'normal distribution' require us to describe each one of us as 'above the mean', 'below the mean' or 'within n standard deviations of the mean' – as if these mean something. The truth is simple: we are multifactorial, talented in a myriad ways. To put ourselves into any of the world's reific and disintegrative ways is to deny an holistic truth and to make atoms out of whole people. It is the Bertrand Russell way, but it is not the way of God.

For we are all, once we subject ourselves to sober judgement, gifted to an exact degree which only God knows – but the assurance of faith is that we ARE gifted. In fact, we are gifted so much that we need not think of ourselves too highly, or too lowly; to do either would be to spurn the gracious power that has been given to us for a lie of our own device. We must renew our minds, banish all thoughts of numerical ratings, and be transformed.

At this point, everyone will rise up and condemn what seems to be my misplaced idealism. Well, I don't think that God calls for a lower standard, and I am not saying that. I believe that numerical ratings cannot capture the excellence that comes with being your best. It is not possible that your best is worse than any grade the world can give you. If you are an IB student capable (as far as God knows) of scoring 44 points at best, then 44 points is honourable, distinguished, powerful; the same goes if your God-given limit is 34, though – then 34 would be excellent. With this reasoning, I hold all my students to a higher standard than I can possibly demand on my own: can you be the best that you can be? Can you see yourself as being licensed to touch the face of God and be a finger of His hand in this world?

But how would we know what our best is? There are two things to ponder. The eagle is a symbol of Roman might; the prophet Isaiah also used it in his inspirational message: "You will soar on wings like eagles." Note: you will not soar on eagles' wings, but on wings like eagles. It is the difference between the numerical grades of this world (mere wings) and the excellence of God (something like wings, but better). It is only on the wings of the spirit and of the Spirit, that you can reach above the surly bonds of earth. You were all made for better things; the best is yet to be. You were all made gifted and talented; why should you despise yourself? And lastly, there is nothing normal about your distribution.

Forget the patterns of this world. Transcend them. Think of the box, because you are constrained to; think beyond the box into the vault of the heavens, because you are more than atoms. You are what you are, and that is no mean thing at all.