“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” --Martin Luther King, Jr.
I saw “12 Years A Slave” today. There’s a character in the film who is the best cotton-pickin’ field hand. Her only reward for it is brutality.
I have always remembered MLK’s quote because it sounds like something a wise person would say. But after watching the movie, it no longer feels this way. Sure, Patsy will be remembered by her slavemaster as the greatest field hand who ever lived. But does this make Patsy more admirable and virtuous than a slave who refused to work for an unjust system? Or one who only did the bare minimum out of sheer survival? Isn’t it understandable that the slave who slaves alongside her, whose work looks shoddy in comparison to hers and is punished for it, would hate and despise such excellence?
What do you think of MLK’s quote? Do you think a person should strive for excellence no matter what? Or do you think a person should strive for excellence only to the extent that there is a benefit to oneself?
Note that the quote starts with “If a man is called to be a street sweeper”. Nobody is called to be a slave. And striving for excellence in anything one might be called to would include striving against slavery. Maybe Patsy really is called to be a cotton-picker, but she would be a more excellent cotton-picker as a free woman working for a just wage than she would as a slave.
I think excellence is a virtue by any reasonable definitions of “excellence” and “virtue”, to answer the OP per the title.
But the thread should be titled something like “How should a person handle being enslaved?”, as the main import of the question is this. There’s an old tradition of investigating word and phrase implications on the SDMB, and the present title sounds like the thread is about that.
As far as how a person should handle being enslaved, well, that’s a monstrously difficult question. It’s hard to imagine many Dopers can consider it from their own lived experience. It’s also hard to imagine us finding anything to criticize about how a person actually does handle being enslaved. It’s hard to imagine faulting Patsy or someone who only did the bare minimum.
There are people who dedicate themselves to the work they do and strive for excellence in doing so. I image there were slaves who took great pride in the work they did, despite the circumstances. It’s hard to know the motives: pride, love of craft, OCD. But yeah, there is virtue in that, regardless.
I think excellence is always a virtue, but the pursuit of it sometimes is not.
On the first part, a former co-worker of mine said something very similar to that quote to much nodding from his audience: “whatever work I’m doing, I do the best work I can do, not because I like it or because it’s important, but because it’s me doing it and I do good work.”
On the second part, “perfection is the enemy of good”. Perfectionism can block a person from doing good work, and from trying again at something which did not come out perfectly the first time, and therefore from getting better at it.
Are there works that shouldn’t be done to the best of one’s ability? Yes IMO, but they’re the same ones that shouldn’t be done.
It’s odd that he used art as an example, as with art there’s the common problem of never knowing when you’re done - always striving for perfection. Remember also that that is what’s often frustrating about people with OCD is their desire for perfection, like when Mr. Monk got a job at a car wash and took two hours per car.
I’ll echo NAVA’s comment with some qualification, and I’m going to take a different tack on the original post.
I think there are many cases when doing an excellent job is simply not worth the extra effort it might take. I’m thinking of projects whose longevity is short. I think of myself as a perfectionist but I usually ask myself if a project I’m undertaking will last long enough to justify an excellent effort or just an adequate effort. I can think of many situations in my life where the answer was “adequate,” and that’s what I did. I’ve even done projects poorly if their longevity was short enough.
In short, no, I don’t think excellence is always a virtue.
We merely have different definitions of “the best”: my description of the problems a perfectionist can have come from direct observation of my father and one of my brothers, to me the inefficiency of trying to do “the best possible job ever” detracts enormously from perfection - I saw how badly it hurt those two both in whatever pursuits they were trying to be “perfect” in and in other aspects (such as taking two years longer to graduate because His Lordship couldn’t find a piece of data, rather than stating “a literature review performed with suchandsuch parameters has found no information” and discussing the different possible cases). There are few things I hate more than waste, and the worst possible waste is wasting people.
There’s also the issue of sometimes having to let go of something because it’s Orders. Currently I’m in a project in which I’ve had to send to the programmers a bunch of stuff that would have been done more efficiently, faster, cheaper and with a lot less test cycles if I’d done it myself (I actually happened to already have most of those programs, ffs…), but hey, when the boss says “not your job”, hey, not your job. Since I have a glass face, I do my best to keep the neon-lights “I told you so” from my expression when things end up being a bloody mess
Is that kind of excellence available to all of us? Michaelangelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare are all recognized as rare geniuses. (Martin Luther King, Jr. too) It is possible there is such a thing as street sweeping at that level of genius, but probably that level of streetsweeping is also not available to all of us.
Not all of us receive a clear calling either.
I bet that all of them, Michaelangelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare, and the genius at streetsweeping were not always easy to live with.
There’s all kinds of things it doesn’t make sense to put a lot of effort into unless we are getting something for that effort. It is not impossible to imagine a situation where a slave does get something for great effort…possibly they just actually enjoy the labor, some people really like hard outdoor labor (see Scything Makes A Comeback)…possibly they stand to gain favor, better food, better housing, less labor, or even some personal autonomy.
So I’m going to go with overall disagreement with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s quote. We should strive to be upstanding people who pull our weight and do our share, but excellence is optional and slippery anyway. What do we get credit for being excellent at? I am excellent at napping. A lot of people have difficulty napping, but I can fall asleep easily, yet not sleep too long. I derive great physical and mental health benefits from my naps. Is napping my calling? (I think maybe.)
