No Contest (29 page)

Liberal, reform-minded people are less interested in punishing than in exhorting competitors to obey the rules and avoid getting carried away with the race to win. They are fond of unearthing an example of exceptional sportsmanship—a college coach who refuses to pay his athletes under the table, a tennis player who walks off the court arm in arm with her opponent—and they hold up this model to others. Competitors are told that the only thing that matters is how the game is played, that abuses can be eliminated if they would only “make more sportsmanlike gestures such as shaking hands or helping an opponent to his feet”
³
or “eliminate all authoritarian people from coaching”
⁴
or “replac[e] the term
opponent
with
associate
.”
⁵
Thomas Tutko and William Bruns urge us: “Let's compete, let's play to win, but let's keep it all in perspective. . . . To learn to compete and face a challenge, to learn to accept victory and adjust to defeat, is quite different from a philosophy whereby one individual or team must emerge as a victor.”
⁶
(Of course they fail to explain how it is possible to compete in such a way that one individual or team does not emerge as a victor.)

Underlying both approaches—isolating and punishing an individual who cheats and cautioning competitors about going overboard—is a single assumption. The assumption is that the ugly measures people use to get ahead represent a contamination of true competition. Thus, sports writer John Underwood says that cheating “defiles” competition,”
⁷
that violence has “perverted the good name of sport.”
⁸
For William Bennett, now the U.S. Secretary of Education, violence is a “degradation of the game,”
⁹
while for Garrett Hardin, bloodiness is “only an accident of competition.”
¹⁰
This is also the position of James Michener, who declared the problem “is not with competition per se but with the violence that excessive competition arouses.”
¹¹
The conservative's insistence that the fault lies with the individual competitors and the liberal's careful condemnation of
inappropriate
competition are really not so far apart. In both cases, competition itself is rescued from any blame. If we get rid of the troublemakers, if we don't go too far in our quest for victory, then there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the win/lose structure.

If you were an advocate of competition, this is precisely the tack you would take. No matter how frequently they seem to appear, you would argue that abusive, self-destructive, violent, or immoral behaviors are corruptions of
real
competition, which is in its essence as virtuous and healthy as these “exceptions” are nasty and neurotic. To argue in this way is also to enjoy an appreciable rhetorical advantage, since such a position appears pleasingly moderate: you are not saying
all
competition is bad, but merely that it should not be done to excess. What could be more reasonable?

This position coincides with the entrenched reluctance of Americans to consider structural explanations for problems. We prefer to hold individuals responsible for whatever happens or, at the most, to find a convenient proximate cause. Rarely are events understood in their historical or economic or social context. As one of many possible examples of this, consider how we respond when our children fail to learn. Typically we insist that they are not studying hard enough or else we put the problem down to poor teaching. What we do not do is acknowledge that a two-tiered educational system funnels most of the promising teachers and the privileged children to the private sector, virtually guaranteeing that students without the resources to follow will receive an inferior education. We do not ask why learning is defined in terms of a standardized test score, why obedience is valued above critical thinking—and we certainly do not look at the institutions in our country whose existence depends on a passive, acceptant public of precisely the sort that our schools manufacture.

The story is much the same when we confront poverty or crime or most other social ills.
^*
As for psychological problems, we do not even recognize them to
be
social in nature; the trouble is framed as an “illness,” purely an individual matter. This way of looking at the world has several consequences. It often results in blaming the victim, as many observers have pointed out. It leaves the foundations of our society undisturbed and even unexamined. And it all but assures that the problem itself will not go away.

In the case of competition, the root cause of abuses is the competitive structure itself. “Abuses,” then, is really something of a misnomer since these actions do not represent the contamination of competition but rather its logical conclusion. In the last chapter, I argued that hostility is virtually built into an arrangement where someone else's fate is inversely related to your own. So it is that
a structural imperative to beat others invites the use of any means available
. “The aim of competition is to win and the temptation is to win at any cost,” wrote Arthur Combs. “Although it begins with the laudable aim of encouraging production, competition quickly breaks down to a struggle to win at any price.”
¹²
This process is part of the natural trajectory of competition itself. The only distinction that a competitor qua competitor knows is that between winning and losing; other distinctions, such as between moral and immoral, are foreign to the enterprise and must be, as it were, imported. They do not belong. The only goal that a competitor (again, qua competitor) has is victory; the only good is what contributes to this goal. If a new goal is introduced—particularly one that
interferes
with winning, such as staying within the guidelines of appropriate conduct—it is likely to be pushed aside. This does not mean that people who do so don't understand how to compete; on the contrary, they understand perfectly. Their behavior follows from the structure.

What this means is that we can no longer content ourselves with simply condemning cheaters or feeling sorry for self-destructive competitors. To do so is not only shortsighted but hypocritical; we set up a structure where the goal is victory and then blame people when they follow through. Pious admonitions about not getting carried away in competition, however well-meaning, are just exercises in selfdeception. If we are serious about eliminating ugliness, we will have to eliminate the competitive structure that breeds the ugliness.

This perspective is radical and disturbing, but I think it fits the facts—that is, the frequency and pervasiveness of improper actions during competitive encounters—far better than the “contamination” view. Most people do not even keep the facts in view, failing to see the connections between campaign illegalities, scientific fraud, corporate trickery, and the use of steroids in college sports. Each appears in a different section of the newspaper, and it never dawns on us that there is a pattern. Once we acknowledge that these diverse shady activities all take place in the context of competition, we are more likely to see that the problem lies with the common denominator.

A few writers have identified competition itself as the problem. Anne Strick's critique of the American legal system, as we have already seen, questions the premise that justice is best served by an adversarial (i.e., competitive) model. She goes on to argue that this model is largely responsible for the abuses so common in the profession. “The Watergate lawyers were only doing what came naturally,” Strick writes, because “‘enemies' is what our legal system is all about.”
The need to beat the Other side in the courtroom is the basis of “diversion, distortion, and direct deceit. . . . Where polarity shapes thinking and winning is the orthodoxy to which men chiefly adhere, deceit is absolutely justifiable.”
¹⁴

Gunther Lüschen realized that the same is true on the playing field: “By and large the characteristic of a contest as a zero-sum game seems to explain why cheating should go on at all levels—even where the odds at stake are not high.”
¹⁵
By definition, all competition is zero-sum (in the broad sense of mutually exclusive goal attainment), so the invitation to cheat is always present. George Orwell made the point even more strongly. “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,” he wrote. “It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.”
¹⁶

Empirical research lends credence to this view. A sports psychologist found that

 

both athletes and nonathletes used lower-level egocentric moral reasoning when thinking about dilemmas in sport than when addressing moral issues in other contexts. These and other findings suggest that moral norms which prescribe equal consideration of all people are often suspended during competition in favor of a more egocentric moral perspective.
¹⁷

 

These findings also suggest that competition itself is responsible for the development of a lower moral standard. Indeed, another pair of researchers point to “evidence that regular sport participants become more committed to winning at any cost and less committed to values of fairness and justice as their competitive experience increases.”
¹⁸
Ironically, Michael Novak, whom we already know to be a staunch defender of competition, agrees that sports naturally lead participants to try to win at any cost:

 

The true practise of sport goes on, beneath the moralistic mythology of virtue and clean-living. Basketball without deception could not survive. Football without aggression, holding, slugging, and other violations—only a few of which the referees actually will censure—could not be played. Baseball without cunning, trickery, and pressing for advantage would scarcely be a contest. Our sports are lively with the sense of evil. . . . Sports provide an almost deliberate exercise in pushing the psyche to cheat and take advantage, to be ruthless, cruel, deceitful, vengeful, and aggressive.
¹⁹

 

However appalling one might find Novak's cheerful endorsement of these attributes, he is accurately reporting that they form the basis of sport, that they issue from the contests' very nature. It remains only to emphasize once again that they are not confined to sports. They are to be found, albeit in different forms, in virtually any kind of competitive activity—and, for that matter, throughout a culture defined by a competitive worldview. Bertrand Russell put it well:

 

The trouble does not lie simply with the individual, nor can a single individual prevent it in his own isolated case. The trouble arises from the generally received philosophy of life, according to which life is a contest, a competition, in which respect is to be accorded to the victor. This view leads to an undue cultivation of the will at the expense of the senses and the intellect.
²⁰

 

What, then, of sportsmanship and other calls to stay within certain guidelines? First, the notion is partly cosmetic; it offers a patina of respectability for the enterprise of making other people lose. The social pressures associated with the latter are far more powerful, and our sanctimonious noises about being a good sport allow us to condemn rule-breakers when it suits our purposes.
²¹
More important is the fact that sportsmanship is an artificial concept. It would not exist except for competition. Only within the framework of trying to win is it meaningful to talk about carrying this out in a graceful or virtuous fashion.
^*
If we did not compete, we would not have to try to curb the effects of competition by invoking sportsmanship; we might well be working
with
other people in the first place.

Even viewed in this light, though, the question of sportsmanship reminds us that not every businessperson resorts to sleazy tactics to get ahead and not every football player tries to disable his opponent. There are plenty of factors that encourage or discourage the use of inappropriate techniques. One such factor is the level of the competitor's moral development. Not surprisingly, researchers have found that the maturity of an athlete's moral reasoning is inversely proportional to the number of aggressive acts he or she engages in or views as legitimate.
²²
Other factors include the severity of the penalty, the likelihood that violators will be caught, and the perceived willingness of other participants to abide by the rules. The implication is that it is possible to try to counteract the natural consequence of the imperative to win and thus reduce the level of intentional competition. It is possible, but we Americans generally do not do so. On the contrary: The trouble with a hypercompetitive culture like ours is that we not only leave the mechanism intact but we create a network of reinforcements for winning at any cost. Cheating and the like can be said to be overdetermined—called forth by both the intrinsic structure of competition and the societal attitude toward it.

The latter has been remarked on more frequently than the former. In her analysis of lying, Sissela Bok writes:

 

The very stress on individualism, on competition, on achieving material success which so marks our society also generates intense pressures to cut corners. To win an election, to increase one's income, to outsell competitors—such motives impel many to participate in forms of duplicity they might otherwise resist. The more widespread they judge these practices to be, the stronger will be the pressures to join, even compete, in deviousness.
²³

 

The last sentence is crucial: The pressure we feel to be number one creates a vicious circle as we expect others to play dirty and feel justified in breaking the rules ourselves—if not obligated to do so. If I play it straight, the next guy is just going to take advantage of me. To complain, as the lawbreaker often does, that honesty does not pay may be self-serving, but it is largely correct in a competitive society.