The Lost Art of Cooperation

The Wilson Quarterly ^ | Autumn 2007 | Benjamin R. Barber

[forkinsocket]

Competition is as American as apple pie. It announces American individualism and marks the American market economy with its characteristic rivalries. Not just for neoliberals such as Milton Friedman and ­quasi-­anarchists such as philosopher Robert Nozick, but for Americans of all political stripes, it reflects a distrust of the “government and co-operation” dear to cultural critic John Ruskin. We are a nation of winners (and, yes, losers) where, in the wonderfully perverse turn of phrase often attributed to one of America’s “winningest” coaches, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

Yet we need not be readers of Ruskin to know that competition also has a pejorative sense, even in American usage. It may be nature’s way, as Charles Darwin proposed, but only when we conceive of nature as a jungle. Whatever we make of it, today competition dominates our ideology, shapes our cultural attitudes, and sanctifies our market economy as never before. We are living in an age that prizes competition and demeans cooperation, an era more narcissistic than the Gilded Age, more hubristic than the age of Jackson. Competition ­rules.

We need only look at America’s favorite ­activities—­sports, entertainment, and ­politics—­to notice the distorting effect of the obsession with competition. Sports would seem to define competition, as competition defines sports. But beginning with the ancient Olympics, sports have also been about performance, about excelling (hence, excellence), and about the cultivation of athletic virtue. It is not victory but a “personal best” that counts. In the United States, however, athletics is about beating others. About how one performs in comparison with others. Ancient and modern philosophers alike associate comparison with pride and vanity (amour-propre), and have shown how vanity corrupts virtue and excellence.

[forkinsocket]

No wonder ours is often an ­outer-­directed culture, unreflective, grasping, aggressive, and ­cutthroat.

Author says that America is obsessed with competition.

[ClearCase_guy]

I suspect that our society began to lose its understanding of the value of cooperation at about the same time that schools starting throwing everyone into groups and grading 6 kids on the work done by the sole industrious member of the group.

Such "group work" fosters ill-feeling on all sides and quickly makes people conclude that: "Cooperation sucks".

[KarlInOhio]

throwing everyone into groups and grading 6 kids on the work done by the sole industrious member of the group.

I hated that. I don't know how many times I heard "we want Karl in our group so we will all get good grades." Grrr! Time to go read The Little Red Hen to some random children in the street to warp their little minds with thoughts of individuality and personal responsibility.

[griswold3]

yeah, cooperate with liberals on fiscal issues and it always ends up being a ‘cut’ in a program when they don’t get all they want.

When was the last time ‘we’ won an issue???
(I can’t remember.)