NotitiesThe Cost of Ambition
Miroslav Volf
In "The Cost of Ambition" onderzoekt Miroslav Volf de drang naar superioriteit en de gevolgen daarvan voor ons zelfbeeld en welzijn. Hij legt een verband tussen de strijd om beter te zijn dan anderen en gevoelens van minderwaardigheid, en onderscheidt tussen streven naar superioriteit en streven naar excellentie. Deze drang is wijdverbreid en beïnvloedt niet alleen persoonlijke relaties, maar ook bredere sociale en politieke structuren.
Whether we did things better than others should not matter; other people were not our measure. It often did, of course, matter, certainly for me—and, to my shame, it still does. (Page 0)
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A sense of inferiority fuels striving for superiority, and striving for superiority is shadowed by feelings of both pride and inferiority. We oscillate between “I am better than some, maybe even most!” and “Everybody is better than me—or at least everyone who matters.” Behind the oscillation is an unstated conviction: “I must be at least better than most—beyond average—or I am inadequate, a loser, nothing.” And still further back behind that conviction is yet another: “My worth derives from how I stack up against others; I am how I stack up against others.” (Page 0)
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As I was writing this book, exploring what the Hebrew Bible, Jesus, Paul, Milton, and Kierkegaard say about striving for superiority, the sentences I wrote had a way of turning around and talking back to me—not only to my intellect but also to my heart, the hearth where the flame of ambition burns. (Page 0)
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I designed the book such that you can start reading it at the beginning or at the end, with chapter 1 or with the twenty-three theses on striving for superiority that make up the conclusion. You can also start with any of the chapters in the middle. Each is self-contained, and each offers a distinctive take on striving for superiority, highlighting aspects of its problems and of the alternatives to it. The chapters also complement one another, as I will suggest in the brief summary of the book in the conclusion. (Page 0)
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Markeren(Geel) - 1 > Pagina 4 · Locatie 216 (Page 1)
Schadenfreude (Page 4)
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Central to the Christian faith is the conviction that the God of Israel, the master of the universe, came to dwell first in the womb of a lowly woman from Nazareth and then in a more abiding way in the child to whom she gave birth. The body of that “marginal Jew,” who had no place to lay his head, was the most exalted temple of God (John 2: 21). The highest one became as the lowliest ones are. The humility of love is a central aspect of God’s glory facing humanity. (Page 4)
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Striving for superiority regulated by meritocracy—that is the ideal, in sports and in most other domains of life, with which people identify. (Page 5)
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Striving for superiority is literally everywhere. I am getting from terminal B to terminal C in Chicago O’Hare Airport, and instead of taking the escalators and the moving walkways, I walk with my small suitcase and bag of books, descend sixty stairs, continue walking the entire length of the tunnel underpass along the moving walkway, and, on the other end, ascend sixty stairs—and I feel a bit superior to the masses who aren’t exercising and are burning fossil fuels rather than calories. (This, of course, is crazy, because I know nothing about the exercise patterns of any of these people, their relation to fossil fuels, let alone the state of their health or their incapacities that may make them prefer moving walkways and escalators. And how environmentally virtuous can my refusal to burn fossil fuels be, given that I have just landed and am rushing to catch another plane!?) (Page 5)
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You might think that our troubles and our striving would end if we reached a state of near equality with others. They won’t. Every state of equality achieved through competition is unstable. And so our striving to catch up and overtake—and suffering when we fail—continues. (Page 6)
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In the ancient texts of the Western tradition, we have these two contrasting views of striving for superiority. One tradition considers it a source of personal and cultural progress. In the other, it is a deceptively attractive means by which false glory, empty and harmful, is enthroned among humans. More than two millennia later, in the Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality among Men, known simply as the Second Discourse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau joins the two traditions into a tense marriage. He clearly prefers one partner to the other, though how exactly Rousseau assesses the moral corruption and cultural advances that result from striving for superiority is a matter of scholarly debate. 18 His interest in the topic arises from a concern to preserve human freedom “in a world where people are increasingly dependent on one another to satisfy their needs.” 19 Rousseau is likely the most significant and most influential modern critic of striving for superiority. Rousseau distinguishes famously between two kinds of love a person has for themselves: amour de soi-même and amour propre. The first is simple to translate: self-love. He describes it as “a natural sentiment that inclines every animal to attend to its self-preservation and that, guided in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue.” The second kind of love, amour propre, is impossible to translate and therefore remains mostly untranslated. Roughly, he means by it a desire for preeminence. He describes it as “only a relative sentiment, factitious and born in society.” (Page 8)
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Amour propre is “relative” because it arises in social settings as people compare themselves to one another. It is “factitious” because it gives rise to strife. (Page 9)
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Striving for superiority is the source of both vice and virtue. We owe to it, Rousseau writes later in his story of humanity, “what is best and what is worst among men, our virtues and our vices, our Sciences and our errors, our Conquerors and our Philosophers.” 24 Reading this both-and sentence, we may be tempted to conclude that in Rousseau’s mind negative and positive effects are roughly balanced. But that would be a mistake. That same sentence concludes: “a multitude of bad things and a small number of good.” (Page 10)
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The person striving for superiority is “always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinion of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment.” Worse, everything [is] being reduced to appearances, everything becomes contrivance and play-acting; honor, friendship, virtue, and often even vices in which one at length discovers the secret of glorying; how, in a word, forever asking others what we are without ever daring to ask it of ourselves, in the midst of so much Philosophy, humanity, politeness, and Sublime maxims, we have nothing more than a deceiving and frivolous exterior, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom and pleasure without happiness. 28 This is Qohelet plus! Striving for superiority is here not mere futility. It is a chasing after wind that creates a culture of pernicious vacuity. Whatever cultural and material and even intellectual progress striving for superiority stimulates, these gains are not worth the hollowing out of human life it causes. (Page 10)
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Note: asking others what we are quote rousseau
In his classic The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith notes that a modern market economy does not so much respond to existing needs by producing goods that will satisfy them as it “creates the wants the goods are presumed to satisfy”; it “fills the void that it has itself created.” 33 A modern economy generates desires—our desires—so that it can satisfy them. Insinuating itself into the crevices of our hearts, it does the desiring for us and in us. (Page 12)
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Striving to be better than others has become an integral part not just of our values but of our identity and therefore of our desires. When we have outdone others, we are proud—and anxious, for every success is temporary and can be secured only by the same means it has been achieved. When others have outdone us, we feel inadequate, inferiorized—made uncertain of not just whether we can perform a task but whether as human beings we are adequate. Unsurprisingly, depression has become a signature psychological disorder over the past fifty years or so. As Alain Ehrenberg argues in The Weariness of the Self, depression is “a malady of inadequacy” afflicting those who have a painful sense of failing to achieve—by being better than others. (Page 13)
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Theologians, for example, are confronted with images of their peers’ offices and bookshelves—only the ones thought beautiful and full enough to be shared publicly, of course—and may be left feeling either inferior or newly motivated to strive for superiority. Or they may be stung when met with a list of accomplishments from other figures in the field: a new book that is selling well, an upcoming conference talk, a brilliant new idea published in a forthcoming paper. The line between keeping abreast of the field and intense personal comparison and jockeying for position is often a slender one. But social media heightens our ability to compare and our desire to fight for superiority in a way only possible in modernity—with devastating consequences for our sense of security, our mental health, the sorts of pursuits we devote our time to, and even our sense of self. (Page 14)
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Striving for superiority, even in values and attainments that are excellent themselves, can erode that very excellence. Politics, too, has been shaped by the demands of striving for superiority. As we are flooded with an endless cycle of information, politics has become assimilated to the demands of the attention economy. Though always about power and influence, today politics increasingly revolves around pure competition. Dominance has replaced the common good as the aim of governance. (Page 16)
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In 2018, RAND published a report on “Truth Decay,” which made the summer reading list of former president Obama. 42 Defined as “the diminishing role of, trust in, and respect for facts, data, and analysis” in “political and civil discourse,” 43 truth decay was found to be intertwined with increasing polarization and the erosion of civil discourse. (Page 16)
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Striving for superiority over others creates the feelings of inferiority that it purports to solve; it is highly contagious in cultural systems and social structures; it creates distortive and deceptive views of reality; and it incentivizes the pursuit of low-value goods for the sake of status and minimizes the value of excellence. (Page 17)
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Striving for excellence versus striving for superiority. Striving for excellence means striving to become better in some regard, to improve, or at least not to get worse, especially as we age; 47 it is striving to be better than myself. Striving for superiority, in contrast, is striving to be better than someone else, which can range from being better than my sibling, neighbor, or school friend to being better than anyone living, even to become the GOAT—the greatest of all time. As I understand them, these are two crucially different strivings. (Page 19)
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If in striving for excellence I compete at all, I compete against myself. (Page 19)
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A simple way to put the difference between striving for superiority and striving for excellence is to say that they have a distinct object of desire. 52 In striving for superiority, my goal is to stand above another person by a certain distance. In striving for excellence, my goal is to achieve some good, regardless of how I compare with others. (Page 21)
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Stephen Darwall distinguishes between two kinds of respect. 54 One is appraisal-respect, which we show to people based on some performance or possession. Because people’s performances and possessions differ, the appraisal-respect we accord them will differ too. The other kind of respect is recognition-respect, and we show it to human beings as human beings (or, for instance, to office holders by virtue of their office). All humans are equally human; they have equal worth as humans, and therefore the recognition-respect we owe them is equal. Darwall builds on Immanuel Kant, who argues that our worth is based on our equal and common human “dignity,” as distinguished from “worth” based on performance or possession. If we think that human beings have only worth and not dignity, then we will likely seek to strive for superiority, because superiority will increase any worth that we have as human beings. (Page 22)
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The burden of such inferiority falls mainly on the “poor,” those who are helpless and perceived as losers. Those who strive for superiority tend to disregard, exploit, or outright despise the poor, for helping them would not so much “disrupt the serenity of their happiness” 55 but interrupt their striving and set them back. As Jesus put it, those who strive to have the best seats in the houses of worship and places of honor at banquets are often the same as those who devour widows’ houses (Mark 12: 38–40). What Adela Cortina calls aporophobia, the rejection of the poor, 56 is particularly pronounced among those whose sense of self depends on being superior to others as human beings. (Page 23)
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If the desire for superiority is nearly always also a desire to be recognized as superior, why does this distinction matter? One thing that we will see in the coming chapters is that, in environments where superiority becomes a key value, sometimes one’s standing as superior in the public estimation—the recognition of one’s superiority—can become detached and begin to float free from one’s qualities or endowments, free from the things by which one can be superior in the first place, the Cs of the previous section. We might say that status or public ranking, then, becomes a good in its own right. One can strive for superior status without actually being better at anything. Conversely, one can be superior and have no desire to be recognized as such. Superiority and the recognition of superiority are therefore different. This difference accounts for the phenomenon of sheer status—superior or inferior—and will help to illuminate a number of examples in what follows. (Page 23)
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Markeren(Geel) - 6 > Pagina 25 · Locatie 597 (Page 24)
If striving for superiority is about a specific object of desire, as I have defined it earlier, then I am interested here to explore whether it is in fact desirable. (Page 25)
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The hope of this project, then, is to raise questions that may help us think more carefully about our moral lives—and new language is often helpful for provoking thought. (Page 25)
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