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Born in 1937, Joseph Epstein is a professor of English at Northwestern University in Evaston, Illinois. He is also the editor of The American Scholar, a quarterly journal of essays. The essay below is taken from “Ambition: The Secret Passion”, published in 1980.

The Virtues of Ambition

Joseph Epstein

(1) Ambition is one of those peculiar 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 heavy 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 dreamsof glory, of wealth, of love, of distinction, of accomplishment, of pleasure, of goodness. What life does with our dreams and expectation cannot, of course, be predicted. Some dreams, begun in selfishness, 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 only the ambitious alone. Still, none of this seems sufficient causefor driving ambition under counter.

What is the worst that can be said – that has been said – about ambition? Here is a partial list:

(4)To begin with, ambition, is often antisocial, and indeed is now out-moded, 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 commonwealth. 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 corruptionof 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 deemed worthy of the sacrifices made on ambition 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 wieldthe power of the spoken and written words 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, place names and name brands may change, but such items do not seem less in demand today than a decade or two years ago. What happens 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 condominium; 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,” Succeed at all costs but refrain from appearing ambitious”.

(8) The attacks on ambition are many 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 stirringsand promptings, but only that, no longer openly honored, it is less openly professed. Consequences follow from 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 pratings 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 constellation of qualities that make up his rather shabby character.

Ambition, it must once again be underscored, is morally a two-sided area. 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 not much more be said on the subject.

(10) But going at things the other way, sacrificing ambition so as to guard against its potential excesses, is to go at things 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 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 of us 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 their 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 would become a thing of the past. The stress of creation would be at the end. Art would no longer be troubling, but purely celebratoryin 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 heart attacks or stroke caused by tumultuous endeavor. Anxiety would be extinct. Time would stretch on and on, without ambition long departed from the human heart.

(13) Ah, how unrelievedly boring life would be!

There is a strong view that holds that success is a myth, an ambition therefore is a sham. Does this mean that success does not really exist? That achievement is at bottom empty? That the efforts of men and women are of no significance alongside the force of movements and events? Now not all success, obviously, is worth esteeming, nor all ambition worth cultivating. Which are and which are not is something one soon enough learns on one’s own. But even the most cynical secretly admit that success exists; that achievement counts for a great deal; and that the true myth is that the actions of men and women are useless. To believe otherwise is to take on a point of view that is likely to be deranging. It is, in its implications, to remove all motive for competence, interest in attainment, and regard for posterity.

(14) We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth or immediate circumstances of our upbringing.We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live: courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or in drift. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we refuse to do. But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed. In the end, forming our own destiny is what ambition is about.

Section 4