The Virtues of Ambition

The Virtues of Ambition

1.Ambition is one of those Rorschach words: define it and you instantly reveal a

great deal about yourself. Even that most neutral of works, Webster’s, in its Seventh New Collegiate Edition, gives itself away, defining ambition first and foremost as “an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power.”Ardent immediately assumes a heat incommensurate with good sense and stability, and rank, fame, and power have come under fairly under attack for at least a century. One can, after all, be ambitious for the public good, for the alleviation of suffering, for the enlightenment of mankind, though there are some who say that these are precisely the ambitious people most to be distrusted.

2.Surely ambition is behind dreams of glory, of wealth, of love, of distinction, of

accomplishment, of pleasure, of goodness. What life does with our dreams and expectations cannot, of course, be predicted. Some dreams, begun in selflessness, end in rancor; other dreams, begun in selfishness, end in large-heartedness. The unpredictability of the outcome of dreams is no reason to cease dreaming.

3.To be sure, ambition, the sheer thing unalloyed by some larger purpose than

merely clambering up, is never a pretty prospect to ponder. As drunks have done to alcohol, the single-minded have done to ambition – given it a bad name. like a taste for alcohol, too, ambition does not always allow for easy satiation. Some people cannot handle it; it has brought grief to others, and not merely the ambitious alone. Still, none of this seems a sufficient cause for driving ambition under the counter.

4.What is the worst that can be said – that has been said – about ambition? Here is

a (surely) partial list: to begin with, it, ambition, is often antisocial, and indeed is

now outmoded, belonging to an age when individualism was more valued and useful than it is today. The person strongly imbued with ambition ignores the collectivity; socially detached, he is on his own and out for his own. Individuality and ambition are firmly linked. The ambitious individual, far from identifying himself and his fortunes with the group, wishes to rise above it. The ambitious man or woman sees the world as a battle; rivalrousness is his or her principal emotion: the world has limited prizes to offer, and he or she is determined to get his or hers. Ambition is, moreover, Jesuitical; it can argue those possessed by it into believing that what they want for themselves is good for everyone – that the satisfaction of their own desires is best for the commonweal. The truly ambitious believe that it is a dog-eat-dog world, and they are distinguished by wanting to be the dogs that do the eating.

5.From here it is but a short hop to believe that those who have achieved the

common goals of ambition – money, fame, power – have achieved them through

corruption of a greater or lesser degree, mostly a greater. Thus all politicians in high places, thought to be ambitious, are understood to be, ipso facto, without moral scruples. How could they have such scruples – a weighty burden in a high climb – and still have risen as they have?

6.If ambition is to be well regarded, the rewards of ambition – wealth, distinction,

control over one’s destiny – must be considered worthy of the sacrifices made on ambition’s behalf. If the tradition of ambition is to have vitality, it must be widely shared; and it especially must be esteemed by people who are themselves admired, the educated not least among them. The educated not least because, nowadays more than ever before, it is they who have usurped the platforms of public discussion and wield the power of the spoken and written word in newspapers, in magazines, on television. In an odd way, it is the educated who have claimed to have given up on ambition as an ideal. What is odd is that they have perhaps most benefited from ambition – if not always their own then that of their parents and grandparents. There is a heavy note of hypocrisy in this; a case of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped – with the educated themselves astride them.

7.Certainly people do not seem less interested in success and its accoutrements

now than formerly. Summer homes, European travel, BMWs – the locations, the places names and name brands may change, but such items do not seem less in demand today than a decade or two years ago. What has happened is that people cannot own up to their dreams, as easily and openly as once they could, lest they be thought pushing, acquisitive, vulgar. Instead we are treated to fine pharisaical spectacles, which now more than ever seem in ample supply: the revolutionary lawyer quartered in the $250,000 Manhattan luxurious apartment;

the critic of American materialism with a Southampton summer home; the publisher of radical books who takes his meals in three-star restaurants; the journalist advocating participatory democracy in all phases of life, whose own children are enrolled in private schools. For such people and many more perhaps not so egregious, the proper formulation is, “Success at all costs but refrain from appearing ambitious.”

8.The attacks on ambition are many and varied and come from various angles; its

public defenders are few and unimpressive, where they are not extremely unattractive. As a result, the support for ambition as a healthy impulse, a quality to be admired and inculcated in the young, is probably lower than it has ever been in the United States. This does not mean that ambition is at an end, that people no longer feel its stirrings and promptings, but only that, no longer openly honored, it is less often openly professed. Consequences follow form this, of course, some of which are that ambition is driven underground, or made sly, or perverse. It can also be forced into vulgarity, as witness the blatant prating of its contemporary promoters. Such, then, is the way things stand: on the left angry

critics, on the right obtuse supporters, and in the middle, as usual, the majority of earnest people trying to get on in life.

9.Many people are naturally distrustful of ambition, feeling that it represents

something intractable in human nature. Thus John Dean entitled his book about his involvement in the Watergate affair during the Nixon Administration Blind Ambition, as if ambition were to blame for his ignoble actions, and not the constellations of qualities that make up his rather shabby character. Ambition, it must once more again be underscored, is morally a two-sided street. Place next to John Dean, Andrew Carnegie, who, among other philanthropic acts, bought the library of Lord Acton, at a time when Acton was in financial distress, and assigned its custodianship to Acton, who never was told who his benefactor was.

Need much more be said on the subject than that, important though ambition is, there are some things that one must not sacrifice to it?

10.But going at things the other way, sacrificing ambition so as to guard against it s

potential excesses, is to go against it wrongly. To discourage ambition is to discourage dreams of grandeur and greatness. All men and women are born, live, suffer, and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about.

11.It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the linchpin of society,

holding many od its disparate elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much. Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart.

Ambition, as opposed to mere fantasizing about desires, implies work and discipline to achieve goals, personal and social, of a kind society cannot survive without. Ambition is intimately connected with family, for men and women not only work partly for their families; husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other, but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for children. Yet to have a family nowadays – with birth control readily available, and inflation a good economic argument against having children – is nearly an expression of ambition in itself. Finally, though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats, it has, in more recent times, increasingly become the domain of the middle classes. Ambition and futurity –a sense of building for tomorrow –are inextricable. Working, saving, planning –these, the daily aspects of ambition –have always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class. The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for. Like it or not, the middle class has done much of society’s work in America; and it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition.

12.It is not difficult to imagine a world shorn of ambition. It would probably be a

kinder world: without demands, without abrasions, without disappointments.

People would have time for reflection. Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the collectivity. Competition would never enter in. conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past. The stress of creation would be at an end. Art would no longer be troubling, but purely celebratory in its functions. The family would become superfluous as a social unit, with all its former power for bringing about neurosis drained away. Longevity would be increased, for fewer people would die of a heart attack or stroke caused by tumultuous endeavor. Anxiety would be extinct. Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart.

13.Ah, how unrelievedly boring life would be!