On a Lack of Ambition

Or "Why We Don't Try to Do Nice Things"

Tyler Cowen and Paul Graham were talking recently as part of Cowen’s ongoing Conversations with Tyler series. Graham and especially Cowen are diverse men, who could hold forth with interest on a number of subjects; but both by vocation and apart from it the thing that seems to wind their respective clocks the most is thinking about, identifying, and helping to cultivate talent, in which pursuit they are both very successful. Talent takes up most of the talk, and their conversation crackles with the kind of invigoration you might expect when two people so passionate about the same thing are in one another’s encounter.

Of course, talent is often flagged (and sometimes false-flagged) by ambition; and for every Blaise Pascal, subordinating their astonishing gifts to ulterior interest and hobbling them for posterity, the most outsized talent is frequently, though not always, distinguished by being attached to outsized ambition. The most interesting part of Cowen and Graham’s conversation was when they came to ponder the relationship between talent and ambition, and more particularly the question: “Why is there not more ambition in the developed world?”

This part of the exchange went like so:

PG: Boy, what a fabulous question. I wish you’d asked me that an hour ago, so I could have had some time to think about it between now and then.

TC: [laughs] You’re clearly good at boosting ambition, so you’re pulling on some lever, right? What is it you do?

PG: Oh, okay. How do I do it? People are, for various reasons — for multiple reasons — they’re afraid to think really big. There are multiple reasons. One, it seems overreaching. Two, it seems like it would be an awful lot of work. [laughs]

As an outside person, I’m like an instructor in some fitness class. I can tell someone who’s already working as hard as they can, “All right, push harder.”

It doesn’t cost me any effort. Surprisingly often, as in the fitness class, they are capable of pushing harder. A lot of my secret is just being the person who doesn’t have to actually do the work that I’m suggesting they do.

Here ends the exchange — the most interesting question brooked in what is a generally interesting exchange gets no more consideration than this.

That’s to say, it doesn’t get nearly enough consideration. Graham is right: it is a fabulous question, and it demands more prolonged thinking-about.

Considering what it is that makes for a lack of profound ambition in the developed world in the 21^st century, I should think it accords to some combination of the following:

Increased primacy of learning-by-rote in education, stressing linear encounters with subjects

The spread and entrenchment of a post-industrial educational standard has led to increased priority being put on teaching children via rote methods, methods which are structured for linear-graded encounters with subjects. For instance, when students learn maths, they learn it through processional encounters based on practical reinforcement of norms: you learn addition and subtraction, followed by multiplication. They don’t signify much to you as a student, beyond what they represent for your personal academic performance record. Then you learn the names of three- and four-sided shapes, followed by the names of shapes with more sides. They don’t signify much either.

In this manner educational material is presented without context, in order of difficulty, to maximise the likelihood that a large number of children who vary in academic ability will, come the end of the syllabus, be able to pull off roughly the same small set of applied manoeuvres with the principles being taught.

Greater and greater interest has been given lately to the way in which the European aristocracy were educated, and the coincidence of methods of aristocratic tutelage with a high rate of production of exceptional individuals who both formulated and achieved goals of massive ambition. The aristocratic tutelage method, which has the additional benefit of providing one-to-one tuition (and, indeed, many-to-one tuition for those wealthy individuals who could hire multiple tutors for their children), provided a rangier, seminarian, and more contextually rich set of educational cues, with far greater opportunity for direct dialogue between wonder-struck students and their older, and usually quite accomplished, teachers.

Where the rote educational standard optimises for conscientiousness and context-obscurity, the aristocratic method incentivises the direct expression of curiosity and criticism from students, can be far more indulgent and enabling of rare brilliance, and, being freed from a prescribed syllabus with standardised subject-specific requirements, is also free to cultivate a more integrated conception of subjects. It is hard to quantify, but harder still to overstate, the probable degree to which, for instance, Russell’s early encounter with Euclid and the very principles underlying mathematics fertilised his later all-consuming ambition to write a comprehensive work outlining the underpinning logic of the entire field.

A broad sense of how different subjects fit together is excellent for an individual’s ability to identify where the undeveloped areas within and between domains are — being able to spot ‘free real estate’ of this kind is a surefire shortcut to the formulation of high ambition and the derivation of much enthusiasm therefrom. And a sense of the curious and the critical, formed through discussion with learned elders, is also most helpful for questioning received wisdom; for hardly numerable are the breakthroughs in one field or another that came as a result of someone having the gumption to question received wisdom.

In summary, what rote education has to do with ambition: Optimises for conscientiousness and replicable performance, not big ideas or nonconformist thought.

Very little ambient exposure to objects of high literacy

It’s hard in our time to grasp how, in decades and centuries gone by, rich, difficult, complex literature could be found everywhere. Popular novels — the kind long forgotten today — newspaper stories, and political pamphlets spilt over with language of a richness and variety that would beggar belief nowadays. McClure’s was America’s most popular magazine, and when politicians of the most high-idealistic variety duelled in the press it looked like this. The most familiar text in the Western world, encountered by most people daily — the Bible — was written in elegant, even abstruse poetry, and the figure of education most revered in rhetoric and written communication among learned people — Cicero — was of such high esteem that many would have sworn by Quntillian’s proclamation that “‘Cicero’ is not the name of a man, but of eloquence itself.”

In Elizabethan Britain, a common pastime to wile away the long winter evenings involved common-or-garden folk sitting around and reciting their preferred dean’s latest sermons (many of them 15 or 20 minutes long) back to one another in impassioned priestly tones; in his own day, John Donne was not known for his intolerable sexiness but for being such a hellcat meme-minter at the pulpit. Reading Shakespeare was a nightly comfort for the average individual. Julie made Rousseau a celebrity all over Europe on account of the number of men willing to profess to one another (in refined epistolary tones) that they were moved to tears by the beauty of its prose style. The mean length of sentence has gotten significantly shorter in the years since the turn of the 20th century. In Victorian times, even illiterate children would gather in yard and hall and pay a penny to have the latest chapter of Dickens read out loud to them — his style is now considered difficult by literate and presumably well-educated English speakers. Meanwhile, Hugo and his gargantuan works of digressive Baroque-Romantic French prose were so popular among the French public that he nursed not unthinkable illusions of being Napoleonised upon his return to Paris from his long exile; his public funeral rivalled that of any 19th century monarch for attendance.

When Hugo wandered off into thick tangential considerations of niche subjects like Gothic architecture, the public didn’t scrunch its nose and go and read something simpler or more focused; instead, they took his lead and developed a passion for Gothic architecture themselves.

Just as it is hard to understand how frequent opportunity was in times gone by for serious engagement with cultural works rich in technical command, aesthetic beauty, and intellectual depth, so is it hard to fathom our poverty in this regard now. And yet such engagement in undoubtedly essential for keeping one’s general conception broad and the pace of one’s inner life high. Without a broad conception and an inner life capable of both the processing and the stylisation of complex thought, to conceive worthwhile ambition is difficult, and to achieve it virtually impossible (not least, I suspect because the more scarce worthwhile ambition becomes, the more difficult it is for a given worthwhile ambition to be achieved, owing to the density of debased ambitions that suck dry the surrounding landscape).

In summary, what a lack of ambient access to high literacy has to do with ambition: Provides people fewer tools for the processing and composition of complex thought, and fails to keep the mind adequately nourished with new impressions and syntheses that are conducive to high-ambition; and because works of high literacy are themselves conceived in ambition, the lack of opportunity to be regularly immersed in them deprives one of a sense of everyday communion with what is excellent.

Little sense of historical belonging and continuity

In our time, there are very few active, widely-subscribed mainstream-adjacent institutions to which people can happily belong that encourage a profound sense of historical belonging and -continuity. Such institutions are fundamental for projecting into one’s life the presence of interests that transcend the interests of the self.

It is unsurprising, if somewhat mysterious, that most of the recorded epochs of abundant individual- and collective achievement were primarily engendered by societies with a profound sense of being part of an ongoing historical process. And it is unsurprising that the period of Western time most productive of society-altering gains was most saturated with feelings of both love of nation and love of God, fertilised with a healthy (though not trenchant) scepticism towards the latter. A feeling for interests that go beyond oneself, and which are moreover present in one’s everyday life and the lives and thoughts of one’s peers, encourages one to look beyond oneself when composing ambition, and furthermore encourages one to consider enacting one’s ambition on a broad social level.

In summary, what a lack of historical continuity has to do with ambition: Provides fewer opportunities to throw oneself into a collective interest with all of one’s might and heart. Many conquests were made, many great churches erected, and many nation-building documents sired, by giving people the opportunity to sublimate themselves to state, faith, and abstract notions of civilisation (e.g. liberty, freedom).

A lack of goodwill

The lack of the aforementioned institutions for creating impersonal interest also creates less amenable, kindly group feeling between people that is not excessively oppositional in some way to an outgroup. Kindly group feeling gives people both the security and the wealth of prosocial feeling and goodwill to one’s fellow man required to think grand undertakings are not merely possible but worth the bother – if, for instance, I did not fundamentally love what is good in my fellow man, and long to give it the most plentiful outlet possible, I would not think that building Surf would be worth its own most exacting while.

It is often said how the most able of people in our time are disincentivsed from contributing to public life, and instead devote themselves to building delightful walled gardens — this is aligned to a shrinkage in the width of one’s interest, and an attenuation of feeling for what it is worthwhile thinking it possible to achieve. If I feel I have no stake in the world beyond the land on which I live — or, worse, if I think it is a fool’s errand to believe I have such a stake — then my thoughts will remain in my garden, and remain garden-sized, however beautifully topiaried they might become in that context.

In summary, what a lack of goodwill has to do with ambition: Who can be bothered building monuments to the beauty of humanity who perceives no reason to believe humanity to be beautiful?

Fewer memory-intensive pastimes

Where previously people would memorise the sermons of celebrated priests to recite them back to one another, sit around reading poetry or extracts from Cicero from memory, people now outsource many of the former duties of memory to machines and engage in mediated, tech-intensive activities, from videogaming to feed-scrolling, that actively reduce memory by stimulating dysfunction in your dopaminergic circuitry. A stronger memory results in more passively-composed connections as can lead to ambition-culturing insights, a wider and more detailed perspective, and a stronger sense of general continuity.

Moreover, ambition is positively inseparable not merely from memory but from an awareness of the limits of memory; that is, ambition is progeny of the realisation that even great things, people, and moments are prone to be forgotten. Having a memory store full of the great and good from epochs long passed is an excellent way of stimulating ambition, for what better company could one hope to keep, in life and beyond, than this panoply of eminent individuals who continue inspire the dreams of people born centuries downstream of them?

In summary, what a lack of memory-intensive pastimes has to do with ambition: Ambition primarily roots in being remembered for something. If neither you nor anyone around you remembers any impersonally known thing or individual fondly, you will perceive it less worthwhile to attempt to be remembered yourself.

Historical despair

We have since at least the middle of the 20th century, prompted by the ideological desolation following World War II, been sliding into historical despair. This has been consolidated in the early 21st century by the increasing popularity of unfalsifiable identitarian doctrines stemming from the work of Foucault and his acolytes. Much of Foucault’s most popular work revolves around suggestions that all social connections are zero-sum power relations, and that ‘truth’ is a purely subjective concept. This has led to a sentimentalisation of history among the most highly-educated and, subsequently, a revulsion towards it. Even where a belief that history is where bad people live does not take hold in the individual, it forms a kind of miasma swirling around the resistant individual which that individual must then expend great energy to fight against — and it is a draining and emotionally taxing fight, for they who know that history is more than something to get upset about also know that all our hopes for the future lay in its archives.

Historical despair is anathema to high ambition – for reasons that are simultaneously empirically undeniable and fundamentally elliptical, feeling that one is part of an historical continuum, with a proper means to build upon the work and the example of exalted forebears, is what stimulates a great deal of worthy work.

The same doctrines that have triggered such historical revulsions have also sewn a tremendous sense of interpersonal distrust, wariness, and unhappiness with what appears to be the squalid moral limits of human potential, which leads to the kind of ill-feeling towards others that makes ambition seems contemptible. It seems logical to suggest that the great suppression of human potential in the European Dark Ages owed in large part to the Augustinian picture of a human as a scrofulous, bent, imperfectible thing that prevailed to such a degree during those days; and it seems equivalently logical to suggest that the sudden revival of individual and collective ambition, and the germination of talent on an historical level, of the Renaissance city states came as a result of a rejection of this picture of humanity, and the preference instead for focusing of what was, is and will forever be rational, heroic and beautiful in human nature.

It all connects neatly.

In summary, what historical despair has to do with ambition: Aside from the thoroughly negative view of human potential it endows one with, historical despair cuts off access to one of the primary wellsprings of high ambition; historical affection for heroic figures of the past. Loving them, and wanting to emulate them, is one of the most direct routes (if also one of the most insincere) to developing surpassing ambition.

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