The Big Competition Thing: Olympic and Otherwise

I approach the subject of “Competition” with a great deal of humility and even trepidation, because of its central and far-reaching importance. There is nothing I think of more than “competition,” which appears to me as the inverse of love.

The current Olympic competitions in Brazil are the occasion of more widespread public questioning than I've ever seen and much to the good. Brazil has immense problems, and plenty of poverty, which are much more deserving of attention and resource than this exercise in fantasy.

The first real questioning of the Olympics that I came across was Albrecht Haushofer's Moabit Sonnet #25. Haushofer was one of those magnificent Germans - imprisoned by the Nazis in solitary confinement at the Gestapo prison at Moabit, shackled hand and foot, released when the Russians arrived in Berlin in 1945, but shot by a gang of Nazis outside the prison gates. His body was found three weeks later, with his right hand inside his coat, clutching these sonnets he had written in prison.

All that youth, dedicated to death, is essentially what I saw all around me when I was young: the “competitive spirit” in everything related with school, from “sports” to grade-point averages carried out to the fourth decimal place.

The British empirical, scientific and cultural tradition was full of it – Hobbes, Darwin, et al., classical economics, utilitarianism, right down to the current “Evolutionary Psychology.” Life is a competition, death to the soul.

A reader recently sent me a link to an excellent TED talk by Dr. Thomas Fleischmann on near-death experiences.

I let his video run and it was automatically followed by several similar, even one by a crusty old Brit, which made me wonder how the tradition survives such contrary evidence.

One of the character changes usually following an NDE is loss of interest is the formerly all-important question of who is the greatest among us, and also the fear of death.

There are several places in the New Testament where the subject of “Who is the greatest?” is taken up and I often wonder whether those familiar passages are remembered with embarrassment or what. Those ideas are crucial to everything, for me, so I wonder how the competitors manage to know them, know that they are true, but go on as if they weren't true. That has always mystified me.

John Woolman on Schools

I was pleased recently to reread John Woolman for the first time in fifty years. He was still there, deep in my mind, as vital as ever, despite the passing time.

What occasioned this rereading was a blog piece by David H. Albert at The Skylark Sings in which I find for the first time Woolman's essay, “On Schools.”

“On Schools” was first published in 1758 and is only six paragraphs long, You will find it in its entirety at the end of Albert's blog or along with the other interesting short essays included in Woolman's original book, “Considerations on pure wisdom, and human policy; on labour; on schools; and on the right use of the Lord's outward gifts,” at the Evans Early American Imprint Collection.

I have picked out two quotes from “On Schools” for your delight. The first is just perfect, and important, and yet so rarely said or appreciated:

To encourage children to do things with a view to get praise of men appears an obstruction to their being inwardly acquainted with the spirit of truth. For it is the work of the Holy Spirit to direct the mind to God; that in all our proceeding we may have a single eye to Him; may give alms in secret; fast in secret; and labor to keep clear of that disposition reproved by our Savior, "But all their works they do for to be seen of men." - Matthew XXIII. 5.

And then there is this - I imagine that anyone who has dropped off a child on the first day of the first grade knows all about this, bringing a child into this world:

It is a lovely sight to behold innocent children; and when they are sent to schools where their tender minds are in imminent danger of being led astray by tutors, who do not live a self-denying life, or by the conversation of such children as do not live in innocence, it is a case much to be lamented.