The Origins of Social Order: Fighting and Playing

Many young men seem to be stuck on their couches, in a stupor of screens, unable to launch a life. One could point to any number of contributing factors, material and psychological. Surely one of them is that the basic engine of male aspiration—competition—has fallen under suspicion in our egalitarian moral landscape.

What your better self might be capable of is something you have to discover. The ascent is set in motion by watching other people and feeling the sting of rank: I want to be like that person, not those lame and self-satisfied people, whom I suspect I more closely resemble. Such emulation is what gets you off the couch. Our taste for effort, directed to those excellences that are arduous to achieve, requires a keen sense of the vertical dimension. It just seems to be the case that this dimension comes alive for us through other people: we compare ourselves to them, and want to be counted among those who shine.

But such competitiveness labors under a bad conscience in an egalitarian culture, and is easily shamed into somnolence. Further (here consider the mid-century status of The Catcher in the Rye as compulsory high school text), the cult of authenticity has enjoined us to regard all socially received standards as “phony” and to find, or rather simply to posit, our value in a subjectivist vein. “My truth” is that I am awesome! 

If solipsism is a natural outgrowth of egalitarianism, then the converse may be true as well: the thirst for distinction creates real human connection and solidarity. This is perhaps a bit counterintuitive; we may think that individual distinction comes at the expense of everyone else. But this is the mindset of small-minded resentment.

In Homo Ludens, Johann Huizinga wrote that “the competitive ‘instinct’ is not in the first place a desire for power or a will to dominate. The primary thing is the desire to excel over others, to be the first and to be honoured for that.” The difference between wanting to excel over others and wanting to dominate others gets elided in egalitarian culture, and the thirst for distinction is thereby subject to all the suspicion that should be reserved for a would-be tyrant. The irony is that this clamp-down on the spirit of contest itself expresses a tyrannical need to control others. You see it in the playground minders of affluent progressive schools, for example, who monitor play for signs of incipient trauma to the fragile selves they are busy cultivating.

In the play of children left to their own devices, as in grown-up play, there arises a circle of players who contend against one another, but who also recognize each other as players. The game is not for everyone; the circle is closed. The play community, therefore, comes under suspicion from the surrounding society. Do they think they are better than we are? What exactly goes on in their clubhouse, anyway? Such associations look potentially seditious; and in fact, in the course of political history, they often have been. Thus, the emperor Trajan, for example, outlawed the formation of firefighting crews in the eastern Roman Empire, despite their obvious utility. He feared that, through the solidarity of those who face danger together, such crews would become political. The fact that they fight fires makes them proud. Recognizing this problem and trying to solve the perennial problem of revolt once and for all, Thomas Hobbes called his Leviathan “King of the Proud.” The state had to undertake a project of moral reeducation—taming the proud spirit of rivalry and masculine play, just like those playground minders—if it was to establish and maintain a monopoly of power. 

Huizinga gives us reason to worry that this aspiration to control ends up cannibalizing the real source of social order. The contest for honor gives rise to deference and trust among players, and on Huizinga’s account, it is precisely here that we should look for the origins of institutions. The anthropologist Marcel Granet reconstructed ancient Chinese ritual songs. “In ancient China, almost every activity took the form of a ceremonial contest; the crossing of a river, the climbing of a mountain, cutting wood, or picking flowers.” Granet wrote, “The spirit of competition which animated the men’s societies or brotherhoods and set them against one another during the winter festivities in tournaments of dance and song, comes at the beginning of the line of development that led to State forms and institutions. Contests and games require rules, after all. Unlike the lust for power, they require that participants recognize the legitimacy of standards that are not simply emanations of their own will.

The sense of a world that is indifferent to you, and a capacity to accommodate yourself to it, is precisely what an infant lacks. The world revolves around him, and he experiences his mother as an omnipotent extension of his own will. Anything that thwarts his will is enraging. This is called infantile narcissism in the Freudian schema.[1] Let’s combine this nugget from Freud with what we have learned from Huizinga. The world does not love you simply for being you. But if you rise to its challenge, it may confer on you the distinction of a public nature. One puts oneself up against others in a publicly visible fight for distinction, while submitting to the common rules of some established game. The ego and the superego need one another: there can be no well-founded pride without a corresponding capacity for self-disgust, and it is other people (and their rules of play) who provide the marks on this vertical scale.

To efface the scale or deny that it exists, in the name of egalitarian scruples, is to guarantee arrested development on a mass scale. This can take a number of forms, and I think we would do well to entertain a hybrid Freud-Huizinga perspective in trying to make sense of some contemporary manifestations of infantilism. Consider the sad ritual of mass shootings by young men who seem unable to conceive a way of making a mark on the world—of making themselves known to others—other than through an eruption of solipsistic rage. As in his life on the screen, the shooter acts out a fantasy of omnipotence that has never come up against the civilizing resistance offered by other people: fighting and playing. 

Notes

[1] The father represents external reality, and is felt as a threat: a threat to the bubble of love between mother and child. He is the conduit for the superego, that locus of universal demands and shared norms. On Freud’s account (as relayed by Howard S. Schwartz), “the father’s job is to convey to the children the image that indifferent others would have of them.” See The Revolt of the Primitive: On the Origins of Political Correctness (New York: Routledge, 2017).