How a single-minded fixation on competition makes us all lose
I’ve been thinking a lot about the merits of competition lately, doubtless influenced by spending untold hours watching the world’s best lay it on the line in their pursuit of global supremacy in everything from water polo to ping pong.
It’s hard not to feel unmoved when witnessing so many hard-working athletes finally reap the rewards of their unfathomable dedication; and it’s often equally moving when failure arrives, as it does of course to most.
Because for every Simone Biles there are uncountable numbers who finish leagues away from the podium and yet are still joyously living out their dream with a deeply impressive combination of grace and sportsmanship. In fact, as the example of Simone Biles so vividly highlights, even the most eminent athlete has had to forthrightly confront the pain of losing in order to push herself on to still greater victories.
As any experienced competitor will tell you, true competition isn’t just about avoiding losing. It’s about finding a way to successfully deal with it.
Small wonder, then, that we so often turn to the matrix of competition when promoting societal role models for our young, given its laudable trifold combination of focused determination, honest acknowledgement of failure and the potential for triumph over adversity.
But for all its manifold advantages, there are many extremely significant activities that are very different in their fundamental orientation, and by focusing all our attention on a narrow, competitive prism, we run the risk of underappreciating their importance for the next generation.
Which brings me to Hubert Reeves. If you live in the anglosphere, you’ve probably never heard of Reeves, which is a real shame, because he was the perfect incarnation of what a scientist should be: deeply thoughtful, endlessly curious and about as profoundly non-competitive a fellow as you could possibly imagine.
Reeves, who died last October at the age of 91, was not only a highly accomplished astrophysicist who made seminal contributions to our understanding of stellar nucleosynthesis, he was also a phenomenally gifted and remarkably broad popularizer of science, whose seemingly limitless efforts to convey his boundless enthusiasm for the world around us went well beyond his professional area of expertise, including geology, ornithology, oceanography and much, much more.
The other day I heard a replay of a radio interview with him where he described how, growing up in a small community just outside of Montréal, his salesman father one day brought home a children’s encyclopedia—an otherwise anodyne event that unexpectedly launched him on his scientific trajectory, kindling an unslakeable curiosity to explore the world around him in all of its stunning beauty.
And the point I’m struggling to make here is that this passionate, all-consuming, highly laudable, investigative spirit that we should also be holding up as a vital societal exemplar to our youth, has nothing—absolutely nothing at all—to do with competitiveness.
Of course many scientists, humans that they are, are deeply competitive–often, it must be admitted, obnoxiously so. As someone who spent some time running a scientific research institute (see HERE), I’ve certainly seen my share of that sort of thing. But the key distinction worth making is that science—very much unlike tennis or the 200m individual medley or the decathlon—isn’t necessarily competitive.
Not only is competition not part and parcel of the act of doing science well, more often than not it just gets in the way.
And there’s something else, too. Top-level accomplishments in highly competitive domains necessarily require extraordinary levels of dedicated specialization in order to propel the victor that tiny bit further over the line, which is what people mean when they talk about the enormous personal sacrifices underlying any significant competitive achievement from fencing to pole vault to chess.
But in domains like science, it doesn’t quite work that way.
Of course specialization is important there too on a day-to-day level, but the truly great breakthroughs, the genuine Olympian-level scientific triumphs, almost always come from a flash of insight that somehow manages to make links between previously separated domains, which means that any scientist who manages to do so must be sufficiently well-rounded scientifically to see them in the first place.
But such intellectual breadth can’t be forced—it can’t be regimented into some sort of training routine—it must be a natural, free-flowing force, a fundamental character trait. And you either have it or you don’t.
Hubert Reeves, of course, most definitely did, as demonstrated by his fittingly entitled 2008 memoir Je n’aurai pas le temps (I wouldn’t have the time) after the 1967 Michel Fugain ballad that laments how (among other things) he would never have the time to fully experience the wondrous immensity and variability of the universe.
After 91 action-packed years, Hubert Reeves finally ran out of time. But there are many young people around us who are ideally-disposed to carrying that vital scientific baton. If only we let them know about it.
Howard Burton, August 15, 2024
Howard was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics where he launched an extensive outreach program to engage people of all ages and backgrounds with behind-the-scenes insights into the fascinating world of science. His book First Principles: Building Perimeter Institute with a foreword by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose tells the unconventional story of PI’s founding.
He is the author of 5 additional non-fiction books on various topics and he is the creator of a wide range of documentaries – details HERE.
