Second First Place

In my composition courses, before students write rough drafts, students engage in a debate in order to help create arguments. The debates also help students to see what kinds of counter-arguments they can make effectively.

I structure the debates along the lines I learned when I was a high-school debater. We have two teams. The students not debating serve as judges.

Last semester, at the end of one in-class debate, the judges voted. Clearly, one team had done a better job than the other.

I congratulated the winners. And I consoled the losers. But one guy on the losing team said, "We didn't lose." I said, "I'm sorry, but you did. The judges clearly voted for the other team. And I can go over the reasons why you lost one more time."

He was insistent: "We didn't lose." He smiled. "We took second first place."

Second first place?

I thought to myself:

Did Rommel take second first place to Patton?

Did Custer take second first place to Sitting Bull?

Did Cornwallis take second first place to Washington?

The student who declared himself in "second first place" was actually one of my favorites. However, he is an IGEN. I'm a Gen Xer who was raised by the Greatest Generation. My parents were older when I was conceived. I mostly have their values and attitudes toward competition.

My first reaction to the declaration of second first place was incredulity. Igens tend to be--like millennials--much more egalitarian than Gen Xers, Boomers, and the Greatest Generation.

On the face of it, there's nothing wrong with some egalitarianism. But life isn't completely egalitarian. Some experiences are pretty zero sum. And "second first place" seems to me to sidestep the fact that in some activities--job seeking, contract obtaining, and even dating--there are clear winners and losers.

And there's nothing wrong with that state of affairs. When I was a teenager, I ranked sixth in my prep school class out of 300 students during the first quarter of my freshman year. When I talked to my father about my ranking, he just said, "Why aren't you number one?" And the next quarter, I really pushed hard, and I was number one. I didn't rank first every quarter, but my father's push helped me to compete and, more important, achieve my best. It's not so much the ranking that mattered, it was the drive to achieve it, the desire to have it, and the work it took to get it.

Second first place seems like a cop out to me.

Some people might say, well, competition is bad. (and if you're  Marxist, you could make Jameson's social constructivist argument that a respect for competition is just part and parcel of being blinkered by a capitalist system that doesn't allow for the possibility of other ways of being)

But I don't buy that argument. Don't you want your surgeon to be almost OCD in terms of getting things right?  If you run a company,  don't you want your sales reps to be driven to achieve market domination? If you're accused of capital murder, do you want your defense attorney to be ok with taking second first place?

Second first place, not a good place to be, for any generation.