Participation Trophies

I’ve received participation T-shirts, cups, pens, erasers, and the occasional stuffed animal, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever received an actual participation trophy; those things are expensive! I hear a lot of blustering nowadays about participation trophies and what they’re doing to this generation. But I think we need to look past all that, because it’s only a symptom of our younger generation’s real problem.

The Value of Trophies

What is the point of a trophy? It isn’t “winning” per se. Defeating other people is not in itself a particularly good or bad thing. C.S. Lewis described pride as being happy not that we have beauty or wealth or intelligence, but that we have more beauty or wealth or intelligence than anyone else.

In any case, we give perfectly legitimate recognition for, say, completing a marathon, achieving a perfect score on a test, or playing a piece of music particularly well, regardless of what everyone else does. We can say, then, that trophies recognize achievements.

But this achievement must be of the right type. If you manage to sneak into your neighbors’ house and gruesomely murder their child, it will be an achievement of a sort; it doubtless took great planning and effort. But it is not worthy of commendation.

Worthy of commendation. A trophy, then, is a recognition of worth. And this brings us to the heart of the matter.

The Value of People

Why do we give trophies to everyone nowadays? Because we don’t want to hurt anyone’s self-esteem. The real question is: why is everyone’s self-esteem so fragile? When did we start mixing up the worth of someone’s achievements with the worth of the person himself?

Well, as a society, we’ve traditionally grounded our worth as people in the idea of universal values and truths, in the soul and the spirit. Without this, as I’ve said before on multiple occasions, we become very out-of-whack. We have lost the universal things and attempted to replace them with man-made things, and in the process we’ve gotten ourselves very mixed up about what really matters.

You see, when only the physical world matters, when only the values made up by man matter, then your value as a person really is only the sum of what you do and what people think about you. Your collection of trophies, literal or figurative, defines your ultimate worth. Thus, trophies have become our way of telling people they’re worthwhile. And since we don’t want to tell anyone they’re less worthwhile than anyone else, we’re forced to ignore real differences in achievement.

Ironically, by implying that people’s worth is based on their achievements, we have given them reason to become far more competitive than before. No longer can we recognize and appreciate the innate good in every talent and achievement, because there is no innate good. No longer can we sincerely hope that the best man wins, because he who wins, by any means necessary, is by definition best.

The Value of Participation

I think some of this damage can be repaired if we take a step back and recognize the true value of participation. Participation in something good is good, regardless of achievement. It brings us in contact with goodness and so is its own reward. The competitor who works only for the medal is miserable; the true achiever takes joy in the activity itself. The best artists, the best athletes, the ones who do win and can enjoy the victory, are the ones who understand that the pleasure is in the doing, not the winning.

When we realize this, we realize something even more fundamental: that all the trophies we now give people “just for existing” are only our pitiful attempt to reconnect with a still deeper goodness, the goodness of existence itself in a universe with Him.

When we realize that we are worthy and valuable and loved, just because we are, and that this is an ultimate and immutable truth, we need nothing else. When we have God’s participation trophy, then, man’s recognition can be enjoyed without being depended on. Without it, the ultimate Olympian and the last-place finisher will both feel worthless.

“The first place trophy” by mobility-kill is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0