My wife and I have an inside joke. I’ll do some project for her and ask her if she’s satisfied with the results. She’ll say, “It’s fine.” To which I’ll reply, “Fine is what I aspire to be.”
I admit, it’s not a great joke, but it amuses us. Because if you knew anything about me, you’d know that just being fine or good enough is never really good enough for me. I firmly believe that a job worth doing is a job worth doing well.
We’ve lost our way as a nation. It used to be that we’d seek out the best of the best. Now, we’re settling for “good enough”.
Let me tell you why. There’s an old saying, “close enough for government work”. What it means is that when you farm everything out to the lowest bidder, you’re not going to get the best possible results. You’re trading cost for quality and, while the results aren’t going to be perfect, they’re probably “close enough”.
What a horrible way to go about life.
Government jobs don’t attract the best and brightest people. The people who get hired into government work are typically people who couldn’t get a job anywhere else.
Now, add to that the Government’s desire to base hiring on factors that have nothing to do with a person’s ability to do their job. You know, things like gender, race and personal pronouns. And when you hire people because of what they look like, instead of what they’re capable of, you’re not going to get the best possible people. What you’re going to get are people who are simply good enough.
Well, hopefully.
And that gives us a government filled with people who are OK with settling for something less than excellence.
Which would be fine if it stopped there. But it didn’t.
Because those same barely-adequate people are responsible for creating the rules that the rest of us have to follow. And they don’t see anything wrong with hiring people who aren’t the best candidates for the position. After all, that’s how they got their job.
So, they forced their ridiculous hiring policies on the rest of the country, and made companies hire people based not on their skills and abilities but on things like gender and race. You know, things we’re not supposed to be noticing anymore.
Companies were forced to hire people based on who or what they are, and not on what they can actually do. And once that happened, it was the beginning of the end of excellence.
Have you ever gone to a music recital or concert played by grade schoolers? I have. What a horrible experience. The music, if that’s what you want to call it, is off key, off tempo and, in many cases, barely recognizable. About the only redeeming quality it has going for it is that it’s free. Other than people who are into S&M, I can’t imagine anyone paying to be tortured like that.
But that’s where we’re headed. In the interest of diversity and inclusiveness, we’re making America into a place where “good enough” is what we aspire to be.
The music industry, specifically orchestras, has relied on blind auditions since the 1970’s. What they discovered was that when the people doing the hiring can’t see the person auditioning, you’re nearly guaranteed that the person who gets the gig is the best musician. Not the best female musician, or the best black musician or the best GLIBTAQ musician. The best musician. Period. Which should be the only thing that matters when you’re hiring someone to play in your orchestra.
But now the music industry is moving away from blind auditions and are moving towards the notion of “social equity” in hiring. That means concertmasters are being pressured to consider race, sex and other irrelevant attributes when making hiring decisions.
Getting rid of blind auditions is ridiculous. The only thing that would make it worse is if they actually hired blind musicians. OK, OK. I realize there are plenty of blind musicians that are pretty good. But are they the best? Maybe, but probably not.
Now, let’s take this one step further. If social equity is the goal, then shouldn’t a profoundly deaf person, someone who has never even heard music, be hired as a musician before anyone else? If the deaf aren’t underrepresented in the music industry, then I don’t know who is. If we’re willing to sacrifice excellence for wokeness then any deaf person who auditions should get the job regardless of if they’re any good or not.
But is that a good idea? Of course not.
Let me ask you this, let’s say you bought tickets to an orchestra. Do you want to hear the best music possible, or would you be willing to pay to hear a concert performed by people who were only “good enough”, but were hired because they were part of the latest woe-is-me group?
Come on now. Be honest.
I’ll tell you what, if it were me, I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about the ethnicity or personal life of any of the musicians. As long as they were the best. If I found out that the concert was less than it could be because they hired a deaf guy in the name of social equity, I wouldn’t be inspired by his courage. I’d be pissed.
I know, I know, there’s probably more than one deaf person who plays in an orchestra. But I wouldn’t pay to hear the best deaf musician, or the best blind musician or any other musician hired for the sake of some make-believe thing-that’s-not-a-thing. I’d only pay to hear the best musician they could find.
But if this is the direction we’re going, then we should be all in. We should also be demanding that white guys be hired as musicians in traditionally non-white ensembles.
But that’s not the way it would work.
If a bunch of Mexican guys wanted to form a barbershop quartet, that would be considered perfectly fine. But, if I wanted to start my own mariachi band, I’d be accused of “cultural appropriation”.
We used to be a nation that demanded excellence. Now we hire people because they check some box, and dumb down academic requirements to the lowest common denominator.
We are well on our way to becoming a nation that no longer appreciates a job well done and is instead willing to accept a job done well enough.
