The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse

Aiming to be better than others is morally harmful and chafes against Christian ethics, according to this intriguing meditation from Yale theology professor Volf (A Public Faith). In support of his thesis, Volf cites such thinkers as Søren Kierkegaard, who posited that the “craving for distinction” amplifies anxieties about inferiority while reinforcing narrow scales of valuation that prize traits like intelligence, wealth, and beauty. Indeed, Volf writes, such comparisons do not “preoccupy Christianity at all,” because the faith centers the idea that people are loved by God simply because of their humanity. Grounding that concept in art and scripture, he analyzes John Milton’s Paradise Regained, in which Jesus resists the temptations of Satan in the wilderness by refusing to “strive for superiority” over God, and writings of the apostle Paul that frame the pursuit of “any kind of superiority—social, material, moral, or spiritual”—as “inimical to the gospel message.” Volf’s argument amounts to a robust critique of the prizing of ambition for its own sake, though he also acknowledges that such striving can lead to social progress and that it’s possible for people to improve themselves without measuring their progress against others’. Armchair philosophers will find much to ponder in this smart take on a world obsessed with forward motion. (May)