HON 357 - Topics in Humanomics

Only Honors students can take Honors classes unless granted permission from the professor and Honors Director. It would not be an exaggeration to say that human life and history has been shaped principally by the forces of competition. In natural and sexual selection, in the military clashes between great nations, in our favorite pastimes of sport and entertainment, and in the marketplaces of commodities and ideas, the drive to outperform others is the root cause of all momentum. What is competition? If it is possible to set out a single definition that unifies all instances, then we must be able to identify something that naval battles and film festivals and the market for smartphones all have in common. What is that common thread? In this course, we will explore the motivations, mechanisms, and outcomes of competition through the examples of widely different competitive activities. And we will do so both with historical distance, by taking the competitive environment of Ancient Greece as a case study, and by examining competition among our contemporaries. The Greeks of the fifth century B.C. competed in everything imaginable: in the battles between city-states, in traveling dramatic competitions, in specialized production of consumer goods, in giving speeches, in looks (literally, their beauty), and certainly in Olympic sport. In the midst of all this agon (that’s Greek for “contest”), they managed to achieve what is widely regarded as a cultural Golden Age. Did they achieve this flourishing because of or despite their embrace of competition? Likewise, what are the sites of competition in our age? Are these contests productive in the way they were for the Greeks? Is cooperation preferable to competition? How do we harness the power of competition to gear it always to the good? Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 3 credits