Competition

Competition is one of those basic questions on which I come out with just such outside answers that I simply can not grasp the common view. This position causes me to wonder where I might be wrong, to doubt myself, and to go through it all again. I've done it hundreds of times and always come back with the answer that, no, I'm right.

An immediate instance of this that comes to mind is in schools where competition for test grades, grade-point averages, marks, prizes, and such abound. Competitive sports – an oxymoron, since sport connotes the rejection of competition – are a big deal. The “winners” are consider heroes, get their names in the paper, are held up as examples to emulate and the competition itself is considered a preparation for and metaphor for life itself.

The idea of it is enshrined in survival-of-the-fittest biological theory that is mistakenly applied to human group life, contrary to every religious teaching about doing unto others what you would have them do to you. Wouldn't it be funny if they found that Christ, for example, said something like “whosoever would be first, shall be last” or asked his disciples to compete with each other to determine “who is the greatest among them” and offered bribes to encourage such competition among them?!

Competition brings out moral fault because getting ahead of, beating, trouncing, annihilating, destroying – common vocabulary in politics, economics, “sports,” the academy – involve hurting others.

I thought a lot about Franklin Roosevelt's statement:

“Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”

That seemed like a sensible statement to me, at first. I think of Watson and Crick's competitive approach as recounted in “The Double Helix” and how it propelled a revolution in molecular biology that has led to all sorts of useful things. Still, I think that their discovery is not good or bad in itself but depends on the use to which we put it.

We in the USA have had decades of dedicated self-aggrandizement and programmatic selfishness since the late 1970's, touted as the highest level of human civilization in the history of the world. The fundamental current struggle in USA politics and cultural life is, I believe, to defeat the competitive world-view.

Maxwell Perkins has a classic statement on it in “A Letter to Van Wyck Brooks” where he says, among many other good things:

“The qualities of competition are selfish, brutal, beast-like qualities as compared with the softer, generous qualities whose presence in a man handicaps him under the competitive regime...”

I can not reproduce the whole letter here, but it can be found in his book, “Editor to Author, The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins,” or reproduced in “TheBitch-Goddess Success.”

This latter book, “The Bitch-Goddess Success: Variations on an American Theme by Alexis de Tocqueville, Washington Allston, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, William James, Louis Sullivan, Charles Ives, Vachel Lindsay, Maxwell E. Perkins, W.H. Auden, John F. Kennedy, George F. Kennan,” is, by the way, just an absolute jewel of a book. I have given away more copies of that book than any other over the course of my life. I even had a clergyman steal one my copies.

You see, that's another inherent fault in competition. It's a “bitch-goddess” in that you can never “win” it. There is always going to be someone ahead of, in front of, better than, having more money, smarter, greater, than you! Here is what they say these days: “Good luck with that.”

Larry Summers and The Best and Brightest

The latest episode in my long history of grappling with the problem of cleverness

is my current reading of Herman Melville's “The Confidence Man.” It's a catalogue of clever ways in which people manipulate and use others. The question goes through my mind: “How did Melville know Ohio so well?"
 

Another recent episode was an article by Robert Scheer about Larry Summers' current effort to become chairman of the Federal Reserve.
 

The substance of the article struck me as being accurate but I thought a lot about his reference to Summers as “stupid.” I can see why Scheer says it. It's true in a fundamental sense, in that Summers misses obvious, fundamental, realities despite being brilliant. Just consider his proposal to use poor countries as dumps or his remarks on women's minds while president of Harvard or his remarks promoting financial derivatives speculation by touting the maturity, sophistication and sense of Wall Streeters. You wonder how he could be so stupid as to believe such things or where has he been all his life – on what planet - how it is possible. He is astonishingly stupid in that sense, I suppose, but I see it more as a case of being astonishingly clever.

Larry Summers and Bob Rubin

The Viet-Nam War now seems quite “stupid” yet it was given to us by “The Best and the Brightest,” as Halberstam put it. Perle and Wolfowitz and Rice and Cheney and Powell and many other very bright people gave us what is now called the Iraq "blunder."

I think it has something to do with the fact that very clever people - bright, quick, highly intelligent people - are able to escape having to deal with realities that the rest of us have to face, to know, or we die.

True Facts

That guy with half a face who lives across the back alley is in jail again tonight. One of my friends who lives in that building was over here this morning telling me that it's 'Bye Bye Half Face.'

I never learned for sure why he has only a half a face. Some people tell me that it was due to his having had a stroke, and others say he got shot in the face. He seems too young to me to have had a stroke, but I don't actually know.

My next door neighbor, that lady who feeds feral cats, was complaining about Half Face earlier this week because he had stolen the gate to her iron link fence. She confronted him about it, and he said he only got about a buck for it at the scrapper and that he would give her that buck.

Anyway, there was a lot of noise last night over at his house across the alley. There are about three people who live there in addition to that fat guy who just sits on the back porch all day and who have various substance-abuse problems. It seems that one of the women who hang around over there is upset with Half Face for non-delivery of dope. So they argue and scream about it late at night, and she is not going to be treated this way, so she she steals his cellphone and goes home to her own apartment.

Half Face goes there with his Pit-Bull to get his cellphone back and is making banging noises and yelling and swearing and the girl is screaming and the Pit-Bull is barking. People gather and the dog bites some kid on the arm and Half Face is threatening the girl. The cops arrive and take Half Face to jail and impound his Pit-Bull. They charge him with some offense against the girl and something else, and set bail at $13,000.

My friend who is telling me the details this morning is especially worried about the dog. He thinks the dog may have to be put down, since it is untrained, undisciplined. People around here worry more about animals than about human beings. When that kid broke into the flat behind the dry-cleaner's last year, and killed a guy and his dog, my neighbors were more upset about the dog than the guy. And we have two cat ladies on this block who would go to jail themselves before they would stop feeding feral cats. The city told them that they would be fined over $100 per offense if they caught them doing it, and that was over a year ago but they're still doing it.