No Contest Read online

  A question suggests itself at this point. If the accuracy of this view is so widely accepted in the scientific community, if Kropotkin wrote so early and is still recognized as having been on the right track, what accounts for the widespread acceptance of the Hobbesian-Spencerian picture? Why does the idea of a cooperative nature seem surprising to so many of us?

  There are several answers. First, cooperation is “not always plain to the eye, whereas competition . . . can readily be observed,” as Allee put it.33 Lapwings protect other birds from predators; baboons and gazelles work together to sense danger (the former watching, the latter listening and smelling); chimpanzees hunt cooperatively and share the spoils; pelicans fish cooperatively. Indeed, the production of oxygen by plants and carbon dioxide by animals could be said to represent a prototype for the cooperative interaction that becomes more pronounced and deliberate in the higher species. None of this, however, makes good television. It is easy to ignore an arrangement that does not call attention to itself.

  Second, there is some ambiguity about the language involved. Following Darwin, some biologists and zoologists34 use “competition” in its metaphorical sense, referring to nothing more than natural selection. If we find only one species remaining in a given area where there once were several, we might describe the winnowing process as “competition.” In itself, this is unobjectionable, provided that we keep in mind that this is not a matter of observation or even inference, but rather of definition: we are using the word in such a way that this scenario is competition. But this becomes problematic when we confuse the two meanings of competition—this broad, almost trivial sense, which describes all living things, and the narrower sense that refers to an intentional attempt to best another. Such a confusion can be exploited, as I suspect Garrett Hardin does, to argue for the inevitability of competition in human life. It’s an ingenious syllogism, of a type that often has been used to draw fallacious conclusions:

  1. The natural world is inherently competitive (sense one).

  2. Humans are competitive (sense two).

  3. Therefore, human competition is also inherent.35

  There is a third explanation for why we consistently regard nature as competitive and overlook the compelling evidence of mutual aid. This lies in the common tendency of the observer to project himself onto the observed, a tendency that explains the remarkable similarities between gods (Hebraic, Hellenic, and otherwise) and the people who wrote about them. John A. Wiens, a biologist, lays out considerable evidence to suggest that “competition is not the ubiquitous force that many ecologists have believed” and asks, “Why, then, have [they] been so preoccupied with competition?” His answer: “Competition . . . occupies a central position in Western culture—witness its expression in sports, economics, space exploration, international politics, or warfare. Little wonder, then, that community ecologists expected . . . that the primary factor organizing communities would be competition.”36 The very transmutation of natural selection into competition, of differential reproduction into exploitation, reflects a tendency to shape biological theories according to socioeconomic biases. (Unconsciously, we understand nature to be just like ourselves.) Then these biological theories—congealed into an account of how the natural world really is—are used to legitimate cultural practices. (Consciously, we use nature to justify ourselves.) Several thinkers have caught on to this,37 but the clearest statement was offered in 1875 by Frederick Engels:

  The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes’s doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes [a war of all against all] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus’s theory of population. When this conjurer’s trick has been performed . . . the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved.38

  I began this section by noting that data concerning animals have a limited relevance for humans. Let me close with this qualification: if we are concerned about our own collective survival, the natural world may have something to teach us after all. Its lesson is that cooperation generally has far more survival value than competition. This, as Darwin recognized, is particularly true for human beings. Montagu summed up the case:

  In so far as man is concerned, if competition, in its aggressive combative sense, ever had any adaptive value among men, which is greatly to be doubted, it is quite clear that it has no adaptive value whatever in the modern world. . . . Perhaps never before in the history of man has there been so high a premium upon the adaptive value of cooperative behavior.39

  Such a prescription, however, anticipates later chapters simply byvirtue of being a prescription. Here our task is only to consider whether competition is inevitable in human life, and the very idea that we ought to minimize it rests on the assumption that we can—hence, that it is not inevitable.

  LEARNING COMPETITION OR COOPERATION

  From the prevalence of cooperation, we turn now to the other major argument against claims of inevitability: the contention that competition is learned. A tour of the literature through many disciplines makes it clear that the great majority of theorists and researchers who have investigated competition have concluded that the competitive orientation is indeed learned. Theoretically (and, as we shall soon see, practically, too) what is learned can be unlearned.

  The first comprehensive investigation of the topic was the 1937 study sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. Mark A. May and Leonard Doob reported 24 specific findings based on “the existing knowledge represented by the survey of the literature of the field,” the first of which was this: “Human beings by original nature strive for goals, but striving with others (co-operation) or against others (competition) are learned forms of behavior.”40 Neither of these two, they continued, “can be said to be the more genetically basic, fundamental or [primordial].”41

  This conclusion has withstood half a century of study across several fields. The father of modern research on competition in social psychology, Morton Deutsch, of Columbia University, wrote in 1973 that “it would be unreasonable to assume there is an innately determined human tendency for everyone to want to be ‘top dog.’”42 Sports psychologists Thomas Tutko and William Bruns agreed, basing their opinion on considerable experience with athletes of all ages:

  Competition is a learned phenomenon . . . people are not born with a motivation to win or to be competitive. We inherit a potential for a degree of activity, and we all have the instinct to survive. But the will to win comes through training and the influences of one’s family and environment. As the song in South Pacific says, “you’ve got to be carefully taught.”43

  In the United States, we are carefully taught, and the result is that, excepting the kind of invisible cooperation that is required for any society to run, Americans appear to be uniquely uncooperative as a people. David Riesman, the eminent sociologist, found an interesting irony in “the paradoxical belief of Americans that competition is natural—but only if it is constantly re-created by artificial systems of social roles that direct energies into it.”44 First we are systematically socialized to compete—and to want to compete—and then the results are cited as evidence of competition’s inevitability.

  Consider the dimensions of that socialization:

  For two centuries [writes psychologist Elliot Aronson] our educational system has been based upon competitiveness. . . . If you are a student who knows the correct answer and the teacher calls on one of the other kids, it is likely that you will sit there hoping and praying the kid will come up with the wrong answer so that you will have a chance to show the teacher how smart you are. . . . Indeed, [children’s] peers are their enemies—to be beaten.45

  The message that competition is appropriate, desirable, required, and even unavoidable is drummed into us from nursery school to graduate school; it is the subtext of every lesson. The late Jules
Henry, who turned his keen anthropologist’s eye to our own culture, made this strikingly clear:

  Boris had trouble reducing “12/16” to the lowest terms, and could only get as far as “6/8.” The teacher asked him quietly if that was as far as he could reduce it. She suggested he “think.” Much heaving up and down and waving of hands by the other children, all frantic to correct him. Boris pretty unhappy, probably mentally paralyzed. . . . She then turns to the class and says, “Well, who can tell Boris what the number is?” A forest of hands appears, and the teacher calls Peggy. Peggy says that four may be divided into the numerator and the denominator. Thus Boris’ failure has made it possible for Peggy to succeed; his depression is the price of her exhilaration; his misery the occasion for her rejoicing. This is the standard condition of the American elementary school. . . . To a Zuni, Hopi, or Dakota Indian, Peggy’s performance would seem cruel beyond belief.46

  Something far more significant and lasting than fractions is being taught here. Boris will likely grow up despising the Peggys he encounters, perhaps fanning that wrath until it takes in all women or some other group that seems to include too many winners. Perhaps he will be unequal to the demands of active rage and will simply slink through life a confirmed failure. In any case, he and Peggy will take from this classroom a common lesson: other people are not partners but opponents, not potential friends but rivals.

  In a hypercompetitive society, it is never too early to begin such training. Most recently, “readiness programs” have appeared to prepare infants for “the feverish competition at the better nursery schools.”47 By the time of elementary school, the pressure to be number one is nothing new, but it has just begun to be codified and quantified. A first grader may be crushed, for instance, if her homework assignment is stamped with a smile face while others receive a smile face and a “VERY GOOD.” Eventually this ranking takes the form of grades. “Educational achievement,” writes Morton Deutsch, “is measured so as to conform to an assumed underlying distribution. The social context of most educational measurement is that of a contest in which students are measured primarily in comparison with one another rather than in terms of objective criteria of accomplishment.”48 Where in this carefully designed laboratory of competition can a child even sample cooperative achievement? In fact, most teachers misunderstand the very word cooperation; they use it to refer to obedience. To “cooperate” is to follow instructions.49 We have another word for genuine cooperative effort, as several writers have pointed out: It is cheating.*

  When class is over, the lesson continues. Children are taught that all games must have a winner and a loser. As Peter and Brigitte Berger have written, “It is only very young children who sometimes wish, wistfully, that ‘everyone should win’; they soon learn that this is ‘impossible’—in American society, that is, for there are other societies in which children actually play games in which ‘everyone wins.’”50 The idea that everyone can win evokes condescending smiles, and it doesn’t take long before these children come to accept the naturalness of competition. Here is Jean Piaget, in his classic work The Moral Judgment of the Child, questioning six-year-old Mar: “‘Who has won?’ ‘We’ve both won.’ ‘But who has won most?’”51 Piaget is not only learning from his young informant, but also teaching him.

  The inculcation of competition in the classroom and on the playing field is a source of unending frustration to some parents. Fathers and mothers who would prefer that their children learn to work with rather than against others can do only so much to foster this value since they do not raise their children in a vacuum. Even determinedly liberated parents must contend with an elaborate competitive structure outside the home that will frustrate their best efforts at education. “Out there,” doing one’s best means triumphing over others. (This is the same struggle that defines parents’ attempts to steer their children away from sexism or violence or mindless obedience or unhealthful foods or any number of other things sanctioned by our society.)

  Such a clash between the parents and the rest of the culture is exceptional, however. The family generally is an efficient vehicle by which societal norms are transmitted, not a holdout against these norms. Most parents raise children according to the values by which they were raised, and this process perpetuates the larger culture in which it occurs. From our very earliest days, we are busily absorbing an uncritical acceptance of competition. We are being primed for the classroom and the workplace. As we grow, the socialization in the home continues to work hand in glove with the socialization outside the home. There is pressure to make our parents proud—by being not merely good, but better than others, at schoolwork, sports, and almost any other activity in which we take part. If Dad, in his day, had the highest batting average in school, then we must do likewise. If Dad was not a superlative athlete, then we must distinguish ourselves anyway: our task is to provide vicarious gratification. If our parents never got very far in school, we must not merely take advantage of the chances they never had—we must be the very best of students. Examples of such pressure can be multiplied indefinitely. Of course some parents, who sport newly raised consciousnesses, may proudly declare to any who will listen that they “ask of Bobby only that he do his best.” But this official posture surely does not fool Bobby. He is fully aware that “doing his best” is a code that means beating his peers. As a result of their own training, most parents, even if sincere, still communicate subliminal messages of disappointment with anything other than victory.

  But the family does not merely encourage and sustain competition in the outside world—it manufactures its very own brand. This is particularly true in the nuclear family, which, let us remember, is not the only possible arrangement for child-rearing. One series of field studies in the South Pacific found that “greater rivalrous responses . . . occurred in children brought up in Western-type small nuclear families rather than the traditional extended families.”52 How does this happen? First, many parents carefully (though often unconsciously) direct a drama of sibling rivalry on the stage of their own homes. Even competition booster Harvey Ruben is appalled by the “‘divide and conquer’ theory of parenting” whereby children who are set against each other are easier to discipline. Setting up an insidious race to become Mommy’s favorite mostly benefits Mommy. It gets the dishes dried, for one thing. But far more important are the emotional rewards for parents, who are “every bit as much in need of approval, affection, and support as their children, and in many cases, unfortunately, they are able to get this most easily by nourishing divisiveness within the home.”53

  In some homes, it is the parents who compete for their children’s love. “Whom do you love more?” is seldom asked aloud, but parental behavior often seems motivated by this concern. The intrinsic sickness of this family pattern, like the terrible consequences for all concerned, will not be considered here. My point is only that such dynamics foster competition. We grow up thinking of love as a scarce commodity—the prize in a desperate contest that we will enter again and again. We associate being loved with winning a race, and this happens partly because of the very language with which we have heard affection expressed (“Who’s the best little girl in the whole wide world?”). Beyond love, we will generalize the need to be number one, taking competition with us to any and all arenas.

  The process of socializing children to be competitive is sometimes tacit. Few parents, for example, sit their child down and say, “Now, Steven, it’s time you learned that you can’t have a good time unless you set things up so one side wins and the other loses.” This attitude is taught by example. On the other hand, the idea that people attain excellence exclusively in a competitive setting—that no one would be motivated to work in a noncompetitive economic system—is something we often hear in just so many words. Even more common are expressions of the belief that one has no choice but to be competitive: competition is an unavoidable feature of human life, so you might as well get used to it right away. Some parents may sincerely believe this, but
others feel conflicted and vaguely guilty about their own competitiveness. If they convince themselves (and teach their children) that one can’t help being competitive, they can live more easily with themselves. This belief in competition’s inevitability may be insupportable for all the reasons discussed in this chapter, but it soon takes on the shape of a classic self-fulfilling prophecy. By teaching children to act in a way that is said to be inevitable, we make the practice inevitable and so make the proposition true. This may well be the heart of the socialization process.

  To complicate matters further, competition seems to be self-perpetuating. In his long career of studying conflict—and, more generally, social interaction—Deutsch has found that any given mode of interaction breeds more of itself. Specifically, “the experience of cooperation will induce a benign spiral of increasing cooperation, while competition will induce a vicious spiral of intensifying competition.”54 Quite a bit of research on the so-called Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) Game, in which players choose whether to cooperate or defect,* has confirmed this. Moreover, Harold H. Kelley and Anthony J. Stahelski’s PD experiments found that people who generally are cooperative tend to resemble competitive individuals when they must deal with them. Competition, we might say, cannibalizes cooperation.56