Thursday, December 31, 2009
The Meritocracy of Mediocrity
One of the Bay Area mystery writers I read tends to wear her political correctness on her sleeve, which when it comes to denouncing racial and homophobic bigotry is OK, if a little trite. But for some reason she concurrently disparages hippies, as though that type of bigotry is somehow acceptable.
Perhaps it is a symptom of her age, brought up during rather than after World War II, caught between the generation that fought the war against the Nazis and the generation that demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. A generation known more for its corporal compliance than for its quest for philosophical transformation.
Undoubtedly their limited understanding of transcendent relationships is due in part to their lack of entheogenic exploration, but this does not entirely explain their propensity to disparage what they do not understand; that, unfortunately, is a widespread symptom of the regularized rewards of superficial social status--what some would call the meritocracy of mediocrity.
Perhaps it is a symptom of her age, brought up during rather than after World War II, caught between the generation that fought the war against the Nazis and the generation that demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. A generation known more for its corporal compliance than for its quest for philosophical transformation.
Undoubtedly their limited understanding of transcendent relationships is due in part to their lack of entheogenic exploration, but this does not entirely explain their propensity to disparage what they do not understand; that, unfortunately, is a widespread symptom of the regularized rewards of superficial social status--what some would call the meritocracy of mediocrity.
