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What happened, however, was that huge numbers of people sought power as the only transcendent good; and given the normal distribution of most human qualities such as talent, it was inevitable that most people who sought (and achieved) power were mediocrities.

Theodore Dalrymple

When someone is said to be lacking in ambition, it is usually meant as a criticism, as if people had a transcendent moral duty to be ambitious. How else but by ambition will mankind advance?

I grant that ambition is sometimes, or often, necessary, but it is a virtue, like bravery, that is not self-standing. To be brave in a bad cause is worse than to be cowardly in the same cause. And it hardly takes much historical knowledge to realize that ambition can be the closest ally of monstrous evil.

If everyone were ambitious, what a terrible world it would be! The constitution of human society requires people of very different qualities, the unambitious as much as the ambitious. In some respects, the unambitious, those who are not driven to achieve anything, are fortunate: They are not tortured by the idea that they must improve on what they have already done, that they must forever go onwards and upwards. They can be content with their lot in a way that the ambitious never can be.

Of course, such contentment has not had good press; but that is because writing is always done by the ambitious, as history is usually written by the victors. The dilemma is posed in the following fashion: Is it better to be a discontented man or a contented pig? The “correct” answer is contained in the way the question is phrased; for who would say it is better to be a pig than a man? (I leave aside the question of the pig’s actual level of intelligence and self-consciousness.)

The ambitious tend to regard the unambitious as wallowing in the swill and mud of ordinary existence. They have the contempt for the unambitious that the intellectual often has for those who’ve never read a book. No doubt this picture is sometimes true: One meets people whose steel-plated complacency repels. But this complacency is far from confined to the unambitious; it is found among the ambitious who have succeeded triumphantly without any particular talent. It is often written on their faces, as unmistakably as hardship is written on other faces.

My thoughts turned to the question of ambition when I considered our gardener in France, who comes twice a week. He is a man in his 50s who has always lived alone and who refuses all payment more than 50 percent higher than the minimum wage, though we would be prepared to pay him more.

To see him work is a rare pleasure. He obviously loves what he does. He works fast, efficiently, and with an aesthetic sense. You soon realize that supervision of his work would be an impertinence. Seeing him from the corner of your eye, however, you see that he never lets up. If he says he has worked three hours, he has worked three hours, with no time off for mooning or coffee breaks.

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