Page 280 - The Social Animal

262 The Social Animal

One chimp has food and the other doesn’t. The foodless chimpanzee
begins to beg. Reluctantly, the “wealthy” chimp hands over some of
his food. In a sense, the very reluctance with which he does so makes
the gift all the more significant. It indicates he likes the food and
would dearly enjoy keeping it for himself. Accordingly, it suggests that
the urge to share may have deep roots indeed, even among notoriously
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aggressive animals like chimps. But Kropotkin’s ideas were largely
ignored, perhaps because they did not fit the temper of the times or
the needs of those who were profiting from the Industrial Revolution.
Let us look at our own society. As a culture, we Americans seem
to thrive on competition; we reward winners and are disdainful of
losers. For two centuries, our educational system has been based on
competitiveness and the laws of survival. With very few exceptions,
we do not teach our kids to love learning—we teach them to strive
for high grades and great scores on the S.A.T. When sportswriter
Grantland Rice said that what’s important is not whether you win or
lose but how you play the game, he certainly was not describing the
dominant theme in American life. If anything, he was expressing a
hope that we might somehow rid ourselves of our morbid preoccu-
pation with winning at all costs—a preoccupation that dominates life
in this country. From the Little League ballplayer who bursts into
tears after his team is defeated to the college students in the football
stadium chanting “We’re number one!”; from former President Lyn-
don Johnson, whose judgment during the Vietnam war was almost
certainly distorted by his desire not to be the first president to lose a
war, to the third-grader who despises her classmate for a superior
performance on an arithmetic test, we manifest a staggering cultural
obsession with victory. Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the
Green Bay Packers may have summed it all up with the simple state-
ment, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” What is fright-
ening about the acceptance of this philosophy is that it implies that
the goal of victory justifies whatever means we use to win, even if it’s
only a football game—which, after all, was first conceived as a recre-
ational activity.
It may be true that, in the early history of human evolution,
highly competitive and aggressive behaviors were adaptive. But as I
look about and see a world full of international, interracial, and in-
tertribal hatred and distrust, of senseless slaughter, of terrorism, of
anthrax and smallpox being manufactured as weapons, of enough