The price of living in a democracy, with a corresponding two- (or multi-)party state, is that all knowledge in the social-sciences field (broadly speaking) is either partisan or not popular. This bothers its citizens from time to time, the usual trigger being the equation of “democracy” with “mediocrity in scholarship.” Saying this tends to raise a little tumult, so the person who says so is unpopular indeed unless a format is carved out for them – or if they’re a foreign visitor who can go home after making such a remark.

The usual solution proffered to the mediocrity complaint is either advocating the creation of a space protected from partisanship where excellence can thrive – whose half-life is a lot less than Oxford’s – or else indulging in a genteel sort of backtalk: criticizing the two- party state for shoving “great scholars” into either a square or round hole and making them fit into it. The usual advocated solution which follows this kind of responsorial complaint is the “rationalization of politics” – a disguised call for a one-party state.

Given this alternative, you would think that riding with the “mediocre” charge would be preferable.

But most Americans (to take the usual synecdoche for “democratic republic”) don’t like this being brought up at all, even if accompanied by the common-sense explanation that as long as “if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich” prevails, and as long as excellence in scholarship produces hard books that are too plain-covered for America’s coffee tables, then the middlebrow way will prevail. Here lies a puzzle, as noting that one can’t be excellent at all things would seem to be about as controversial as saying that soap operas aren’t exactly in the same league as documentaries in terms of either truth to life or dramatic appeal, or in noting that going for the gold in science, computer programming, etc. doesn’t exactly leave much time to take up serious philosophy.

You’d think that the people who heard the “mediocre” charge would have just pointed to United States citizens’ achievements in business, science, sports, etc. and laughed. Or replied that U.S. history has shown reservoirs of hidden excellence which are always available in cases of national emergency, such as the Sputnik crisis, which turned the United States from the world headquarters of sophisticated mechanics to arguably the #1 country in terms of real science. If social science ever became relevant to national security, or if there developed a pool of riches awaiting the excellent social scientist, then the supposed “mediocrity” would vanish quickly. This prediction is completely consistent with previous U.S. achievements.

So what’s wrong here?

Maybe the sting in the charge comes from an association of business skills with low opportunism, even cunning. There is a basis to that charge: any common-sensical person can easily see how a spurt of cunning can pay off in riches through the use of demagogy. If the best man in the shop is singled out through smearing, then he will find it much harder to compete in the marketplace, and is more likely to fold his hand and go to work for someone already at the top. (The same applies to women.) So there is a cash value to the encouragement of bigotry in a market society.

If you’re economically literate, you know that the story doesn’t end there. The free market has also proved to be an excellent dissolvant of bigotry through the use of depersonalization of the product being manufactured or sold. If the best man is smeared to death, he can simply roll with it, and even use it as a publicity stunt. Imagine Henry Ford saying: “Ignoramus I may be, but I sure know how to make a car.” Or Bill Gates “nerding it up.” Or anyone else that, in Liberace’s phrase, goes “cry[ing] about it all the way to the bank.”

The only kibosh in this is the loss of dignity that’s the price of rolling with the buzz. This goes a long way to the explanation why so many African-Americans are cynical about the free market.

There’s also another drawback. Since scholars’ products are more closely associated with themselves as people, the same mud-face trick is a lot harder in that field. Since scholars deal with material that’s often hard to check, they have to worry about their honor (their word being good) a lot more than the average jobholder or businessperson. I will grant that honor is not as central to scholarship as it is to the armed forces, but the scholar’s path, though wider than that of West Point, is still narrow. Loss of dignity hurts a scholar right in the pocketbook.

So the only hope for excellent scholarship coming from a business society such as the United States lies in the non-profit sector: its inhabitants have less reason to worry about any ‘stubbornness’ or ‘recalcitrance’ on their part cutting into their net income than regular people. Despite Robert Oppenheimer’s wacky political ideas, his achievements in theoretical physics are well known and permanent: he came, thanks to his rich father, from the trust-fund- boy sector. Others less fortunate have come up through the professor circuit (for as long as they can stand it.)

The trouble is that the non-profit sector is also where you find none other than...Junior. The boy that has to be flattered half to sleep or else he’ll cause trouble for his friends and allies. Mister Vain...or, in some cases, Doctor Vain.

This is really what stops any democratic republic from developing true excellence in scholarship. Since “excellence” has a traditional association with aristocracy, and since the traditions of a democratic republic incline the average fellow to view the aristocrat as both vain and stupid, reinforcement of these traditions is easily and neatly found by dumping the vain and stupid into the fields which an aristocratic society identifies with “excellence.”

There’s no way around this. “Democratic excellence” (if we leave the flattery, or encouragement, aside for the moment) is as much an attempt to square the circle as trying to combine an adversarial legal system with the sedateness of a French court of law, or the above hope of getting rid of partisanship in social science without getting rid of the two-party state. All of the renunciations involved in accepting the above are similar in form to the cracker-barrel maxim: “freedom may be flabby at times, but it sure beats being terrorized by your government in Sparta!”

I should note an added benefit to the constrained vision (Prof. Thomas Sowell’s phrase) above. If you want to scope out the fine fellow in the shadows whose patriotism might be somewhat hysterical...