On Pernicious Adequacy

In a fitting follow on to my rare paean to the post-Great War – aka ‘modern’ – world that was my previous and first post, I thought it appropriate to speak (mercifully, more briefly*) on a now slowly wilting societal and personal value of tremendous import that in fact had its apotheosis in that very modern era – ambition. 

Ambition Incarnate

Source: No clue, but I'm guessing public domain, previously British government

What I mean by this is an ambition to excellence, and to the bettering of oneself, one’s standing, and one’s standards.  Though, as said, its apotheosis is distinctly modern, it is not unique to the post-WWI era upon which I hang that label.  But before I delve too deep there, let’s tell the full story, shall we?

Eurocentric history, for all its flaws, allows us to arrange the years since the Fall of Rome (which for tradition’s sake I will establish at 476, though the cultural impact of Rome was such that one can convincingly argue against its very demise), as one march of increasing quality of life and increasing freedom and possibility for the majority of Europe’s (and later, North America’s) denizens.  From tribalism to feudalism to monarchism to representative government to the fiddly multicultural demagoguery democracy of modern Europe and the EU, the rights and privileges of the average man steadily, on balance, improved (yes man, I take it squarely on the chin that women’s prospects were far less than men’s – though the idea that these have largely improved with time is not, I think, a terribly controversial one).  Yet for all of these political and philosophical advancements, the chances of rising above the station of one’s birth to greater wealth and personal influence remained far more static; indeed the ability to pull oneself up by bootstraps, as the phrase goes, came not with political development, but with paradigmatic shift in economics.  The industrial revolution was the key. 

I am under no delusions that the first job opportunities that industrialisation presented to the masses of working poor were terribly life changing or tolerable.  Early factory work was undeniably awful, the more so for its lack of safety measures and the poor treatment of child labourers especially.  Yet it was first in the late Victorian era and the opening decades of the 1900s that the idea blossomed that any man, though unlikely, could through his own work and effort make himself into a financial success, and an important member of society.   It is telling that Dickens’ work on the very idea of improving one’s station, Great Expectations, takes for granted that the means to one’s improvement will come not from oneself, but from a visiting purveyor of happy happenstance; benevolence from above.  Indeed, in the titular scene, Pip’s benefaction is indicated to him by Mr. Jagger simply by telling him that he now has “great expectations;” no un-endowed labourer having any expectations that one would call great.  Yet by the time Victoria Regina had passed, nabobs out of the middle class had risen and fallen, and two great wars had been fought, nearly every man on either side of the North Atlantic believed to at least some extent that his stars where as mobile as those that had hung above his crib.  Witness not the American Dream of a house, spouse, dog and some humorously fractional number of offspring, but rather the American dream of becoming one’s own Carnegie, Vanderbilt, or Rockefeller.  By the time the dust of WWII had begun to clear, nearly 2000 years of progress left each Western man with the right to ambition, and a streak to rise above adequacy.

But ambition is a fragile gift, and adequacy a pernicious slime.  It is, in a way, understandable; WWI (to bludgeon a dead, dead, dead horse) and WWII (to bomb one) had destroyed two generations worth of the sort of daring, brash young men from whom ambition exudes.  Europe especially was tired, battered, shorthanded, and aghast; any change could sell, and the simple adequacies of a safe roof, non-rationed food, and peace in one’s time were elating after those earthly eschatons.  And so Europe, for which Britain will be our microcosm, began its perilous dance with adequacy.  Perhaps the brightest, most stinging example of this pernicious love affair came in 1971, when British peacetime income tax was set with a top bracket of 98%, when investment was included, for yearly incomes over £20,000 (about £175,000, or $290,000, in the modern day).  True, this is quite a lot of money, and more than most people will ever make – but it is the strongest evidence of the culture of adequacy one could encounter.  Only in a society in which each taxpayer unquestionably expected and, worse, accepted that he or she could never come to earn such money can such a policy endure the public scrutiny.  To this day, for all of my love for it, the United Kingdom suffers from a pernicious adequacy, its inborn class divisions – deeper admittedly than those across the Atlantic – worn as an excuse for settling.  The nabobs might laugh, but more likely they would weep.

The United States was not so battered by the Great Wars and so did not so dramatically succumb to the taxation manifestation of adequacy, and Americans tend to see these British taxation numbers and recoil.  To its credit, the citizens of the USA have held tighter to their ambition than their British counterparts, but they too are not without their creeping adequacy.  It has become stylish amongst American malcontents to discuss the ‘lie’ of the American Dream – in such discussion most certainly restricted simply to the promise of an owned home, spouse, kids, pet– as an adult fairytale peddled by the powerful to persuade the plebe populace to persist in their perseverations under the heel of big banks and business.  Pundit and progressive politician tell us that more government aid and more programs are necessary as more and more the greed of the haves condemn the yet-to-haves never to have.  And the public believes it.  A steady job and a home for one’s family with bit of liquidity for leisure and little luxuries have now been labeled the apex of ambition where for a gleaming century in history they were the desirous adequate!  For about a hundred years we had so raised the hopes of man that a lifetime of working drudgery meant more than a hovel and the chance at meat once a week at the largesse of one’s owners.  Yet now, faced with the difficulty, the inconvenience, the uncertainty of the fruits of striving, more and more people slip into the same pernicious adequacy – 'where I am is enough, I should be happy with what I have, the world is too mean a place for me to do great things.'

There is nothing wrong with the 'Little' American Dream – a well appointed home, a happy family, and a brace of disposable income is as fine a goal as mankind ever had, and I speak not only to money, but to great thoughts and deeds - goals which do not necessarily need a bankroll.  Something as simple as excellence in one's own field, and the drive to achieve it, is enough.  But to hear the naysayers call it an unattainable ambition is a farce against the ambition that drove the great men of the last century, and an abnegation of the responsibility to greatness that must draw on at least some.  What’s more, it reduces adequacy to the squalor of the past – a truly anti-progressive attainment.  When a people have abnegated wholesale their call to greatness and the drive to achieve, their chances at greatness die, and themselves soon after with little cultural legacy of which to speak.  Never were a greater lie told nor pariah released upon us, and it preys on all people now: “Cast down your bucket where you are.”

My best to all on this fine winter evening.  Chase the sun.

(*a lie, sorry)