Identifying with one’s country is taken for granted in the modern world. “We,” i.e. Canadians, want our peacekeepers, hockey teams and authors to do well. It is so common that we rarely wonder what “we” have in common with the rest of us, in a land that is vast, varied and underpopulated. Watching the Olympics, though, makes me think about it. Why should we feel deeply involved when “our” men’s rowing eight underachieves (we’re told)? Could you name any of them, before or after? Can you picture their faces?

These identifications are often attributed to the human need to belong to a community, which makes sense to me. Many countries have unifying elements like ethnicity, religion or language. When these are lacking or sparse, as in Canada, that need to belong is so strong that people find a way to identify anyhow, with what have been called “imagined communities,” which also makes sense to me. I’d add that nations are not just communities (like churches, unions, clubs etc.) but have a political nature. They are states. So they share not just what they were in the past and are in the present but what they can do together in the future. In that respect, a country like Canada can make up as a political entity what it may lack in other aspects of nationhood. Democratic politics, of course, is often associated with ancient Athens — the deep host city of these Olympics.

It’s also interesting that we don’t just identify as Canadians at the Games, we identify as winners or losers. There might be other ways to connect, but they seem hard to imagine after the past two weeks. A Globe and Mail editorial, Why We Stink at the Games, tried to justify the sense of panic by claiming that “medals matter . . . because Canada should aspire to excellence.” I’d have said they matter because no one wants to feel like a loser.

What separates us from those ancient Greeks is not our focus on winning, which the original Olympics also celebrated, but on losing. It’s as if there is no merit in loss, since, as U.S. sports icon Vince Lombardi theorized, winning is “the only thing.” Losing is stigmatized, there can be nothing of value in it and you ought to doubt yourself if you think there might be. You can hear a note of doubt creep into Olympic athletes’ voices when they speak about their pride at having done their best even though they didn’t win, as if they sense their compatriots squinting back in disbelief or scorn, implying they’re making excuses and should just hang their heads or go soak them. Or they sound puzzled — since they feel they have fulfilled the Olympic ideal, which certainly involves competition.

The agon or contest was immensely important in ancient Greece, sometimes brutally so. They would probably have considered the Globe wussy for trying to justify the need to win in terms of excellence — except in the bare sense of excel. But the role of competitiveness was circumscribed in Greek society, exactly because of its destructive potential when it intruded into social and economic relations. For that reason, it was limited to areas like sports.

The extension of competitiveness to everything, so that it tries to be the organizing principle of entire societies and economies — and ultimately the planet — came from another context: 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism and the free-market ideologies of recent times. You could hear the Canadian version in ugly arguments made by free-trade supporters in the late 1980s, for instance, that Canada should not be a sheltered workshop. When competition suffuses everything, if you don’t win, you are a loser; there is nothing else to be. In the Greek model, there was glory to winners but not ignominy for losers. Other values, like co-operation, were emphasized in other realms of social and economic reality.

Or am I being too much a Marxist here, seeing economic infrastructure reflected on levels like sports and culture? My astute friend John (not Ralston) Saul, as ardent and sophisticated a Marxist as you will find, asked after the Ben Johnson doping debacle of the 1988 Games, “Do you think we can attribute this to capitalism, or just human nature?”

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.