Virtuous Competition

One

Competition

One of the things that drives our culture very deeply is a competitive mindset.

We’re a huge sports culture. We participate in sports, we root for our favorite sports teams. We’re also super competitive in school, and competitive about grades. And then, finally, we get competitive in the marketplace. When we talk about other people applying for the same jobs, or other businesses in the same industry, we talk about our competitors. When we talk about how much we get paid, we say we want the compensation to be “competitive” for the field. 

But all this competition should make us stop and think because, after all, a competitive situation is normally one in which two people are striving for the same thing, and only one of them can get it

But how can it be Christian to be involved in that kind of activity? Jesus says we have to love our neighbors as ourselves. So how can it be Christian to get in a situation where the only way I can win is if my neighbor loses?

Two

Zeal for Excellence

Actually, competition can be a good thing. It can be an activity that benefits all the participants as long as it’s simply an activity geared towards everyone trying to become as excellent as they can.

Because, basically, there are two ways you get better at something. The first is to practice in ways that challenge you and the second is to observe someone who is able to show you how you can improve. In other words, to have somebody else set a standard that’s worth reaching for.

Well, that’s basically what we’re supposed to do when we engage in competitive sports: we challenge other people as they challenge us, and we set standards for each other so that each person can experience an excellent performance that they can try to reach and surpass.

Now notice that this kind of competition only improves the performance of both players, or both teams, if the players and teams are evenly matched. If a professional baseball team played against a little league team, neither side would grow in excellence. The professionals wouldn’t be challenged, and the little leaguers would get discouraged right away, and after a while would give up even trying. 

So too, in the economy, the Church celebrates competition as a way of promoting excellence. In fact, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church waxes rather eloquent on the social benefits of the competitive market, “A truly competitive market is an effective instrument for attaining important objectives of justice: moderating the excessive profits of individual businesses, responding to consumers’ demands, bringing about a more efficient use and conservation of resources, rewarding entrepreneurship and innovation, making information available so that it is really possible to compare and purchase products in an atmosphere of healthy competition,” #347

But healthy competition means that you can’t just have one business dominating everybody else. That doesn’t promote excellence. It leads to laziness and complacency on the side of the winner, and discouragement and despair on the side of the losers.

If our market is going to be dedicated to excellence, then there has to be competition, but it has to be geared towards people’s good. 

Three

Envious Competition

There’s another kind of competition that isn’t directed towards excellence at all. This is a competitive mindset where you don’t try to improve your own excellence, you try to ruin someone else’s. This is the kind of competitive mindset Tonya Harding showed when she had her Olympic skating rival, Nancy Kerrigan, violently attacked.

Envious competition happens when you don’t care about being better than you are, all you care about is being better than everyone else. So you attack everyone else.

In economics, this is where you don’t care about making the best product or offering the best service, you just try to attack or destroy someone else’s business. You don’t just worry about keeping yourself in the black, you work at trying to force your competitor into the red. 

There’s nothing noble about that. Fair competition is a good thing. Deliberately trying to eliminate competition, that’s not good at all. 

If someone else is doing good for others, you should never try to prevent them. To stop someone else from doing good can never be a good thing. 

Four

Don’t destroy goodness. Promote goodness in yourself and others.

Everything we do has to be directed to human goodness. Competition is no exception.

If our competitive action is geared toward becoming excellent ourselves and encouraging excellence in others, that’s great. Then the goal isn’t so much scoring points or making money, the goal is doing something well, and the points or money are just symbolic mechanisms for acknowledging excellence. ut if our competitive action is geared toward hurting someone else, damaging their bodies, exploiting loopholes that debase the activity, and driving them into bankruptcy so that we can corner the market, then both our neighbor’s excellence and our own are compromised. And God will want to know why we deliberately damaged our neighbor to gain an advantage for ourselves.

Five

Balancing modes of excellence

Even in the case of competition that’s driven toward excellence, we have to be careful of our priorities. After all, the ultimate goal of life is not to become excellent at a particular sport or a particular line of work.

Sometimes, our faith obligations and our family obligations will call us to back off of a given kind of competitive excellence, in order that we can pursue a higher, more important kind of excellence.

The ultimate goal of life is to become excellent disciples of Christ, excellent children of God. And Scripture gives us all kinds of competitive imagery there.

Remember, our competitors give us new challenges, and new standards that we should strive for. No wonder Jacob is presented as wrestling, competing, with God Himself. The people around us and the saints set us standards, the sinful world sets us challenges in the forms of temptations that we must overcome.

So let’s bring the competitive mindset to our faith, so that like St. Paul we can say, “I have competed well. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race… henceforth, there awaits for me the crown” II Timothy 4:7-8.