The Cost of Ambition with Miroslav Volf

We are grateful to each of you for joining us today. We have about 1500 people registered and we are grateful for your time and your interest. I understand about 200 of you are with us for the first time, and you all are located in places ranging from Senegal to Malaysia. So the concerns that we’re going to talk about today are indeed universal. If you’re new around here, a quick introduction. What is the Trinity Forum? We are a community of people engaged in a common effort to keep the historic Christian intellectual tradition alive in our time, to foster new growth in that tradition, for cultural renewal, and to make it available to people everywhere. Many of you are part of this work as members of our Trinity Forum society community; thank you. And a special thanks to our sponsor today, Brazos Press, and our co-host, the Yale Center for Faith and culture. What we try to do in these conversations is invite thinkers with relevant, practical wisdom to help us live. We provide a hospitable place to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and ultimately to come to better know the author of the answers. So turning to today’s theme, the impulse to be better than others runs so deep in us that we are seldom even aware o f it. And even if we are made aware of it and understand that it contradicts our convictions, the societal pressure to be superior, not to mention our innate longing for it, is powerful. To argue that our striving is misdirected, though, sounds like saying we shouldn’t let ourselves be so subject to the Earth’s gravitational pull.

Is there even a choice? Can we find a better way? Our guide in exploration today is Miroslav Volf. He is the founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith and culture, and a professor of theology at Yale Divinity School. He’s developed and teaches the most popular humanities course at Yale, entitled Life Worth Living, which is now taught well beyond Yale, including in a federal prison. Miroslav has written or edited more than a dozen books, including Exclusion and Embrace, which was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in Religion and was named one of Christianity Today’s 100 Most Important Religious Books of the 20th century. He also coauthored Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, a New York Times bestseller developed from his course at Yale, which we discussed with him on one of these conversations last year. After this conversation today, you may want to check out our podcast or video with Miroslav on that book. Today we’ll be talking about his latest book, published just a few weeks ago, entitled The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others is Making Us Worse. To our viewers, you’ll enjoy the book. It’s full of old friends: Soren Kierkegaard, John Milton, Saint Paul, the whole gang. And by the way, a bit later, I’ll tell you how you can get a signed copy of it signed by Miroslav while also supporting the Trinity Forum. Finally, I’ll note that Miroslav is a native of Croatia, where he grew up as a pastor’s son during Yugoslavia’s Communist era. Miroslav, welcome.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for taking this time to discuss not so much the book, but the ideas that are behind that inform that book.

Well, we always like to understand the story behind a book or really the ideas that that led you to. So what have you observed in people and in the world we’re now living in that made you decide to take up this topic at this time?

Well, I mean, it’s a great question. What have I observed in people? Now, I am one of the people, I take it. And so I can answer this question by reflecting on what I have observed in myself. And the story that I often tell is I’m walking from one terminal to another in Chicago O’Hare airport. And to do so, you have to go through an underpass and there’s this great convenience of escalators on both ends and I choose not to use those because I think I’ll get a little bit of exercise as I’m climbing down and climbing up, going down and climbing up the stairs. And as I’m doing that, I see my fellow travelers on either side of me and I think of myself, oh, I’m a little bit better specimen of humanity. Whereas I am burning my calories and exercising. They’re burning fossil fuels. And then I think to myself, oh, I’m so great. And then next second, I think again, “What? This is a completely idiotic idea. You should be ashamed of yourself, ashamed of yourself, of thinking these thoughts.” So some such experience has been a motivation for me to think personally about this issue, but also to analyze the broader cultural trends and it’s true to say that we live in particularly competitive kind of culture where striving superiority is dominant mode of relating to others in many, many domains of our lives.

Well, let’s define our terms. So you call striving for superiority a social vice dependent on a shared system of values. What distinguishes striving for superiority, which you criticize as a vice, perhaps even a sin, from striving for excellence, which you praise—is a good thing?

Yeah, I think that’s a very important distinction for the for the book. Striving for superiority for me is defined by striving to be better than somebody, somebody else. Striving for excellence is defined by striving to achieve certain ideal, irrespective of how I stack in comparison with others. And I think that distinction is really crucial. We have, in a sense, allowed in my own our own lives and societal lives to kind of transmute this striving for excellence into striving for superiority and to take striving for superiority, how we are better than others, to be the measure of our excellence.

Is that, so is that what you mean when you say it depends on a shared system of values, or it’s a social vice that it’s a comparative, fundamentally comparative exercise.

It is fundamentally comparative exercise. So that’s one element of it. But the other element of it that striving for superiority also always assume the third party that is observing what’s happening. So we have a kind of set of values of what counts as good that is socially negotiated, maintained by different standards depending on what we’re talking about. Say, say, say ideal of beauty it used not to be a strike against you if you are not slim looking and buff. To the contrary, if you’re too slim looking, it used to be a sign that you or maybe a little bit malnourished or something of that. Something of that sort. Whereas if you are kind of corpulent, that means that you’re somebody and somebody important, but you see that even just kind of bodily shape and size is a socially constructed kind of kind of a value. And we live then in a world in which many of our values are not independently motivated in a system of values that we share, but rather are socially negotiated, and they constantly move and move in and change what counts as success. Yesterday doesn’t count as success tomorrow. That too, then, is a kind of socially mediated category and hence makes striving for superiority a kind of a social vice, primarily with detrimental impact upon the self.

Now, taking even if we take that to be true at an individual level, at a societal level, doesn’t it benefit us all? Like we I think we’ve all been been kind of taught over the centuries, really, that that this is, this striving for superiority is, is benefiting us as a whole. That’s it’s a basis for the prosperity of the West that that many of us enjoy. So how would you respond to that?

Miroslav Volf: Let me just correct something. I misspoke last in my last comments by describing the striving superiority primarily is detrimental to us as individuals. I don’t think that’s quite right. I think it has also very detrimental social and also ecological consequences. And I’m not ready necessarily to weigh the character of these detrimental consequences against one another. Just a footnote to correct that. But back to your question and indeed it has been in different periods of history thought that something like striving for superiority. In fact, you read it in the Bible, in Ecclesiastes, you have the idea that, you know, we observe what other people do and that makes us want to do better and improve ourselves. You say you have similar observations in ancient Greece. And of course, in the modern time, that has become a kind of standard mantra. And an example that is often given is is an example of sports. If there weren’t for competition we would not have as high level of athletic achievement in various various sports. What we have forgotten, though, in the meantime for various reasons that I think need to be carefully explored, we have forgotten, though, that there are these detrimental consequences of striving for superiority. People like Adam Smith, for instance, which people might necessarily associate with a critique of striving for superiority because he is the granddaddy of the capitalist system, which has as its foundation, a certain sense of competition. At least that’s what we think. But he actually has a fairly robust critique of striving for distinction in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Even more so, Rousseau and other figures in 19th century one of them with one of them I engage in the book. So this has been a widespread kind of tradition of critique, of striving for superiority, of which we are these days not aware. And we emphasize only this positive side. So how do we weigh positive sides versus negative sides? This would be the important question to to keep in mind.