No Contest (43 page)

An essay in
Sports Illustrated
tentatively questioned some of the common wisdom about competition a few years ago.
³⁴
An article in
Psychology Today
reviewed evidence that domestic violence increases whenever football games are televised.
³⁵
But the most satisfying news is not really new at all: cooperative games for children and adults are still available, offering fun without a struggle for triumph.
^*

 

I want to close by telling you about a few books and articles, most of them published since 1985, that I have found enormously useful. If you have read this far, you, too, may want to take a look at them. Bibliographic particulars can be found in the newly expanded reference section.

For parents who view sibling rivalry as something to be solved rather than accepted as a Fact of Life, I recommend
Siblings Without Rivalry,
an accessible and practical collection of advice by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.

Readers who want further substantiation for the argument made in chapter 2 to the effect that competition is not really the dominant theme of the natural world might have a look at
The New Biology
by Robert Augros and George Stanciu.

For anyone interested in the problems inherent to an adversarial legal system,
Partisan Justice
by Marvin E. Frankel complements Anne Strick's
Injustice for All,
which I have already mentioned, as does Thomas L. Shaffer's article “The Unique, Novel, and Unsound Adversary Ethic.” For a fresh perspective on the corresponding view in philosophy (and other disciplines)—namely, that reason itself demands an adversarial challenge to ideas—see Janice Moulton's article “A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method.”

Readers hungry for a thorough analysis of education in the United States, backed by solid research on children's developing conceptions of ability and achievement, should not miss John Nicholls's splendid book,
The Competitive Ethos and Democratic Education
. The emphasis we place on how well children are performing compared to their peers winds up undermining learning, Nicholls argues, and while fair competition may be better than unfair, “competition cannot be fair if competing with others itself produces inequalities in the motivation necessary to develop skills.”

To understand the problems with competition is, for many of us, to begin a search for concrete alternatives. I have already mentioned some resources for noncompetitive recreation and cooperative learning. But I should not overlook the large number of successful cooperative food stores, electric utilities, banks, insurance companies, and other businesses owned by consumers or workers. Co-op America (2100 M St. NW, Suite 403, Washington, DC 20037), which publishes a quarterly magazine, is one good place to look for more information about cooperatives; another is a book called the
Cooperative/Credit Union Dictionary and Reference
(available in paperback for $17 from the Cooperative Alumni Association, 250 Rainbow Lane, Richmond, Kentucky 40475).

Finally, for those interested in the possibility of not only working, learning, or playing together, but actually of
living
cooperatively, there are more than 300 “intentional communities” in North America composed of people who share any of a variety of interests. The
Directory of Intentional Communities: A Guide to Cooperative Living
offers a descriptive list of these communities as well as a collection of essays exploring what it means to be part of one. (It is available for $18 from Sandhill Farm, Route 1, Box 155, Rutledge, Missouri 63563.)

I hope that in another five or six years I have a great many more publications and programs to recommend to you, signifying that a critical view of competition is becoming less and less a fringe position. But let's not wait for this to happen by itself. Let's work together so our workplaces and classrooms, our playing fields and families, begin to provide opportunities for us to succeed together instead of at each other's expense.

—A.K., 1992

CHAPTER
1

 

1. Walker Percy, “Questions They Never Asked Me,” p. 178. Percy used the analogy to elucidate the difficulty of thinking about the nature of language.

2. Elliot Aronson,
The Social Animal,
pp. 153–54.

3. Paul Wachtel,
The Poverty of Affluence,
p. 284. In fact, religion itself is a competitive enterprise in this country. “Denominations have traditionally vied with each other for numbers, wealth, power, and status; and they increasingly are in competition with secular interest groups,” writes William A. Sadler, Jr. (“Competition Out of Bounds,” p. 167). See also chapter 6 of Peter Berger's
The Sacred Canopy
.

4. Anne Strick,
Injustice for All,
p. 114. Here is Strick's historical analysis: “Losers, predominantly, settled our nation: younger sons with neither purse nor title; refugees from religious and political persecutions, from slums and ghettos, from hopelessness, from debtor's prisons and famines. With each new wave of immigrants, new Losers came. But they were Losers come here to win. And win they did: not merely, for many, opportunity and wealth; but a continent from its rightful owners. Those who won, however, did so essentially in struggle
against
wilderness and fellow man. Winning was the American dream and ultimate blessedness; losing the nightmare and unforgivable sin” (p. 112).

5. Sadler, p. 168.

6. Bernard Holland, “The Well-Tempered Tenor,” p. 28.

7. Apparently Lombardi himself regretted the comment, which seemed to take on a life of its own. “I wish to hell I'd never said the damned thing,” he was said to have remarked shortly before his death. “I meant having a goal. . . . I sure as hell didn't mean for people to crush human values and morality” (James A. Michener,
Sports in America,
p. 432).

8. The first figure is from
U.S. Statistical Abstract
for 1985. The second is from “Survey of Consumer Finances, 1983” in the September 1984 issue of
Federal Reserve Bulletin
.

9. Morton Deutsch, the social psychologist who pioneered research in this field, defined competition as a situation of “contrient interdependence,” which means that “participants are so linked together that there is a negative correlation between their goal attainments” (
The Resolution of Conflict,
p. 20). Back in 1937, Mark A. May and Leonard Doob defined it as a situation in which two or more individuals worked toward an end that could not be achieved by all of them (
Cooperation and Competition,
p. 6). Leonard Berkowitz's definition was along the same lines: “Two or more units, either individuals or groups, engaged in pursuing the same rewards, with these rewards so defined that if they are attained by one unit, there are fewer rewards for the other units in the situation” (
Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis,
p. 178).

10. Karen Horney,
The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, p
. 160.

11. Robert N. Bellah et al.,
Habits of the Heart,
p. 198.

12. Bertrand Russell,
The Conquest of Happiness,
p. 45.

 

CHAPTER
2

 

1. For a good discussion of the Burt phenomenon, including speculation as to why so many have been so eager to accept his conclusions, see R. C. Lewontin et al.,
Not in Our Genes,
chapter 5.

2. An outstanding and wide-ranging critique of biological determinism is contained in
Not in Our Genes,
by R. C. Lewontin, a highly respected evolutionary geneticist; Steven Rose, a neurobiologist; and Leon J. Kamin, a psychologist. They explore such issues as schizophrenia, gender-based differences, and intelligence, concluding, “The only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is ‘in' that nature to construct its own history” (p. 14). Stephen Jay Gould also put it well: “Why imagine that specific genes for aggression, dominance, or spite have any importance when we know that the brain's enormous flexibility permits us to be aggressive or peaceful, dominant or submissive, spiteful or generous? Violence, sexism, and general nastiness
are
biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But peacefulness, equality, and kindness áre just as biological—and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish” (“Biological Potential vs. Biological Determinism,” p. 349). Also see Gould's essay, “The Nonscience of Human Nature.”

3. Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene,
p. ix.

4. Konrad Lorenz, of course, attempted to do just this. Some of the best critical essays on his work and that of such other naturalists as Robert Ardrey are contained in
Man and Aggression,
edited by Ashley Montagu. Aggression, naturally, is of special interest to us here because of its relationship to competition (see chapter 6).

5. This is usually formulated by ethical theorists as “ought implies can,” and was articulated by Immanuel Kant: “Duty demands nothing of us which we cannot do. . . . When the moral law commands that we
ought
to be better men, it follows inevitably that we must
be able
to be better men” (
Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone,
pp. 43, 46).

6. Leslie H. Farber, “Merchandising Depression,” p. 64.

7. See, for example, “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of Dostoyevsky's
Brothers Karamazov,
Erich Fromm's
Escape from Freedom,
and almost anything by Sören Kierkegaard or Jean-Paul Sartre.

8. Roger Caillois,
Man, Play and Games,
p. 55.

9. John Harvey et al.,
Competition: A Study in Human Motive,
p. 12.

10. James S. Coleman,
The Adolescent Society,
p. 318; his emphasis.

11. Harvey Ruben,
Competing,
p. ix.

12. Ibid., p. 22.

13. Ibid., p. 20.

14. Ibid., p. 39; his emphasis.

15. The tendency to construe apparently friendly acts as hostile has been found to be one of the signal differences between normal and disturbed populations (Harold L. Raush, “Interaction Sequences,” p. 498).

16. Harold J. Vanderzwaag,
Toward a Philosophy of Sport,
p. 127.

17. Mary Ann O'Roark, “‘Competition' Isn't a Dirty Word,” p. 66.

18. Garrett Hardin,
Promethean Ethics: Living with Death, Competition, and Triage,
p. 36.

19. There are certain areas of thought from whose contributions we are sometimes asked to
infer
the conclusion that competition is inevitable. These include the study of other species, which is the subject of the next section; and two currents within psychology—psychoanalysis and social comparison theory—which are addressed in the last section of this chapter. I am not aware of any serious arguments for competition's inevitability explicitly offered from within these fields, however.

20. David W. and Roger T. Johnson, “Instructional Goal Structure: Cooperative, Competitive, or Individualistic” (hereafter “Structure”), p. 218.

21. Ashley Montagu cited in Johnson and Johnson, “Cooperation in Learning: Ignored But Powerful,” p. 1. Psychiatrist Roderic Gorney agrees: “Any objective appraisal of modern man will disclose that in the overwhelming preponderance of human interactions cooperation
completely overshadows
competition” (
Human Agenda,
pp. 101–2; his emphasis). See also Arthur W. Combs,
Myths in Education,
pp. 15–17.

22. “Aggression, anxiety, guilt, and self-centered motives and behavior have been so much the cloth of theory and research that questions of a ‘softer' side of young human beings seem almost unscientific” (Marian Radke Yarrow et al., “Learning Concern for Others,” p. 240).

23. For example, see H. L. Rheingold and D. F. Hay, “Prosocial Behavior of the Very Young”; Marian Radke Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn Waxier, “The Emergence and Functions of Prosocial Behaviors in Young Children”; Yarrow et al., “Learning Concern”; James H. Bryan, “Prosocial Behavior”; Maya Pines, “Good Samaritans at Age Two?”; and my own “That Loving Feeling—When Does It Begin?” Yarrow and Waxier write as follows: “The capabilities for compassion, for various kinds of reaching out to others in a giving sense are viable and effective responses early in life. . . . Very young children were often finely discriminative and responsive to others' need states” (pp. 78–79).

24. Rheingold and Hay, p. 101. On the other hand, Roderic Gorney claims that the view “that human beings are predisposed to be not individualistic and competitive but social and cooperative . . . [is] endorsed by the majority of students of human social biology and evolution”
(Human Agenda,
p. 140). Also see Martin L. Hoffman, “Is Altruism Part of Human Nature?”

25. Richard Hofstadter,
Social Darwinism in American Thought,
p. 204.

26. Stephen Jay Gould, personal communication, 1984.

27. Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species,
Chapter III, p. 62. Thus, Patrick Bateson writes that “the restriction of differential survival to mean simply conflict is an obvious abuse of Darwin's thinking” (“Cooperation and Competition,” p. 55).

28. George Gaylord Simpson,
The Meaning of Evolution,
p. 222. Similarly, Ashley Montagu writes: “Natural selection . . . has been rather more operative in terms of co-operation than it has been in terms of what is generally understood by competition. . . . Natural selection through ‘competition' may secure the immediate survival of certain types of ‘competitors,' but the survivors would not long survive if they did not co-operate”
(Darwin, Competition and Cooperation,
pp. 70, 72).