Ambition
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
Books: DIRTY LITTLE SOPORIFIC THIS is a strange book. Epstein means to resurrect 'ambition' from the bad name it currently holds. Sadly, he observes, "To say of a young man or woman that he or she...
...What's gone haywire, in Epstein's view, is that we remain a country of vast opportunity, enormous wealth, and tremendous social fluidity but we have lost our powerful belief in progress...
...A second group of persons comes in for Epstein's contempt: those who have 'made it' and then undergone a 'crisis of success,' together with those who haven't tried to make it at all...
...They have not failed life's tests," he observes, "They have instead chosen not to take them...
...We assume that behind the achievements of ambition lie "vanity, greed, the will to power...
...Ambition, it turns out after all, is bourgeois common sense,''a certain Rotarian optimism . . ." Why Epstein persists in seeing his sanitized reduction of ambition from a passion to an interest as the resurrection of "a thing unseemly, in very poor taste, rather like a raging sexual appetite in someone quite elderly" is beyond me...
...So we've got a bad conscience about ambition...
...Epstein's ire' is considerable but misplaced...
...The people who really get Epstein's goat, and provide him with abundant evidence of rank "hypocrisy," are authors of books that deplore affluence as the authors grow rich...
...It may soothe the overheated brow of social conscience or throw oil over the troubled waters of pervasive social crisis...
...These cameo appearances by the ambitious departed are a species of hagiography, for clearly Epstein means to erect a pantheon of the ambitious for our edification...
...they have their own furious raison d'etre...
...But it seems to me Epstein really intends to attack a host of enemies: hypocritical leftists and intellectuals, as well as professors and intellectuals, as well as the less-than-ambitious children of the successful who toss in the towel by becoming gardeners or truck drivers rather than Wall Street lawyers, doctors, and corporate leaders...
...The book has smooth sailing with a PG rating...
...Epstein aims to set matters straight and, along the way, to chide the bad-mouthers of ambition who run our country down...
...These are easy targets...
...Sure, ambition produces "its usual perversities" but "whatever its excesses, ambition has at all times been the passion that best releases the energies that make civilization possible...
...As Steve Martin has remarked about comedy, ambition isn't (necessarily) pretty...
...If he were Carnegie or Rockefeller his actions would be ennobling philanthropy...
...It is noteworthy that all the societies he mentions, with the possible exception of early America which hadn't quite got its act together in this regard, were expansionist, imperialist, or mercantilist city-states, empires, or nation-states, driven by desire for power and pelf, mistreating 'barbarians,' 'lesser' folks, darker-skinned folks, or simply their next-door neighbors...
...Ambition is said to "bring out the worst in the people," to be "antisocial...
...When all is said and done, it is Epstein's vision of ambition that is pharisai-cal and hopelessly uninteresting...
...For all his words about ' 'forming our own destiny," for that is "what ambition is a-bout," he frames that destiny withi'n the narrow strictures of success American style...
...To be ambitious," he tells us, "is to be future minded...
...He notes the personal crises of such diverse success, stories as Michael Harrington and Richard Dreyfuss, labels them both individuals determined to fail at success, then relabels their crises just one more example of a grim determination not to grow up...
...He condemns them for choosing "the simpler life...
...Balm for the ambivalent...
...It is fit for the eyes of every budding young American Horatio Alger and his contemporary female counterpart: shall we call her Harriet...
...The heart beats a little faster, for none of us is beyond a measure of glee at the unmasking of desire beAMBITION THE SECRET PASSION Joseph Epstein Dutton, $13.95, 312 pp...
...Passions are a force majeure, at odds with utilitarian calculations of marginal utility...
...But Epstein's 'secret passion' turns out to be the de-fanged chant of the up-beat who hope that if they reiterate often enough just how terrific we have been and can be we will forget just how troubled we are...
...Amazingly, Epstein goes on to throw up as the example par excellence of ambition in our time Alexander Solzhenit-zyn That Solzhenitzyn would spit in Eps-tein's eye, having repeatedly condemned, in speeches and essays, the craving after 'more' that characterizes most of Epstein's thumb-nail sketched heroes of ambition, seems not to faze him at all...
...The book's title promises much...
...Perhaps all of these in some measure...
...But to call this "hypocrisy" rather than to see it as an irony of the social relations and economic arrangements of capitalist society is simplistic...
...Epstein begins by stripping ambition down to "the fuel of achievement," "the spirit of futurity...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain rieath the shroud of repressed denial...
...It tit-tilates us with the notion of a passion-a secret passion at that...
...Rather the reverse...
...More than one wealthy socialist has had to deal with the personal and political paradox (or apparent paradox) presented by his position...
...Does Epstein think social arrangements can be wholly without paradox...
...He can throw himself into a tizzy over the anomalous cases-a Marlon Brando earning $2.25 million for twelve days acting...
...To say that Epstein disappoints us is to understate the case...
...They all point to Epstein's foregone conclusion, his epigrammatic summation of the meaning of America: "To offer a one-sentence gloss on American history, ours has been a country of vast opportunity, enormous wealth, tremendous social fluidity, and a powerful belief in progress...
...A person called ambitious is likely to arouse anxiety, for in our day anyone so called is thought to be threatening, possibly a trifle neurotic...
...and the "Pharisaical spectacle" of revolutionary lawyers "quartered in their $250,000 Manhattan condominium, the critic of American materialism with a Southampton summer home . . ." on and on...
...Passions will out...
...In a society in which fifteen percent of the population is below official poverty line and another 10-15 percent receive bare subsistence wages, it is Epstein's puzzlement that puzzles-but not for long...
...That he sell everything he has and give it to the poor...
...He can do this because he presumes, against a vast body of evidence, that "equality of opportunity has grown greater and greater...
...insatiable . . . corrupting . . . leaves only victims, renders men mad . . . or pathetically broken...
...The already powerful and successful...
...But that isn't where the problem lies...
...It is just this he would restore through cheer-leading, positive thinking, and repeated reassurances that it's o.k...
...If ambition is such a thing Epstein should be able to uncover its many hiding places and faces once he strips off those layers of mystification and mealy-mouthed piety with which we have denied, suppressed, and hedged this passion about...
...Who is this book meant for...
...Epstein begins with a self-proclaimed, bold attempt to reclaim ambition from limbo...
...The problem lies in a system of structural inequality in which income distribution, despite the graduated income tax, has remained fundamentally unchanged since 1910, and in which one-quarter to one-third of ail American children, according to the Carnegie Council, are born into families with financial strains so great they will suffer basic deprivation...
...Epstein's favorite epochs, made possible by robust ambition, include Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, Italy under the Medici, France under Louis XIV and "one might wish to add to the list the United States of presidents Washington through Jefferson and England under Queen Victoria...
...What does Epstein want...
...The individuals in Epstein's sketches never come alive-they are types, set up for instruction, a species of capitalist socialist realism...
...to be ambitious after all...
...Why, at this late date, do we need a wholly inadequate sketch of John D. Rockefeller's life as an object lesson to the potentially wise...
...Marxist professors with two Volvos in the driveways of their summer homes...
...Ditto for all the Peter Pans spawned by the upper-middle class, all those feckless youths who would rather raise radishes than tear up Wall Street...
...how troubled we are...
...Epstein is a booster and boosters don't go in much for discomforting evidence and uncomfortable things like facts that may call their optimism into question...
...Young people...
...It's not quite as vapid as the self-help genre but it comes close...
...Instead, his book works as a cover-up, a banal soporific...
...Sadly, he observes, "To say of a young man or woman that he or she is ambitious is no longer, as it once was,a clear compliment...
...The first is Ben Franklin and the list includes, mostly, people who have made big bucks: John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Joseph Kennedy, though he throws in a few (Henry Adams) whose names were not made in the market...
...How did we reach this sorry impasse...
...To call Solzhenitzyn's life a model of ambition is to pare that life down to Rotarian size, not to enlarge it...
...That the rich person with a social conscience shut up and enjoy himself...
...The book is a tedious exercise in coitus interruptus...
...Quick on the heels of Epstein's vacuous definition of ambition and his shopping list of favorite ambitious societies, begins one of a number of biographical sketches of ambitious persons...
Vol. 108 • July 1981 • No. 13
