John-Paul Sardi
Haven’t we heard too often now not to measure ourselves against others? The flower-child generation is passing away. Let it pass. Competition is a healthy, friendly, normal human endeavor. Measuring ourselves against others is important to our growth as a means of orienting ourselves.
The enemy is not competition as much as it is the desire to kill and overmaster. It is an error to misidentify competition as this desire. Competition within communities is often a sign of their strength and vitality. If it is lacking, it is often a signal that the community has become stagnant and swamped in outdated norms of behavior.
* This article responds to an article from our first issue.
First, I challenge the sweeping assertion that competition is ‘healthy, friendly, [and] normal.’ I certainly agree that it CAN be all of these things to varying degrees, though definitely not exclusively so. If you want to have a forthright discussion on the subject, we need not ignore some of its psychological implications; namely neurotic insecurity and mutual envy. Healthy? I respect and admire your optimism but if you are not prepared to adress the negative sides of the competitive spirit then it strikes me as narrow-minded and naive. After all, if we extend our premise from students in a classroom to nations on a globe, what part does competition play in the exacerbation of the Cold War, or a nuclear arms race? Friendly? Furthermore, to say that it is ‘normal’ seems to be parroting the Western cultural hegemony…I ask you, ‘normal’ is a measure by what competitive standard, by what criteria? Darwinian theory? The capitalist socioeconomic paradigm? At the peril of being called a ‘hippie,’ if one adheres to an Eastern philosophy does it necessarily follow that competition and measurement against others is the ‘normal’ path to strength, vitality, and self-betterment, whether inside the classroom or out? Erroneous. I believe the point of Mackinnon’s article was not that competition is inherently evil, nor do I personally hold this belief, but rather that when it eclipses the genuine pursuit of knowledge, the reflection on the ‘competitors’ tends to be shallow and pathetic. Finally, I find that whenever one invokes the term ‘flower-child’ and its connotations in a debate amongst people born post-1985, he makes it very obvious to everyone involved that he is a far cry from argumentative terra firma. We aren’t talking explicitly about Vietnam, so leave our parents and their partisan lexicon out of it. The allusion is not only detestably trite, it is also completely irrelevant; I am somewhat depressed that it was not out-competed by something more compelling: a higher word-form, if you will.
In the spirit of Zorro, I challenge you to a duel. Care to compete?