-- T. S. Eliot
Meditation: by Starhawk (Singing the Living Tradition, #524)
Earth mother, star mother,
You who are called by a thousand names,
May all remember we are cells in your body and dance together.
You are the grain and the loaf that sustains us each day,
And as you are patient with our struggles to learn
So shall we be patient with ourselves and each other.
We are radiant light and sacred dark – the balance –
You are the embrace that heartens
And the freedom beyond fear.
Within you we are born, we grow, live, and die –
You bring us around the circle to rebirth,
Within us you dance
Forever.
Reading: by Eric Berne from Games People Play (1964, p. 17)
To say that the bulk of social activity consists of playing games does not necessarily mean that it is mostly “fun” or that the parties are not seriously engaged in the relationship. On the one hand, “playing” football and other athletic “games” may not be fun at all, and the players may be intensely grim; and such games share with gambling and other forms of “play” the potentiality for being very serious indeed, sometimes fatal. On the other hand, some authors… include under “play” such serious things as cannibal feasts. Hence calling such tragic behavior as suicide, alcohol and drug addiction, criminality or schizophrenia “playing games” is not irresponsible, facetious or barbaric.
Reading: by David Barash from The Survival Game – How Game Theory Explains the Biology of Cooperation and Competition (p. 3)
In [some] cases, two individuals – or companies , or countries – find themselves locked in a deeply frustrating dilemma, in which both “players” strive for their own best interest, but, as a result both are worse off. This is not simply theory but, rather, painful and dangerous practice.
Take, for example, nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India. Each country is tempted by the prospect of gaining a nuclear advantage over the other; at the same time, each would be better off using its limited budget to enhance the welfare of its own impoverished people. But each country is also fearful of being taken advantage of by the other if it lets down its guard and forgoes nuclear weapons. And so, two countries that can ill afford such a dangerous and expensive competition find themselves locked in a nuclear arms race that does neither one any good… and that, moreover, does harm to their own security and that of the rest of the world. Everyone would be better off if these two “players” would only “do the right thing” and stop their nuclear competition, but because each fears being suckered by the other, both see themselves as doomed to keep it up. As we’ll see, arms races of this sort also occur between married couples, parents and children, and so on…
Reading: by Bill Waterson, from a classic “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip, that describes the dynamics of a game called “Calvinball.” The first panel shows the boy Calvin, and his imaginary friend, the tiger Hobbs, playing football.
H: The center snaps the ball to the quarterback.
C: No he doesn’t!
H: He doesn’t?
C: No! Secretly, he is the quarterback for the other team! He keeps the ball!
H: A traitor!
C: Calvin breaks for the goal! Wheeeee! He’s at the 30… the 20… the 10! Nobody can catch him!
H: Nobody wants to! You’re running toward your own goal!
C: Huh?!
H: When I learned you were a spy, I switched goals. This is your goal and mine’s hidden!
C: Hidden?!
H: You’ll never find it in a million years!
C: I don’t need to find it! As traitor to your team crossing my goal counts as crossing your goal!
H: Ah, you might think so…
C: In fact, I know so!
H: But the place I hid my goal is right on top of your goal, so the points will go to me!
C: But the fact is, I’m really a double agent! I’m on your team after all… which means you’ll lose points if I cross your goal! Ha ha!
H: But I’m a traitor too. So I’m really on your team! I want you to cross my goal! The points will go to your team, which is really my team.
C: That would be true… if I were a football player!
H: You mean?
C: I’m actually a badminton player disguised as a double-agent football player!!
H: And I’m secretly a volleyball-croquet-polo player!
(The final panel shows Calvin swatting a volleyball with a badminton racket, while Hobbes is in hot pursuit on a hobby horse, swinging a croquet mallet over his shoulder.)
Calvin says: Sooner or later all our games turn into Calvinball.
Of Winners and Losers
A Sermon Delivered on November 4, 2012
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
On a cold Saturday evening a week ago, I was sitting in the bleachers of the Urbana High School football stadium, huddled under a blanket with my wife, Elaine, watching an amazing game. The Urbana Tigers were in the season playoffs playing the East Peoria Raiders. This was the first time in many years the Urbana team got this far. Once the game started, the Raiders scored the first touch down just a few minutes into the game. Not a good sign.
But amazingly, in the course of the next two and a half hours, Urbana caught up, and then took the lead. And even more amazingly Urbana won the game. This was the first time in our state’s 39-year high school tournament history that Urbana won in the playoffs. In the hundred-year history of the Urbana football program, this is the first time our team has advanced this far.
What a glorious feeling: we won! It was team effort: thanks to the players on the field, and thanks to the enthusiastic support of the fans in the stands, and thanks to our daughter, Sophia, who plays clarinet in the marching band, and thanks to Elaine’s good work as Urbana school board member, and - of course – thanks to my whooping and whistling, we won.
* * *
A friendly competition that lasts a few hours on a Saturday night, and that ends in clear victory, is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately not all games are so simple and straightforward.
We are now in the final stretch of a different kind of competition that has been dragging on for months, which has consumed hundreds of millions of dollars for advertising, countless column inches in our newspapers, and extensive coverage on television – not to mention a flood of campaign commercials.
Millions of Americans tuned in to watch the presidential candidates engage in three spirited debates. And millions speculated on who had won which debate, and why – and what it would mean for the outcome of the race, which is scheduled to conclude this Tuesday.
Some of us have been closely pursuing every twist and turn in the story, every bump and dip in the polls, every new little pitch delivered by one candidate or the other, every new bit of information that sheds light on the state of our economy, on the latest unemployment numbers, or the latest count of jobs created.
The success of any democracy hinges upon the engagement of a well-informed citizenship. You might think, in this day and age, being well-informed would be an easy task. After all, millions of Americans have access to the internet – the information superhighway – and millions more watch cable TV, listen to radio programs, and read newspapers.
Sadly, that is not the way things seem to be working out. It turns out the amount of information available says only little about its accuracy. There is a big difference between the quantity of information, and the quality of information.
Thankfully there is now occasionally coverage of so called “fact checkers.” These folks take a closer look at some of the claims of the two candidates. Who took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy? Who sold what to the Italians, who plan to build Jeeps in China? How much taxes are people paying who earn more that $250,000 a year? And how much will they pay under proposed tax plans? How much have health insurance premiums really gone up in recent years? How many Americans have been helped by Obamacare, and how many have been hurt?
According to the fact checkers, both political candidates are fudging their figures. Both are bending the truth. Both have uttered some downright lies. Which of these lies are more weighty than others – that is the question.
The website PolitiFact.com features a Truth-O-Meter, that rates candidate statements in six catagories: “True,” “Mostly True,” “Half True,” “Mostly False,” “False,” and “Pants on Fire!” When I checked yesterday, one candidate had more “Pants on Fire!” ratings than the other. But, of course, not everyone will agree on the objectivity of PolitiFact.com.
Who will win and who will lose? The one thing most commentators seem to agree upon is that this race is too close to call.
The tragic part of this competition is that in order to win, each side seems to be willing to sacrifice not only the truth, but a wealth of our resources, and both party’s political capital for the sake of strengthening their own position.
The cynical will shrug this off as business as usual: Politicians always play dirty. It goes with the territory. This is simply the way the game is played.
* * *
Now, thanks to game theory, we have scientific support for the self-defeating dynamics of political campaigns.
It is not unlike the psychology of the nuclear arms race between Pakistan and India, that robs precious resources from the impoverished people of both countries. David Barash calls it the “politician’s dilemma” over whether or not to “go negative.” To “go negative” means you spend more of your time and attention attacking the positions – if not the personality – of your political rival, than making a compelling case for your own positions. Going negative means spending more of your time tearing down the other party, rather than building up your own.
Barash writes:
“political rivals… often find themselves stuck in an awkward competitive game, in which they typically fear being suckered by their opponent (victimized… by shady, negative campaign tactics), as well as tempted to reap the benefits of attacking successfully and unilaterally. …Like two contestants in a particularly grueling tug-of-war, each side may long to ease up, but fears that the other will take advantage, so both sides end up holding tight, straining mightily… and often getting nowhere. Not uncommonly, [both players come out behind], the only winners in the world of electoral politics being the consultants, the speechwriters, and the media.”
The natural dynamics of games lead both teams to spend an enormous amount of energy, often counterproductively, simply to stay one step ahead of their opponents.
These dynamics are so deeply ingrained and so universal, we can see them played out throughout the natural world. For instance, the male peacock is now forced to grow a set of “outlandish and metabolically expensive tail feathers,” that easily get entangled in the underbrush, and serve no useful, rational purpose beyond looking just a little bit more impressive than the next male peacock. Wouldn’t all peacocks be better off, if they could sit down together, and agree to a more sensible-sized tail?
Even trees are victims of this dynamic, Barash writes.
“Given that successful reproduction is the biological bottom line, why should redwoods grow so tall? After all, you don’t have to be two hundred feet in height, and bother piling up hundreds of tons of wood, just to make some tiny seeds. But a redwood tree that opted out of the big-and-tall competitive fray would literally whither in the shade produced by other trees that were just a bit less restrained. And so, redwoods are doomed by their own unconscious selfishness to be “irrationally” large, for no particular reason other than the fact that other redwoods are doing the same thing.”
* * *
The natural dynamics that guide our games run deep. Scientists are studying their subtleties, not to turn us all into cynics, but in order to point the way to different ways of playing.
Yes, conflicts of interest are realities in life. But that doesn’t mean all conflicts are necessarily destructive or violent. We have a choice in how we handle conflict. We can manage conflict effectively, creatively and constructively.
In fact, that is exactly what a democracy is designed to do. A democracy, a two-party system, is designed to help us keep each other honest – not to turn us all into liars. It is one way to provide checks and balances, that will, in the end, benefit all of us. It is a political process that was designed so that the business of governing was not left to kings and queens, but could involve all people. “Of the people, by the people, for the people,” is the way Lincoln memorably described it in his Gettysburg address. But as historians know, Lincoln didn’t come up with this idea. He was quoting the Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker, who in well-known sermon said, “Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.”
When the campaign season reaches a fever pitch, as it does in the last days leading up to an election, and when the country seems to be split right down the middle, evenly divided between democrat and republican, it can seem as if half of our entire citizenship is about to become losers, half of us, excluded from the halls of power. Half of our voices destined to fall on the deaf ears of our political opponents.
But an evenly divided electorate does not necessarily mean half of the country is about to be excluded from the political process. Instead it can be an incentive for both sides of the political debate to find more constructive ways to manage their differences.
To move from a stance of conflict to one of cooperation means learning to negotiate. Every one of us is a negotiator. Negotiation is a fact of life. This is the point Roger Fisher and William Ury make, in their book Getting to Yes.
“You discuss a raise with your boss. You try to agree with a stranger on a price for his house… You negotiate with your [partner] about where to go for dinner and with your child about when the lights go out. Negotiation is a basic means of getting what you want from others… Although negotiation takes place every day, it is not easy to do well.”
The most important aspect of negotiation is to learn to see the world from the perspective of one’s opponent. As Fisher and Ury write, you
“need to understand empathically the power of their point of view and to feel the emotional force with which they believe it. It is not enough to study them like beetles under a microscope; you need to know what it feels like to be a beetle. To accomplish this task you should be prepared to withhold judgment for a while as you “try on” their views. They may well believe that their views are “right” as strongly as you believe that yours are. You may see the glass as half full of cool water. Your [partner] may see a dirty, half-empty glass about to cause a ring on the mahogany finish.”
* * *
All our lives, we are playing games. The fact that we are playing games does not mean we are necessarily having fun. Games can be grim and grueling. Games can be dead serious, and there can be a lot at stake.
Life invariably involves instances in which our interests conflict with the interests of others. We believe in the wisdom of one course of action, and someone else disagrees. We work toward one vision of the greater good, and others have a different vision and want pursue a different path.
Sometimes our differences turn into a serious conflict, into an unyielding tug of war, into an arms race, or into an argument in which fact quickly yields to fiction.
We need to pay attention to the games we are playing. Paying attention is the first step in learning to play well. It is the first step in learning to play fair, and to be a good sport.
If we pay attention, we will realize the game we are playing, is not the only game there is. It is one game among many. And people who may seem like our opponents in one game, may actually turn out to be our team-mates in another game. And our respective goals that seemed mutually exclusive from one point of view, may in fact have very much in common, if only we learn to see them from a different angle.
What if we were all on the same team? Not opponents, but cells within the body of creation. This is not a fiction, it is a fact. We are all children of the earth, members of one human family. Each of us with hopes and dreams. Each of us longing to live more fully and more deeply. All of us bound together in an inescapable network of mutuality.
In a race there are often winners and losers. This is one of the games we play. It’s a fact. But let us also remember a larger truth: more important than winning or losing, is the fact that we are all in it together. We are all members and participants in the human race. And our survival depends – not on how fiercely we compete against one another – but how fully we cooperate with one another. We are all negotiators.
May we have the wisdom to envision a road that will lead to a better world, not just for us, but for all people. If we have the courage to race down that road, every one of us will be a winner.
Amen.
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