Sean-What happened to competing against the golf course? Not everyone is playing against another player or the field.
I've heard that canard repeated since, I dunno, my first month of playing golf. Who the heck made that up anyway? You can't compete against a golf course, it's just a playing ground for whatever game (if any) you are actually engaged in. I'll buy that sometimes golfers are competing against their own past and future scores. In which case a second person as an opponent is not part of the game. But the course is not an opponent because it is passive.
When you go out and shoot a basketball by yourself, you are not competing against the rim. If you practice your baseball swing in a batting cage you're not competing against the machine that spits balls at you. Only golfers have the idea they they are "competing" when they go out and knock the ball around by themselves, write every stroke down on a scorecard and type it into a computer when they get back to the proshop. It's a nonsensical reduction of the term "compete" to a meaningless bit of pseudo-mysticism.
You assume too much when taking this point of view. It really is all about getting it in the hole in the fewest strokes possible and if nothing else par certainly is a benchmark.
Par is an OK benchmark for halfway decent players engaging in medal play or practicing for the same. It's flawed in that there are Par 72 courses which are, what, 8-10 shots harder for a six-handicapper than some other Par 72 courses? But it is useful for anyone who makes par or better on the majority of the holes on a typical day. For a 15-30 handicapper it's not a particularly useful benchmark. You don't really want an overall benchmark (Par 72) that you'll never even approach on the best day of your life but Par 4 for a given hole is a semi-reasonable benchmark for any player who can get the ball in the air and keep it in play a couple times in a row.
Still, a bogey golfer who typically shoots around 86-92 on his home course could probably size up a new course as being pretty similar to what he used to and figure "breaking 90" is a more useful benchmark than Par 72. And on a given hole that 420 yards uphill with bunkers in the front of the green and trees on both sides of the fairway, a short-hitting high handicapper would be better served by a benchmark of "try to make 5 or better" than by Par 4.
Benchmarks are optional altogether, of course. It's a perfectly normal way to enjoy the game to leave off the benchmarks and make ones goal to take a couple bucks from your usual four-ball group on Saturday morning. Benchmarks are only needed to monitor ones "progress" if engaged in the game as some sort of self-improvement ritual rather than a simple competitive pastime. Not all golfer view the game as a life-long set of pop quizzes and exams to measure out attainment of an ever-lower handicap index. Or do discover some sort of deep inner truth about ourselves mumbo-jumbo. It can also be just a game in which case Par has no more relevance to the golfer than the number of feet in length a particular basketball court happens to be when playing a pick-up game of 3-on-3.