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.”