by Alfie Kohn
The human nature argument has the effect of blunting change and it is played for all its rhetorical advantages. Ideals and reforms are opposed on the ground that they are impossible to attain, that they fly in the face of the “givens” of life. “Your idea is charming, but unfortunately It’s Just Human Nature To Be greedy/aggressive/competitive/territorial/lazy/stubborn, so it hasn’t much chance to succeed.” While undesirability (a matter of value) is debatable, impossibility (a matter of fact) is not. In the name of realism, uncounted ideas have been dismissed and their creators along with them—a phenomenon that we will consider again in the last chapter.
Finally, I should observe that the human nature position is also an appealing one for psychological reasons. When we are criticized for an attitude we hold, it is tempting to respond, “Look, this is the way I was brought up.” This is sometimes an appeal to cultural relativism, whose subtext is: “Who are you to judge?” but it is more often an appeal to determinism that argues, “I cannot choose to believe otherwise.” If I cannot change, there is no point in arguing that I should.5 There is no shortage of putative causes for our behavior (or values) that can be used to deflect criticism. The almost limitless range of behaviors currently being tied to neurotransmitters offers a new set of excuses to supplant those provided by psychoanalysis. “[People] used to say: ‘It’s not my fault. My parents did it to me . . .’ Now they say: ‘It’s not me. It’s a biochemical disorder in my brain.’”6 Far more attractive than such rationalizations, however, is the claim that no human could be expected to act otherwise.
Even when we are not directly challenged to defend our behavior, the prospect that our actions or attitudes may be inevitable is attractive. Freedom can be unsettling if not positively terrifying7—and scientific determinisms are, psychologically speaking, the contemporary counterpart to theological doctrines of predestination. To be relieved of responsibility can, paradoxically, be experienced as freeing. Finally, the discomfort contemporary Americans have with value judgments can create a strong incentive to resort to arguments that certain things must be. In several respects, then, the human nature argument—which is virtually impossible to substantiate—is very seductive indeed: it fortifies social arrangements, offers a rhetorical advantage in disputes, and makes life easier psychologically. These are considerations well worth keeping in mind as we proceed to consider the specific issue of competition.
ON ARGUMENTS FOR THE INEVITABILITY OF COMPETITION
Competition is cited as part of “human nature” as often as any other characteristic, so one might expect that there is quite a bit of argument and evidence to substantiate this claim. Amazingly, a careful examination of the literature turns up virtually nothing. The inevitability of competition is either tacitly assumed or simply asserted as if it were obvious. I want to examine these assertions in the writings of people who are favorably inclined toward competition before going on to review the evidence against its inevitability.
Among those thinkers who believe competition is unavoidable are the authors of two of the classic works on play: Roger Caillois and Johan Huizinga. Both take it for granted that we are unavoidably competitive creatures. “Games discipline instincts and institutionalize them,” Caillois wrote;8 that these competitive tendencies merit the status of instincts he did not bother to defend. For his part, Huizinga treated play and competition as virtually interchangeable. The possibility of noncompetitive play literally would not occur to someone who believes competition is part of our nature.
In their 1917 essay on the subject, John Harvey and his co-authors observed that, for many people, “in games the pleasure comes from the competition itself . . . and not from success.” From this they quickly concluded that “there is therefore in human nature an instinct of pure competition which finds satisfaction in the very act of striving to do something better than other people, even though the attempt is not successful.”9 This is rather like claiming that because many people prefer thie car ride to the arrival at their destination, humans must have an instinctive attraction to automobile travel. The sociologist James S. Coleman, in his investigation of American high schools twenty-five years ago, employed equally dubious logic. He declared, “The removal of scholastic achievement as a basis of comparison does not lessen the amount of competition among adolescents; it only shifts the arena from academic matters to non-academic ones.” He illustrates the latter with “the competition between two girls for the attention of a boy.”10 That competition is not restricted to the academic arena is surely true, but this hardly substantiates Coleman’s implicit assumption that a set level of competitiveness exists in us willy-nilly and the best we can do is to rechannel (displace) it to this object or that.
One of the very few recent book-length treatments of competition is Harvey Ruben’s self-help manual, Competing, the first sentence of which is, “Competition is an inescapable fact of life.”11 This, we later learn, is because “we indeed have a competitive ‘code’ in our chromosomes”12—an astonishing claim that is not substantiated or even explained. Ruben evidently believes we are genetically programmed to compete on the grounds that competition is very widespread and that we begin competing very early in life.
Although they are not defended, these, at least, are reasons one might suppose competition is part of human nature. Somewhat more common, however, are rhetorical tricks and even name-calling as a way of justifying this assumption. Ruben’s chief modus operandi is to define a wide range of behaviors as indirectly competitive and thus effectively define a noncompetitive orientation out of existence. For example, “Whether the child realizes it or not, learning to wait for a feeding while mother attends to another sibling is one of the first competitive lessons.”13 And again, people who “seem the least competitive of all types actually have only adopted more circuitous strategies to get what the others strive for more obviously.”14 In subsequent chapters, we are told that all acts of comparison, as well as the act of joining a group, are intrinsically competitive behaviors. This model tells us more about its creator than about the world he purports to describe.15 It also sets up an unfalsifiable argument. Whereas any example of a noncompetitive individual or culture should be sufficient to disprove the idea that competition is part of human nature, Ruben has arranged things so that even many such examples will not suffice: He has denied the very possibility of acting noncompetitively and so “proved” its inevitability.
Because Ruben frames his argument at such length, it is easy to see what he is doing. More commonly, though, a writer will make a brief comment about competition that seems persuasive but actually rests on the same conceptual sleight of hand. “Sometimes people are inclined to hide their competitive instincts and drives,” writes Harold J. Vanderzwaag, “but when they participate in sport, their competitive nature is usually revealed.”16 Translation: People are competitive on some occasions and not on other occasions; therefore, the former is real and the latter is an instance of disguise. Here, too, the argument is laid out so no amount of empirical evidence can possibly disprove the hypothesis that competition is inevitable.
Some writers have resorted to ad hominem attacks on those who question the naturalness of competition. “I think we’re all scared to face the competitive side of our nature,” comments Mary Ann O’Roark in an article entitled, “‘Competition’ Isn’t a Dirty Word.”17 This neatly puts anyone who challenges the inevitability of competition in the position of being frightened, of lacking the courage to grasp a difficult but obvious truth. The well-known biologist Garrett Hardin goes further, becoming rather snide, in fact:
We are not surprised to note that young people whose needs are taken care of by their elders often fail to appreciate the inevitability of competition. What is surprising is that adults whose specialty is the behavior of human beings in groups—sociologists—should hold competition in such low esteem.18
Besides blurring the issues of inevitability and desirability, Hardin pronounces himself unwilling to consider that
these upstart social scientists may be on to something. The slam at privileged youth, however, is actually more interesting than it first appears. Put plainly, Hardin’s point is that people who have not had to compete believe that competition is avoidable. But what if such people are correct? If we generalize the meaning of having one’s “needs . . . taken care of,” we are left with the provocative suggestion that competition exists not because it is in our nature but because of economic or psychological deficits that are, in principle, remediable.
I have not carefully selected these examples of unjustified assertion, rhetorical trickery, and name-calling as straw men. They virtually exhaust the available literature. I have not been able to discover any other explicit arguments for the inevitability of human competition.19 Let me therefore turn to the opposing position. There are, broadly speaking, two general responses to the claim that competition is an inevitable feature of human life: (1) cooperation is at least as integral to human life as competition, and (2) competition is a learned phenomenon. I will begin with the first and return to the second later in this chapter.
The respects in which other species (and “nature” as a whole) are cooperative will be examined in the next section. But there is a good case to be made that we regularly underestimate the role that cooperation plays in human life. We attend instead to the far more visible instances of struggle. “The truth is that the vast majority of human interaction, in our society as well as in all other societies, is not competitive but cooperative interaction,” according to educational psychologists David and Roger Johnson.20 Ashley Montagu has been arguing this for quite some time: “Without the cooperation of its members society cannot survive, and the society of man has survived because the cooperativeness of its members made survival possible . . .”21 Arguably, the ubiquity of cooperative interactions even in a relatively competitive society is powerful evidence against the generalization that humans are naturally competitive. Our lives are “promotively interdependent,” to use Morton Deutsch’s language, by the very fact of living and working together. This is true in every society; it is inherent in the very idea of society. If not simply false, the claim that we are unavoidably competitive is therefore a truth so partial as to be utterly misleading.
This tendency to cooperate, to work actively with rather than against others, has been found among toddlers and even infants. So-called “prosocial behaviors”—cooperating, helping, sharing, comforting, and so on—occur in almost every child, even though research in this area has been practically nonexistent until very recently.22 Regular examples of children under three years of age giving their toys to playmates, spontaneously taking turns in games, and so on must give pause to anyone who assumes competitiveness is the natural state of the human.23 I am not trying to suggest by this that it is “human nature” to help others. The problems with such claims have been raised earlier, and what is good for the competitive goose is good for the cooperative gander. One pair of researchers explicitly disavows this conclusion, in fact, arguing that “prosocial behaviors result from experience; they are learned.”24 But from wherever such inclination to help derives, it exists literally from the beginning of life. While we may not be unavoidably cooperative, we are, at worst, not unavoidably anything at all.
THE REAL STATE OF NATURE
In considering the relative prevalence of competition and cooperation, we now turn to the natural world. In doing so, we find ourselves in what seems unfriendly territory. In fact, competition in the animal world is often cited as powerful evidence that competition is part of our nature, too. Before looking more closely at the evidence, however, we need to challenge the assumption that the proper study of mankind is animals. Even if other species were as competitive as some people think, this, like any fact about other species, has at best a very limited relevance to ourselves. As Marshall Sahlins, Richard Lewontin, and other critics of sociobiology have shown—and it should not be necessary to rehearse here—the mediating force of culture puts our species in a class by itself. Only humankind manipulates symbols, reflects upon the fact of its reflecting, questions, makes value judgments, appreciates absurdity, creates institutions and then considers their limitations. Because of this, the historian Richard Hofstadter was absolutely correct to insist that “judgments as to the value of competition between men or enterprises or nations must be based upon social and not allegedly biological consequences.”25
But let us, for the sake of the argument, grant some relevance to the question How does nature operate? From my own exposure to documentaries and popular conception, a series of images has lodged itself in my mind. Two powerful and deliberate males of an uncertain species are locked in mortal combat while the feminine prize coolly sits on the sidelines. A huge fish swims up behind a smaller version of itself, jaws wide open. A fierce feline gracefully turns its less swiftfooted cousin into steak. Some ignominiously vanquished species lies collectively rotting, while the victors are just off camera having lunch. This, I had always assumed, was the real state of nature: somewhere just beyond the tranquil loveliness of a spring day in the forest, all was red in tooth and claw. At this very moment, animals from paramecia to hippopotami are vigorously organizing themselves into winners and losers.
As a humanist (in one sense of the word) I was dismayed at this picture of the natural world; as a humanist (in another sense) I was in no position to challenge its accuracy. Of course, the picture is not without its element of truth. Obviously the scenes I saw on television actually happened; I was not, after all, watching highly paid stunt wolves. Still, as some biologists have been pointing out since the turn of the century, the animal world is not what many of us assume.
To understand why this is so, let us consider the idea of “natural selection,” one of the greatest conceptual advances in the history of human thought. This theory states that the better adapted a species is to its environment—and, specifically, to changes in that environment—the greater the probability of its being around in the future. To adapt is to be able to procreate; to procreate is to survive. So much is uncontroversial. For many years, though, some biologists and ethologists have encouraged the widespread conception that natural selection is tantamount to competition. “Survival of the fittest” (to use the term coined not by Darwin but by Herbert Spencer) seemed to connote a struggle. Winners live to fight another day.
In fact, there is no necessary relationship between natural selection and competitive struggle. As Stephen Jay Gould put it recently:
The equation of competition with success in natural selection is merely a cultural prejudice. . . . Success defined as leaving more offspring can . . . be attained by a large variety of strategies—including mutualism and symbiosis—that we could call cooperative. There is no a priori preference in the general statement of natural selection for either competitive or cooperative behavior.26
Gould’s point is that there is nothing about evolution that requires competition. And, indeed, Darwin himself made clear that he was using the term “struggle for existence” in a “large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being upon another.”27 But what do we find in practice? Surprisingly, natural selection usually occurs without any discernible struggle, those exciting documentaries notwithstanding. According to the late George Gaylord Simpson,
Struggle is sometimes involved, but it usually is not, and when it is, it may even work against rather than toward natural selection. Advantage in differential reproduction is usually a peaceful process in which the concept of struggle is really irrelevant. It more often involves such things as better integration into the ecological situation, maintenance of a balance of nature, more efficient utilization of available food, better care of the young, elimination of intragroup discords (struggles) that might hamper reproduction, exploitation of environmental possibilities that are not the objects of competition or are less effectively exploited by others.28
Natural selection does not require competition; on the contrary, it discourages it. Su
rvival generally demands that individuals work with rather than against each other—and this includes others of the same species as well as those from different species. If this is true, and if natural selection is the engine of evolution—the central theme of “nature,” as it were—then we should expect to find animals cooperating with each other in great numbers. And so we do.
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
