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Critics sometimes suggest that competitiveness is foreign to a religion of love, meekness, and peace. They have no idea how hard it is to be meeker than one’s neighbor. There are abuses of competitive spirit, of course, as there are of love, meekness, and peace. But to compete - com + petere, “to seek together although against each other” - is not a vice. It is, in a sense, the form of every virtue and an indispensable element in natural and spiritual growth. Competition is the natural play of the free person. All striving is based upon measurement of oneself by some ideal and under some judgment. When that judgment is ominscient and omnipotent, such measurement is keener than any scalpel. Human sports, lotteries, and contests of every sort - in oratory, song, drama, horsemanship, the arrangement of flowers, the winning of tenure - would make no sense if the competitive spirit were foreign to human nature and learning. Most humans rejoice in it.
Furthermore, it is unlikely that individuals could ever discover their own potential unless they were blessed with good friends and rivals, whose exploits teach them how to push themselves harder than they yet have. To live in a slack age of low standards is a curse upon self-realization. To live among bright, alert, striving rivals is a great gift to one’s own development.
Michael Novak
The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (p. 347), Madison Books, 1991