No Contest (25 page)

This possibility depends on my coming to understand our common humanity, which is to say, coming to see that your needs and feelings are analogous to my own. Now clearly I know myself as a center of experience, the one who perceives and acts in and reflects on a world. All of existentialist thought is a kind of rebellion against the intellectual systems and real-world practices that crush or deny my subjectivity by reducing me to a part of a crowd, a scientific datum, a pale approximation of some transcendent reality. What Buber adds to this assertion of my subjectivity is the necessity of affirming
your
subjectivity as well. You are not just a part of my world but the center of your own.

Some night while you are driving along a highway, try to imaginatively capture the reality of the other drivers. Each set of headlights represents a person who is, like you, on her way somewhere. In other situations, look deeply into someone's eyes and try to grasp the fact that this is a person who is not just being watched but is a watcher—just like you. If you succeed at reclaiming the subjectivity of the other, you will be unable to hurt him or even to dismiss him. You can dismiss an abstraction (a jock, some bureaucrat, that schizophrenic); you can mistreat an object (a “piece of ass,” a terrorist). But as soon as you come upon
a human being,
you will be moved to share yourself with him, to care for him. It will be far more difficult to hurt his feelings or ignore him or simply analyze him. It will be almost impossible to kill him or cheer his death, which is why this sort of orientation can put armies out of business. Kafka once said that war is caused by a “monstrous lack of imagination”; it should be clear now that he meant the ability to imagine the subjectivity of others.

To say that you and I share a common humanity, however, is not to say that we are the same. On the contrary, I must encounter you as an other rather than as a mirror of myself or an object of my own experience. Empathy, in the sense of picturing myself in your situation, is not enough: The point is to see your situation from
your
perspective, which is not identical with mine. I must “imagine the real”—see the world as you do, experience your inner life. This, according to Buber, is “a bold swinging—demanding the most intensive stirring of one's being—into the life of the other.”
¹⁶
When I both regard you as a subject and recognize your otherness, there is the making of human relationship at its fullest. All of us can strive to receive others this way, and in so doing we prepare the ground for genuine dialogue, a reciprocal sharing by which both participants are enriched.

The ideal of human relationship that Buber describes is, of course, only imperfectly realized. There are circumstances, both internal and external, that interfere with our coming to see another person as different from ourselves and as a subject. Our own needs can drown out the other's cry. The frantic pace of modern life can divert us from the other's humanity. But had we set out deliberately to sabotage relationship, we could hardly have done better than to arrange for people to have to compete against each other.

At this point, let me recall the distinction between pursuing a goal independently and pursuing it competitively. Obviously the former is not conducive to relationship since interaction is ruled out. My success and your success are totally separate, so I don't have to have anything to do with you. But competition entails a kind of perverse interdependence: our fates are linked in that I cannot succeed unless you fail. Thus I regard you merely as someone over whom to triumph. Because you are my rival, you are an “it” to me, an object, something I use for my own ends. This dynamic is found in virtually all exploitative relationships. All too commonly, for example, a busdriver is seen solely in terms of his function; he gets us from here to there. To the extent we perceive him this way—essentially as an appendage of the bus itself—we cannot enter into dialogue with him. But competition takes objectification a step further since I not only use you but try to defeat you. True, you regard me in the same way, and this creates a symmetry that is not present in, say, the boss's relationship to his worker. But it is a fearful symmetry. For competitors, the objectification is doubled; the prospects for relationship are twice buried.

The
reductio ad absurdum
of competition is war, and it is here that we find antagonists most thoroughly negating the humanity of others in order to be able to kill them. One fires on Krauts or gooks, not on people. But precisely the same process is in evidence in less deadly kinds of competition. Tennis players imagine “a faceless opponent,” says one sports psychologist. Adds another: “The more you get involved with playing a personality, the worse you do.”
¹⁷
A pro football player writes:

 

We were really fired up and felt we were going to annihilate “them.” I particularly didn't want to see their faces, because the more anonymous they were the better it was for me—and I'm sure most of the other ball players felt the same way: they were a faceless enemy we had to meet.”
¹⁸

 

Depriving adversaries of personalities, of faces, of their subjectivity, is a strategy we automatically adopt in order to win. Some people do this more effectively than others, but the posture is demanded by the very structure of competition. We may try to reassure ourselves with talk about “friendly competition,” but the fact remains that seeing another person as a rival and seeing her as a “partner in a living event” are fundamentally incompatible stances. It is difficult to imagine a more telling indictment of an activity than the fact that it demands such depersonalization.

There is some empirical confirmation of this phenomenon. A series of ten studies conducted by David and Roger Johnson investigated the effect of various learning environments on “perspective taking”—that is, on “the ability to understand how a situation appears to another person and how that person is reacting cognitively and emotionally to the situation.” The studies show that “cooperative learning experiences . . . promote greater cognitive and affective perspective taking than do competitive or individualistic learning experiences.”
¹⁹
In one recent experiment, for example, undergraduates played at managing businesses and had to negotiate with one another. Those playing under competitive conditions were less able to take the other company's perspective—which here was defined in terms of something as simple as understanding how many assets the other had.
²⁰

What is true of a competitive situation may well be true of a competitive individual. Mark Barnett and his associates asked first-grade teachers to rate their students with respect to competitiveness. Then the experimenters administered a well-tested measure of empathy in which subjects were asked for their feelings after watching slides of same-aged children who seemed happy, sad, angry, or fearful. The result: “Children rated as highly competitive were found to have lower empathy scores than children rated as relatively less competitive.”
²¹

Of course the absence of basic empathy precludes anything like the sort of relationship of which Buber spoke, but it has another, more easily observed, effect, as well: it means that one is less likely to help others. We are especially inclined to assist people when we can imaginatively experience what they are going through.
²²
If empathy encourages altruism and competition depresses empathy, then we should find an inverse relationship between competition and altruism—and so we do. “There is considerable evidence to suggest that cooperative settings, when compared to competitive settings, promote more mutual liking, more sharing, and more helping behaviors,” writes Carole Ames.
²³
A 1968 study of nursery school boys found that those who were less generous in giving away candies also seemed more competitive while playing a racing game with dolls. Conversely, wrote the experimenters, “High generosity seems to be part of a pattern which involves less intense interpersonal competition.”
²⁴
Another pair of researchers confirmed this effect with fifth-grade boys several years later. After playing a bowling game and receiving some tokens, each child was permitted (in the experimenters' absence) to contribute some of them to a March of Dimes canister. Those who were told they had won gave away more than those who were told they had lost or tied. But those who had played noncompetitively contributed the most of all.
²⁵
This finding is not very surprising, the experimenters note, since “charitable or helping behaviors . . . by definition are antithetical to competitive behaviors.”
²⁶

The point here is not that competitive individuals never give money to charity. It is rather that competition ultimately discourages generosity. While we pay lip service to helping people in our culture, or write an occasional check to the United Way, our fundamental orientation toward others is trying to beat them. Because success seems to entail this, we subtly discourage our children from being too concerned about the welfare of others. “Parents generally want their children to be able to compete successfully—and how can they compete if they're altruists?” asks Maya Pines rhetorically.
²⁷

Now it may be possible to fall short of Buberian dialogue while still coexisting amicably. But competition's effects run far deeper than simply closing off an ideal; it tends to turn our relationships into something distinctly unpleasant. Here again is Karen Horney: “Competitiveness . . . creates easily aroused envy towards the stronger ones, contempt for the weaker, distrust towards everyone . . . so the satisfaction and reassurance which one can get out of human relations are limited and the individual becomes more or less emotionally isolated.”
²⁸
Let us take these three consequences—envy, contempt, and distrust—in turn.

To envy another person is to want what he has and to resent him for having it. As is usual for familiar (and disturbing) characteristics, we tend to assume that this is part of “human nature.” But desire is largely a social creation, and so is the distribution of what is valued. Competition creates a prized status where none existed before (see
[>]
), thereby giving us something to desire. Then it insures that not everyone can get it. Finally, competition requires that those who obtain the reward can do so only by defeating everyone else. Both the objective and subjective conditions for envy are established, in other words: restricted access to something desired and a (quite accurate) belief that someone else has got it at one's own expense. Even if no social arrangement could do away with a taste for what others have, competition adds the sour flavor of resentment. It is the latter that spoils relationship. Indeed, Bertrand Russell once wrote, “There is, so far as I know, no way of dealing with envy except to make the lives of the envious happier and fuller, and to encourage in youth the idea of collective enterprises rather than competition.”
²⁹
Contempt for others is induced by competition in two ways. First, envy for what the winners have (and bitterness at their having it) easily congeals into enmity. Jules Henry spoke of how we encourage this feeling in the classroom:

 

Since all but the brightest children have the constant experience that others succeed at their expense, they cannot [help] but develop an inherent tendency to hate—to hate the success of others, to hate others who are successful, and to be determined to prevent it. Along with this, naturally, goes the hope that others will fail.
³⁰

 

The second kind of contempt, the sort that Horney had in mind, is directed at the losers. It derives from the effort of winners—and here we may specifically point to the economically privileged—to justify their success by maintaining that winning is their natural reward for
being
winners. This is not a tautology. Certain people are believed to enjoy the status of being winners in advance of actually winning. These winners are good people, not only capable but virtuous, and their victories are therefore always deserved. The corollary to this is that those who lose deserve their fate, too, and merit only contempt.

We usually do not spell out these assumptions, but they color our perception of winning and losing. They probably are the legacy of social Darwinism, which, as the historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out, “supplied [the competitive order] with a cosmic rationale. Competition was glorious. Just as survival was the result of strength, success was the reward of virtue.”
³¹
George Orwell, reflecting on his school days, put it this way: “Virtue consisted in winning. . . . Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.”
³²

Despite the outrageous arrogance of this view, winners are sometimes successful in persuading losers of its validity. This has two consequences: (1) The losers' contempt for the winners is mixed with selfcontempt, and (2) the losers will set about not to change the system (a move that would in any case be dismissed as “sour grapes”) but only to become a winner next time. Thus there is no one to press for structural change. The contempt for losers, then, not only tears at the fabric of human relationship but functions as a powerfully conservative force.

Finally, there is the matter of distrust. Love, of course, is based on trust, but so, to a lesser extent, is our ability to function in any social system. Even if we are mere acquaintances, you and I expect certain things from, and are vulnerable to, each other. But set up a system where we must compete against each other, and a breeding ground for distrust has been established. Indeed, why
should
you trust me if I have every reason to want you to fail? Distrust spreads rapidly, too—first, because I am never sure that you might not become my rival even if you are not at present; second, because (as discussed earlier) we generalize what we learn to new environments; and, third, because a vicious circle is generated, in which I respond in kind to your attitude. Disclosing my self to others can be considered a key element of psychological health
³³
and is, at any rate, an important part of relationship. But competition erodes the trust on which disclosure depends. Whatever I tell you about myself or do to help you will, in a zero-sum situation, be at my own expense. In a competitive culture, we come to look at each other through narrowed eyes.