by Alfie Kohn
When one begins with the study of women and derives developmental constructs from their lives, the outline of a moral conception different from that described by Freud, Piaget, or Kohlberg begins to emerge and informs a different description of development. In this conception, the moral problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules.30
To take a second example of these divergent approaches, Piaget was among several investigators who observed that when girls who are playing a game come to a disagreement about the rules, they often will start over or switch to another game. This has usually been interpreted as a failing—an indication that girls are not learning negotiation skills or are threatened by conflict. But the same reality can be understood in another way. Perhaps girls cherish their friendships and do not wish to risk them for the sake of continuing a game or learning legalistic skills. Perhaps the female priority system ranks relationship ahead of rules and perhaps this appears skewed only when viewed from a male point of reference.
Yet another arena in which we find these two differing orientations is conversation. Research by sociolinguists demonstrates that, in our culture at least, women and men tend to play different conversational roles. According to Charles Derber, men often acknowledge what someone else has said in a perfunctory way and then shift the conversation to talk about themselves. (“Huh, that’s interesting, because yesterday you know what happened to me?”) Women more often respond supportively, encouraging the other individual to continue. (“Really? And then what happened?”)31 Men are also more likely to interrupt outright—in one study of mixed-sex conversation, 96 percent of the interruptions were men breaking in on women32—whereas women tend to ask more questions and generally take responsibility for starting and maintaining conversations as well as putting other participants at ease.33
In response to these speech patterns, one could conceivably say that because women are being trampled in conversation, they should, in effect, give men a dose of their own medicine by competing more aggressively for attention and authority. (This prescription seems to follow naturally from one prominent researcher’s characterization of women as “the ‘shitworkers’ of routine interaction.”)34 On the other hand, it is possible to agree that one should not allow oneself to be interrupted—or one’s topic of conversation to be ignored—without suggesting that the answer is to try to beat men at their own game. One surely ought to be assertive enough in conversation to avoid being dismissed; likewise, women should not convey by their tone and conversational role that what they have to say is not important. But this need not lead them to begin interrupting or stop being supportive. As linguist Robin Lakoff, one of the pioneers of research in this field, put it:
Although in many ways the typical feminine style doesn’t get you what you want, nevertheless it’s exceedingly valuable. It would be a pity if it were to vanish. The alternative, the male style, has so many bad aspects of its own that nobody is advised to acquire it. . . . Anything that allows the other person to have room is in itself a good thing, something that suggests cooperation. Questions tend to draw other people into the discourse and encourage them to make contributions.35
The female commitment to relationship, as it is manifested in moral reasoning and childhood play and conversation, is terribly important. The shift toward competition represents nothing less than an abandonment of this commitment, the attenuation of care. Perhaps it is unfair to hold women responsible for such a loss; the other half of the human race is even more alienated from the rewards of relatedness by virtue of its immersion in competition. Yet this is exactly the point. To be a bit melodramatic, it is more tragic to watch the process of corruption than to deplore the condition of those who are already corrupt. Put more hopefully, one makes a greater fuss about those who are still able to listen, those who are not yet beyond being recalled to their own values.
To reaffirm the value of relationship, I should emphasize, is not at all to glorify dependence. To cherish the part of our lives that involves connection with others hardly entails subjugating oneself to others’ needs. Neither does it mean that one has sacrificed healthy self-directedness or autonomy. What Gilligan has styled “the feminine voice” is perfectly compatible with a secure sense of self. In any case, competition would be a poor strategy for reaching this goal. As I tried to show in chapter 5, competition is associated with neediness and an external locus of control. Those who talk or act as if becoming more competitive were a sign of growth may have simply confused competition with autonomy or relationship with dependence.
Those who would have women endorse competition may offer an objection to this talk of relationship, as follows: Women may be associated with this orientation rather than with competition, but they cannot really be said to have “affirmed” it. The repudiation of relationship does not amount to giving up something that was freely chosen because women have had connectedness and the like thrust upon them. Competition, by the same token, was never refused by most women so much as withheld from them as an option. Women tend to be more unable to compete than unwilling; they shrink from rivalry. This suits the purposes of men, who have profited from the exclusion of women from the competitive arena.
There is truth in this account. Choice in the fullest sense has been in scarce supply for both sexes as regards competition. It might be said that while women couldn’t compete, men have had to compete. In terms of political and economic power, these situations have not been symmetrical, I should add. The man’s “predicament” has left him to run the show, to monopolize the public sphere. But any feminism that leaves it at that is a feminism that accepts a male set of priorities, that fails to question the infatuation with wealth and power, that accedes to the devaluation of relationship, that says “Me, too!” instead of “What a mess!”
It is pathetic and outrageous that women have had to wait, like Sleeping Beauty, to be awakened with a kiss. But it would be tragic indeed if, finally able to rouse themselves, they did so only to mimic the prince. This is why I call the cheerleaders of competition for women pseudofeminists: they are responding to sexism by appropriating the worst of male values, which represents a serious error in judgment if not a kind of betrayal. The fact that men have had a virtual monopoly on competitiveness does not, in itself, make it desirable. Men may resist new competitors in the marketplace, but they can grin with arrogant satisfaction knowing that women have decided to emulate them. Here is the classic Pyrrhic victory for women: opposing male oppression by becoming indistinguishable from a male oppressor.* Sure, says sociologist Barrie Thorne, “Women should be getting equal pay and having access to every occupation and being President and so on. But I wouldn’t want to end with that because I think this society is structured in an ugly, competitive way. I think the challenge is to pursue that strategy as a right that we have but at the same time critique it and create alternative forms of community and human relations.”36
For women to pump up their biceps or break into the club of hard-driving money grubbers on Wall Street is a peculiar and sad kind of liberation. For the feminine voice to slide down into a baritone that rasps about being number one is a poor excuse for deliverance. The fact that women’s values have tended to clash with the demands of competitive, male-dominated institutions does not mean that the former ought to adjust to fit the latter.
[It’s not] that there is something wrong with women . . . [but] that there is something wrong with this definition of success and that there is something right with women’s inability to accommodate this definition. . . . It no longer seems appropriate to rout out success anxiety and replace it with acceptance of the masculine rules of t
he game. Rather, women now need to focus on affirming the structures and values they bring to the question of competition versus relationships and start reconstructing institutions according to what women know.37
The situation is analogous to something that baffles and dismays those committed to social change. Members of the underclass in America often seem less interested in ending a system of privilege than in becoming privileged themselves. They rarely challenge the basic script, preferring to concentrate only on the casting. The economic system that predicates wealth on poverty, power on powerlessness, is implicitly accepted even by those with the greatest incentive to challenge it. This is a tribute to the effectiveness of our society’s ideological apparatus, which encourages debate on tiny questions in order to deflect attention from the big ones, and which (as I mentioned in the last chapter) perpetuates a myth of individual responsibility to the exclusion of attention on structural causes. However it works, though, it works. Now something similar is happening with women, who are buying into a competitive system rather than challenging it. “Buying into” is an apt phrase, in fact: The case of women and competition is not merely analogous to, but part of, the question of privilege. Pseudofeminism may celebrate competition in women’s athletics or competition in the abstract, but it is primarily concerned with competition for money. The current call to become competitive cannot be differentiated from the acceptance (and thus the perpetuation) of our economic system. Pseudofeminism is, in its consequence if not in its intention, a conservative movement. The three-stage socialization process I mentioned—from avoiding competition to competing guiltily to competing wholeheartedly—needs to be reversed. Women, along with any men who are not too far gone, ought to summon back their guilt. I realize this sounds strange to our ears, since we regard guilt (along with anything else that makes us feel bad) as something to be eliminated. But guilt can be appropriate if it is not irrational, if it directs our attention to something about ourselves that is genuinely problematic. The point here—as, indeed, with all healthy guilt—is not to trap us in an endless cycle of selfpunishment but to provide the impetus to real change. The woman who hears a squawk from her conscience when she begins to see her friends as obstacles to her own triumph should not seek to silence that voice. Rather, she should question her actions—along with the win/lose structure that led her to feel bad.
The goal is not to be unable to compete, as some insist was the departure point for women. It is to arrive not at “cannot” but “will not.” The ideal of psychotherapy is not to become a particular kind of person—a person similar to the therapist, for example—but to widen one’s horizons, to be flexible and free enough to choose. Here, too, the objective is choice, and this requires psychological health as well as economic and political freedom (which includes an end to sex-based discrimination of all kinds). At such a point, I trust that women will choose to stop learning competition, that in its place they will truly affirm relationship. This time around, maybe the lesson will be cooperation and men will be the students.
9
Beyond Competition
THOUGHTS ON MAKING CHANGE
The prevailing mode of competition in American culture thus continues despite convincing evidence that it is damaging to physical, spiritual, emotional, and social health. And what is the reaction of members of the helping professions? Are we creative agents of social change or are we dispensers of Band-Aids to the injured and facilitators of adjustment to “the way things are”?
—Vera J. Elleson,
“Competition: A Cultural Imperative”
INTENTIONAL AND STRUCTURAL COMPETITION REVISITED
The cartoon animals children watch on Saturday morning TV continue to run even when there is no longer any ground under their feet—at least until they look down. It is as if some combination of ignorance and momentum allows them to keep going. The same may be said of competition. We persist in our furious efforts to be number one, we continue to believe this is somehow in our best interests, and we raise yet another generation to do the same. We do these things despite the fact that
cooperative, as compared to competitive, systems of distributing rewards—when they differ—have more favorable effects on individual and group productivity, individual learning, social relations, selfesteem, task attitudes, and a sense of responsibility to other group members. This conclusion is consistent with the research results obtained by many other investigators in hundreds of studies. It is by now a well-established finding, even though it is counter to widely held ideologies about the relative benefits of competition.1
Despite this evidence, reviewed here by Morton Deutsch, we continue trying to succeed at the price of other people’s failure. Often we are those “other people” who fail, but this scarcely diminishes our quest for victory or our belief that competition is good for us.
Changing this state of affairs is difficult because structural and intentional competition reinforce each other. How can we eliminate the competitive framework of our society so long as there still exists both a widespread belief that competition is desirable and a strong inclination to beat other people? On the other hand, how can we change these views so long as a structure remains in place that requires us to compete (and inclines us to bring our beliefs into line with our actions)? It is the same dilemma confronted a generation ago by civil rights activists: trying to end segregation by governmental fiat would run into resistance because of widespread racist attitudes—yet how could racism ever be overcome in a segregated society?
“Neither the individual’s values nor those of the system are primary,” Paul Wachtel has written; “each determines the other in continuous reciprocal interaction. People in a system with competitive values tend to become competitive, and in so doing they keep the system competitively oriented.”2 How can we break this vicious circle? By tackling both levels at once. “What works best is a multiple approach, confining itself neither solely to changing overt behavior nor to promoting insight alone, but rather attempting to weaken a number of links in the causal chain simultaneously. . . . Since our beliefs and values shape our institutions, and our institutions shape our beliefs and values, a multifaceted effort is required.”3 Alas, Wachtel does not offer much in the way of guidance as to how to undertake this multifaceted effort. That will be the task of this chapter.
***
I argued in chapter 5 that intentional competition could be understood in terms of self-esteem needs: we try to beat others in an effort to prove our own worth. Ultimately this strategy reveals itself as futile, since making our self-esteem contingent on winning means that it will always be in doubt. The more we compete, the more we need to compete.
Escaping this trap ultimately means finding more successful ways of securing our self-esteem: building an unconditional sense of trust in ourselves that will make it unnecessary to keep demonstrating our superiority. The better I feel about myself, the less I will need to make you lose. Carl Rogers emphasized that the experience of being accepted by others permits us to accept ourselves. Intuitively this seems more promising than trying to triumph over others. Given the unique dimensions of these issues for each person, however, I would not presume to offer a recipe for setting this complex process into motion. All I can reasonably do here is to call attention to the connection between intentional competition and self-esteem. Overcoming the former means in some respect concerning oneself with the latter.
Self-esteem is not an all-or-nothing affair, of course. Those who are least secure about themselves may require the most confirmation of their talents (and, ultimately, of their goodness). But all of us want io check how we are doing and reassure ourselves that we are competent. We are accustomed to doing so by ranking ourselves—to the point that where we stand (in relation to others) defines who we are. Because of this, a critic should have something with which to replace comparison if he is going to urge us to move beyond it. If we have come to be dependent on ranking for our very identities, we cannot very well expect to a
djust instantly to its absence. Happily, as I pointed out in an earlier chapter, comparing oneself to others is not the only way to measure our progress. We can look instead to our own past performance or to some absolute standard to see how well we are doing. (Content with swimming a few more laps than I did last week, I will not feel compelled to find out how many laps the person in the next lane has completed.)*
If we are obliged to participate in structural competition, we can still work to reduce personal competitiveness. At the very least, we can shift to what I have called “process competition” by directing attention away from the results of an activity. If we are playing a competitive game, we ought not to keep score. If it will be obvious who wins, we should at least avoid awarding any prizes or making a fuss over the victor. By minimizing the significance of winning, we simultaneously soften the blow of losing. Whenever we take part in a contest, we can try to nest it in fellowship: by making a special effort to fortify the bonds between competitors, the destructive effects of having to work against each other can be eased a bit. Friendly gestures to rivals will be reciprocated more often than one might imagine; our opponents probably feel as isolated and trapped by the structure as we do. At the very least, such pleasantness can moderate the hostility that is generated by competing for the same position or prize.