The Canucks’ slogan for the 2017-18 season has been semi-officially unveiled: “Compete is in our nature.” The slogan fits the messaging that has come from Jim Benning about wanting to stay competitive while bringing young players into the lineup.
Strictly speaking, the slogan isn’t new. The Canucks debuted the “Compete is in our nature” slogan late last season in a short series of videos. Now, however, the slogan has gone up on a large banner in Rogers Arena and it seems to be official: that will be the slogan for the coming year.
new #Canucks sign at Rogers Arena pic.twitter.com/O96uP95qnM
— Jeff Paterson (@patersonjeff) September 20, 2017
There’s a lot you can say about this slogan. You could point out that it’s grammatically incorrect — it should read “To compete is in our nature” or “Competitiveness is in our nature — but the use of “compete” as a noun has so infected the sporting world via the phrase “compete level” that it would be like yelling at a brick wall. The brick wall neither hears you nor does it care.
You could also point out that this slogan is essentially equivalent to saying, “We try really hard.” The slogan isn’t “Winning is in our nature,” because that would be incredibly inaccurate given the long history of not winning in Vancouver. They may not win much this season, but they’re promising that they will compete.
But I want to talk about something else: is competitiveness or “compete” actually in the Canucks’ nature? Is it in anyone’s nature?
The question is a moot point in the original sense of the phrase: it’s open to debate. It is related to a larger question — does humankind have a nature? — in the nature versus nurture debate.
John Locke proposed the idea of the human mind as tabula rasa, ie. a blank slate, in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He proposed that the human mind has no innate ideas; children are born with their minds as a blank slate:
“Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.”
Thus, all ideas, traits, and behaviours are learned via experience, starting right from within the womb. While his ideas were criticized in his day and in the centuries since, they are still quite influential.
Following Locke’s view, then, “compete” cannot be in the Canucks’ nature, as nothing is in anyone’s nature. It is entirely acquired via experience.
Certainly we can see competitiveness as a product of our environment. A child growing up with a sibling may be more competitive than a peer with no siblings as the child endeavours to out-do his or her sibling at various tasks. My own children will turn almost anything they do into a competition and exult at “winning,” even if it’s just being the first one up the stairs when we leave the house in the morning.
Likewise, we see parents push their children to be more competitive all the time in sports, to the point of toxicity, whether it’s the parents screaming in the stands at a hockey game or quietly urging their child to compete harder after a loss. But even positive reinforcement can make someone more competitive, suggesting nurture is playing a large role.
In opposition to the empiricist views of Locke and his philosophical descendants is nativism, which states that certain ideas or cognitive schemes are innate (a priori, as Kant would say). Our ability to comprehend language, for instance, could be something innate within the human mind.
“Compete” could be one of those a priori ideas with which every human is equipped at birth that allows or urges us to grasp and claw for resources, success, and satisfaction. Perhaps it truly is part of human nature.
If we look at evolutionary psychology, we can certainly see competitiveness is part of human nature. Every single organism competes for survival and competitiveness is certainly a genetic trait that natural selection would be inclined to favour. Someone who can out-compete their rivals for food, shelter, and mating partners would have a higher survivability and would tend to pass that competitive trait down to their offspring.
While civilization has lessened the need for certain traits for survivability, competitiveness still plays a role: we compete for promotions, raises, or to get our children into the best schools. And, when it comes to sports, a genetic predisposition towards competitiveness would help the cream rise to the top.
In high-level sports, all athletes are competitive in some way and are encouraged by their environment — coaches, parents, peers, and, eventually, fans — to be more competitive. Every member of the Vancouver Canucks would have “compete” in their nurture due to playing hockey for years in this type of environment.
For an athlete to rise to the top, however, and compete at the highest level of competition, ie. the NHL, there must be something more. After all, thousands of young athletes go through the junior leagues and attend countless off-season training camps, with their environment urging them to be more competitive, to play harder, skate faster, and be better. Not all of them make it.
If “compete” is in their nature, they may respond more to that urging than someone with a lower level of competitiveness built into their genes. Since the Canucks have made it to this level, it seems likely that there is some element in their genetic makeup that has made them susceptible to their environment that has urged them to compete.
To be fair, this would be true of every athlete in the NHL.
But I suppose, “Compete is in both our nature and nurture, but likely not at a higher level than other teams in the NHL” is a pretty lousy slogan.
