No Contest (5 page)

It was Petr Kropotkin, in his 1902 book
Mutual Aid,
who first detailed the ubiquity of cooperation among animals. After reviewing the habits of species ranging from ants to bison, he concluded that.

 

competition . . . is limited among animals to exceptional periods. . . . Better conditions are created by the
elimination of competition
by means of mutual aid and mutual support. . . . “Don't compete!—competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!” That is the
tendency
of nature, not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. “Therefore combine—practise mutual aid! . . .” That is what Nature teaches us.
²⁹

 

Fifty years later, W. C. Allee reaffirmed this principle in his book
Cooperation Among Animals
,
³⁰
Montagu, meanwhile, accumulated an impressive bibliography of other scientists who were coming to the same conclusion.
³¹
Zoologist Marvin Bates is representative of these writers: “This competition, this ‘struggle,' is a superficial thing, superimposed on an essential mutual dependence. The basic theme in nature is cooperation rather than competition—a cooperation that has become so all-pervasive, so completely integrated, that it is difficult to untwine and follow out the separate strands.”
³²
It is in the interest of both individuals (or species) if they do not compete over, say, a watering hole; migration is one of many strategies that will allow both parties to survive. Notice, though, that these writers are saying not only that animals tend to avoid competition, but that their behavior is overwhelmingly characterized by its opposite—cooperation.

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 zoologists
³⁴
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.