Excellence, Discounted
“The Torah was not given to the ministering angels.” —The Talmud
This post is the last in a short series on what holds us together: memory, faith, belonging, and excellence. Today’s post asks how to honor distinction without slighting equality.
Once, excellence was a virtue. Now we have learned to say, “It depends.”
Taken to extremes, the “excellent” individual becomes a prisoner of their own gifts. Success becomes the sole proof of worth; failure is exiled to the margins. Achievement hardens into captivity rather than freedom, until excellence itself is defined by the eradication of failure. It is hard to find a shadow in a showroom.
A Jewish midrash warns, “If you grasp too much, you grasp nothing.”
That warning gets at something Aristotle knew—and something I keep returning to. True excellence—what he called aretē—was never a mere measure of performance. It was character, formed by habit, judgment, and shared life. But we have cut excellence loose from its moral anchor and handed it over to institutions, rankings, résumés, and managers. I’m not sure we noticed when it happened.
Once we accepted that talent is universal but opportunity is not, excellence could no longer be seen as a neutral virtue. We had to say “it depends,” because unexamined excellence can easily become a rigid meritocracy, and meritocracy can make privilege look like achievement. Achievement then justifies a new elite. Excellence without equality becomes aristocracy; equality without excellence becomes evasion.
Giving everyone the same starting line does not matter if some runners have shoes and others are barefoot. Equity at its best provides different tools to help people reach their potential. At its worst, it becomes bureaucracy, turning difference into injury and standards into threats.
The trouble is not excellence itself, but when it becomes a protection against failure. Flaws look like exposure, mistakes like evidence, rough edges like defects. We inflate the definition of “excellence” until ordinary people can no longer be normal. When life is treated like a product on display, we can’t be unfinished.
That is why our culture veers between indulgence and severity. Everyone gets a gold star, then discipline returns with a vengeance. Colleges move toward pass/fail grading, then standards reappear, sharper than before. We confuse mercy with indulgence and standards with punishment. We haven’t resolved this. I’m not sure we can.
The fear of failure is learned socially. Excellence has become a performance review. Grammarly, AI editors, predictive text, and style checkers promise to remove risk before a sentence reaches the page.
Meanwhile, tutorials explain how to hide the signs of AI use: drop the em dashes, avoid colons, and bury the now-suspicious “It’s not X; it’s Y” formula. AI even claims to detect itself and advises writers to “become more human” by using personal pronouns and making the occasional mistake. We have reached a strange moment when “excellence” sounds less like a human being than software.
I notice the irony of writing this in a Substack post that my editor—a human one—will probably say is too long.
Philosopher Jean Baudrillard had a line I keep coming back to: “The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.” What it does not lack is leverage. The more seamlessly AI integrates into working life, the clearer the question becomes: whose excellence is being optimized?
Plato thought the problem began with writing—expressed, of course, in writing. In the Phaedrus, he warned that written words offer only a “semblance of wisdom.” By polishing away our flaws, we fall into exactly that trap: mistaking correctness for thought, accuracy for wisdom, and polish for perfection.
After all, a language is shaped by the common, clever ways its speakers bend the rules. We follow the rules to be understood; we bend them to be known.
Another midrash cuts to the heart of it: “The Torah was not given to the ministering angels.” True excellence was never meant for flawless beings. It belongs entirely to the messy, unfinished, unedited reality of being human.
A similar truth unfolds in Exodus. The shortest route to the Promised Land was a straight, eleven-day march along the coast. Yet God did not lead the people that way. If they faced war too soon, they would panic and return to Egypt. Instead, they were sent into the desert. The long way was not punishment but necessary. Recently freed captives could not simply walk into a new homeland and sustain it.
By avoiding the shortcut—what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “the celestial railroad”—they gained time to shed a slave mentality. The desert formed and tested a people, making them capable of freedom.
So it is with excellence. When it hardens into a program to remove risk, mistakes, embarrassment, and delay, what remains is counterfeit excellence: competence without struggle, polish without depth, achievement without inward growth.
Those of us who think for a living want to be more profound. (I ought to know.)
George Orwell was profound. He said: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
The excellent life does not mistake smoothness for arrival. Maybe Aristotle was right: excellence is not a measure of success but a habit of character, no matter what life holds. I find that more comforting than I probably should.
Notes and Reading
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 1100b–1101a. Aristotle grounds excellence (aretē) in stable character (hexis) rather than outward fortune—the truly excellent person bears fate with grace through a “great and calm soul.” As a naturalist, he would have recognized the human brain itself as aretē in action: a living capacity shaped by experience and grown through practice. We keep measuring ourselves against machines. The more honest question is why we stopped marveling at what we already are.
On the bureaucratization of virtue. Turn a deep, human trait into a checklist for managers, and excellence stops being about character; it becomes about playing it safe. As both the Greek and Jewish traditions remind us, real growth requires friction and a trip through a wilderness. True excellence cannot survive in a sterile showroom designed to hide our mistakes. — See “Culture as Formation,” in John Milbank and Adrian Pabst, The Politics of Virtue (2016).
Another AI. “Steve Wozniak Discusses Apple, AI and Pranks as Compelling Perspectives Speaker,” Lehigh University News, January 30, 2026. Wozniak was applauded before an audience of students famous for walking out on other AI luminaries. He criticized the formulaic quality of artificial output and its inability to replicate biological consciousness, while emphasizing a necessary alternative: the escalating capacity of another AI—the actual intelligence of the human mind—to direct and elevate the machine.
The Wisdom of Elwood P. Dowd. From Jimmy Stewart’s famous monologue in Harvey (1950): “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be,’—she always called me Elwood—‘In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”
Excellence as character and not as performance. Excellence as performance provides the endless battleground on which the armies of equality and equity fight. Excellence as character, on the other hand, can't be achieved by shortcuts, into which both equality and equity in a performance-based culture collapse. The example of the wandering children of Israel and their slave mentalities dropping in the wilderness is such a good move here.
Your post makes me wonder if AI isn't like the turn from rhetoric and toward grammatically correct writing championed first at Harvard towards the end of the nineteenth century. The business community wondered why Johnny can't write, and universities--and high schools in their wake--churned out "competent" writers through the "current-traditional" approach to composition studies held sway from then until the 1960s and that decade's move to orality.
Three excellent points, each capped by a delightful and thought-provoking bon mot:
". . . a language is shaped by the common, clever ways its speakers bend the rules. We follow the rules to be understood; we bend them to be known."
"Maybe Aristotle was right: excellence is not a measure of success but a habit of character, no matter what life holds. I find that more comforting than I probably should."
"Achievement hardens into captivity rather than freedom, until excellence itself is defined by the eradication of failure. It is hard to find a shadow in a showroom."
Bring on composition's chiaroscuro! Thank you for this "excellent" essay.