|
 Peg's
Polemic
Every
month, philosopher Peg Tittle casts off the calm, measured and qualified
style of her profession to deliver her opinionated and impassioned
column, exclusively for the TPM philosophy café...
Number
29. The
Olympians
Insofar
as competition is the measure of oneself against another, it entails
the view that the other is more important than oneself. Otherwise,
it would be sufficient to measure oneself against oneself (a past
self, a hoped-for future self) or against some absolute standard
not necessarily related to any self. Such an other-regarding view
usually indicates low self-esteem.
It
does no good to claim that one competes, rather, to better one's
own best: it must be asked why one needs to perform alongside another
in order to better oneself - a stopwatch or tape measure or videotape
should suffice. That such competing against oneself is insufficient
to bring out one's best suggests, again, that what matters is what
the other does, thinks, etc.
This
seems odd, though: most world class athletes have such self-discipline
and have achieved such a level of excellence that for their self-esteem
to remain low, they'd have to be quite out of touch with reality.
Bingo.
The
hierarchal nature of competitive sport is such that the context
for comparison keeps getting narrower: as one excels, one compares
oneself to a smaller and smaller pool of others who also excel;
and the measure of difference becomes equally smaller and smaller.
So unless the competitor keeps in mind the larger left-behind contexts,
or the similarities of amazing achievement, one's self-esteem ends
up depending on a mere ten or twenty out of six billion people,
and a mere two seconds in a four-minute race or a few hundredths
of a point out of ten.
I
don't mean to suggest, however, that this display of low self-esteem
is all there is to competition. Surely there is much more,
especially when the competition is as big as the Olympics: a chance
for businesses to advertise unnecessary or exploitive products,
a chance for petty nationalism to strut its stuff, a chance to misspend
resources (surely clean water matters more than whether A can jump
1 cm higher than B), etc.
Nor
do I mean to suggest that I won't be watching the Olympics. I fully
applaud the pursuit and display of excellence - but why doesn't
sport, like art, have non-competitive events? True, the arts also
have their dance competitions and their music competitions; but
more common are simply the performances - the pure celebrations
of excellence.
.
Peg's
Polemic will next be updated early June 2003
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