“Medianocrity”

“One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, seduced by different delusions.”  —Horace

A “median” is the point at which 50% is above, and 50% is below. Imagine lining up 99 people by height. Person number 50 would be at the median. It’s the point of 50/50 odds for the individual. A “mode” is simply the most frequently seen value, or the high-point of a distribution curve. But if extreme cases off to one side create a long “tail”, the median will move in that direction.

Much has been made of the fifth-grade level vocabulary and grammar of our current voice from the bully-pulpit. But that’s also the “readability” level of U.S. Air Force maintenance manuals for nuclear weapons. And most Americans have gone from reading their news in a morning paper to watching it on TikTok anyway.  So the surprisingly articulate speeches given by this same person at the Arab Islamic American Summit in 2017, and again at the US-Saudi Investment Forum last May might surprise some in the US.

A Flesch-Kincaid score of the 2017 text resulted in a 9.5 grade-level as a speech, and a reading level at the “10th to 12th grade (fairly difficult to read )”. But most political addresses are actually the result of speech-writers who also know about things like medians, modes and “bell-curves” as they relate to audiences…

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“Regression to the mean” was the statistical phenomenon Sir Francis Galton discovered in his 1877 analysis of heredity patterns in human populations. Galton explained this as resulting from an as then unknown mechanism of inheritance. The mathematics of random chance in this process would cause the offspring of extraordinary parents to revert increasingly toward some average, or statistical “mean” over successive generations, what Galton termed, “regression to mediocrity”.

“Mediocrity”, however, can range in definition. Fifty-percent would be “mediocre”, if a measure of the accuracy of predicting outcomes in random coin tosses. But ninety-percent might be a “mediocre” score in a class full of committed students with a competent instructor. The “mediocrity” of being in the statistical median of that particular classroom simply means being in the middle of the pack. Just where that middle is located is something else entirely.

Galton seized upon just this idea when developing “eugenics”. He proposed that a society might work to skew the median toward beneficial inherited physical potentials through selective human reproduction. In the nutshell version, people of good health and high intellect would be encouraged to reproduce from among others of similar stature, with the objective of improving odds within the inheritance-pool.

Of course, it’s not too difficult to imagine how this could turn into a dystopian nightmare as the concept of “family” becomes more like the breeding of racehorses. Indeed, the racial ideology of “Nazism” encouraged selective child-bearing by those with “Nordic” or “Aryan” traits, and used this to justify involuntary sterilization and mass-murder.

Appealing instead to economic incentives, Singapore attempted to encourage a voluntarily shift in fertility-rates toward its college-educated population in the 1980s. Still, ethnic controversies rapidly shuttered the program. Regardless, modern genetic manipulation may render natural approaches to changing the odds in human heredity a moot point, another dystopian possibility examined in the 1997 film, Gattaca. But there are other ways to change the odds in societies.

From a person simply learning a new skill to the choosing of mates with desirable characteristics, skewing probabilities to our own favor is an innately human endeavor. Humans can bend the odds of nature, moving the zone “mediocrity” to our own benefit.

For people born in Nigeria in 2023, the expected at-birth “average” lifespan is 54.5-years (World Bank). However, it’s 84.6-years in Japan, almost half-again as long! Genetics may play some role in this difference. But far more likely is that it reflects conditions that affect rates of infant-mortality, or conversely premature deaths among the elderly. And these create tails that skew distribution curves that plot ages-at-death.

So a “mediocre” lifespan in Nigeria versus Japan probably says more about societal access to medical care, healthy food, clean water, and a safe environment. “Mediocrity” is consequently relative, and can be changed by both individual and collective human behaviors. But this kicks the legs from beneath an intellectual sacred cow.

“Cultural relativism” is the idea that societies should be evaluated only relative to their own cultural norms, values, and practices, rather than as compared to other cultures. It’s a criticism of ethnocentrism, instead emphasizing the evaluation of differing cultures without external bias. The perspective is intended to present a more empathetic and humanistic understanding of societies.

From the perspective of objective study, this makes perfect sense. Evaluating the social function of a tradition, religion, or system of hierarchies might require observation from an entirely unfamiliar perspective. And unfamiliarity with cultural meanings can leave traditions open to misinterpretation… consider a “crucifix”. But there is a limit to this kind of objectivity when evaluating cultures in terms of their relative reciprocal benefits to and from the individuals that comprise them.

Most people would probably choose to live in Japan as opposed to Nigeria based solely on those longer expected lifespans. But they also imply a relative cultural stability that allows for more productive individual development, such as education, work-skills, and the accumulation of wealth. And conversely, these individual benefits can feed back into the society, helping to provide that medical care, healthy food, clean water, and safe environment.

The result is that an ordinary expectation in one society becomes divergent from the norm in the other. And this results in a kind of cultural inequality that can’t easily be resolved. This can even happen among sub-cultures in a larger society, and especially when there are forms of sectarianism.

This was much of the point in Charles Darwin’s 1871, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. With regard to the reciprocal benefit of societies and individuals, Darwin proposed that a society which extends the instinctive bonds found in family to a greater population works to strengthen both its individual members as well as the society itself.

Even accepting that Darwin was a product of a nineteenth-century British perspective, each successive generation can still make the same comparative assessments. And Darwin viewed the human-driven (by female choice) selection for both physiological fitness and compassion as an ongoing process central to the evolution of healthy civilizations.

Societies and their norms are consequently not equal in what they produce, whether for their members, or for themselves. The values and traditions that they select for and hand down are the heredity of civilizations. And they are subject to the same skews and even regression to mediocrity seen in physical traits if they are left to the odds of nature, whether mother’s or human.

That nature doesn’t give a damn about “equality” is an unpleasant truth, and especially in societies where we value the conflicting perspectives of compassion versus merit. In the US, we accept that all people are intrinsically endowed with, “…certain unalienable rights.” But we also enshrine the idea of an “American dream” that is meritocratic, that, “…to become a great and a happy people. …they who live under its (the United States’) protection should demean themselves as good citizens.” (George Washington, 1790)

Whether either Darwin or Washington would be all that impressed with the present-day United States, whether we’re really all that much more compassionate, or even better citizens, I can’t say. At some point, the US managed to skew its median into an expectation that attracts the attentions of half of the Earth’s human population.

But, which half?