It's all around us, the belief that it's good for someone to be greater than you are, run faster than you, know more, have better grades, have more respect, more votes, jump higher, throw more rubber balls through a hoop, whatever.
I can understand it among the animals to some extent, as a result of heredity and environment, natural selection, survival of the fittest and all that. Even what appears to be cooperation among the animals, such as when a pack of dogs take down a prey together, can easily be seen as selfish or natural.
But among humans, competition, the exaltation of self above others, runs contrary to the rule, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," the core of every ethical system.
Christ's disciples were arguing among themselves - as they still do - as to which of them was the greatest, and he turns to them and tells them that whoever would be first shall be last.
I see competition glorified all around me - right now it's the NCAA basketball tournament, NASCAR races, the educational system, the political "horse race - all shot through with self-aggrandizement.
The early Bob Dylan wrote a song, the first stanza of which goes:
I ain't lookin' to compete with you
Beat or cheat or mistreat you
Simplify you, classify you
Deny, defy or crucify you
All I really want to do
Is, baby, be friends with you.
I remember telling some of my students that I would like to see that as our national anthem, this being near the end of the Viet-Nam war when the killing was dragging on and on because our leaders were afraid that if they ended it they wouldn't look good.
But I saw Dylan recently saying how he had done something no one had ever done before, and I wondered if maybe Warhol really was right about him, or as Joni Mitchell recently said, "Everything about him is phony, even his name." Maybe, maybe not.
The subtlety with which competition sneaks into our lives may well be beyond our power to trace.
* * *
No comments:
Post a Comment