Francesco Duina
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“Winning is everything” is such a common phrase that we rarely question where it comes from and why we apply it to everyday experiences. One can win a little league game, an election, the lottery, a friendly competition at work or an unfriendly one. Entrepreneurs can win in business and patients aspire to win their battles over cancer and other sickness. We can win in life itself, and as the actor Charlie Sheen has recently told us, we can actually be “bi-winning” in our struggles with swings of mania and depression.
In Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession (Princeton University Press, 2010), Francesco Duina’s attempts to discover where this fascination with winning comes from, and why as Americans we’re so fond of using the concept in almost everything that we do. Behind our drive to win, he claims, is our desire for differentiation – the longing to be set apart from the rest, and to prove to others and ourselves that we are legitimate and right. But when Duina explores winning outside of the American context, he finds that not all societies share equally in this obsession.
President Obama has recently challenged Americans to “win the future.” In this book, Francesco Duina tells us why Obama–and so many Americans–considers the future and everything else a kind of zero-sum game.
This week’s episode of new books in sociology is hosted by David Phillippi.
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David did an earlier interview with Francesco Duina a few months back for a Society Pages podcast, also a worthwhile listen
http://thesocietypages.org/officehours/2011/01/28/francesco-duina-on-winning/
I was thinking about this book the other day as I was listening to an interview on NPR/Talk of the Nation with Michael Oher–the NFL players depicted in the movie “The Blind Side.” I guess he just wrote a book called “Beating the Odds” that is the story of him coming out of the foster care system. I have yet to see the Blind Side, but it was interesting in the interview how Michael Oher uses the language of wining to describe his path out of foster care, getting adopted by what sounds like was a white and privileged family, and eventually coming to play professional football. As he describes it, ever since he was 7 years old he knew he wanted to be “the best at everything” that he did, and that this ethos of wining helped him to a large degree succeed while many around him didn’t. In the interview he said he remembers looking up to Michael Jordon in particular when he was 7; a sports figure he tried to infuse with his own identity of winning. While he acknowledges the support and advantages that he received from his adopted family, that consequently helped him along, Oher seemed to imply that to a large part it was this spirit to win that carried him to his success.
After the interview I thought about the relevance of his story to the idea of wining so ingrained in our culture. In one way, Oher’s story is the perfect type of story that we love to hear–of how a kid who had so much against him, nonetheless searched deep within himself to find the winner that he really is. While his story is indeed inspiring, it’s also a bit depressing. Indeed, his “success” exists only within the backdrop of what are otherwise stark inequalities of growing up poor and black in the US. That is, we only see Oher as a winner to a large degree, because there are so many non-winners to compare him with. While his story should incline us to celebrate his success, it should perhaps be also a reminder of the inequalities that make his success/winning possible. A reality that we shouldn’t really be proud of.