75 Ambition

名称：75 Ambition
内容简介：
晨读英语美文 文化百科
[00:02.18]It may seem an exaggeration to say
[00:04.96]that ambition is the drive of society,
[00:07.40]holding many of its different elements together,
[00:10.65]but it is not an exaggeration by much.
[00:13.85]Remove ambition and the essential elements
[00:17.11]of society seem to fly apart.
[00:19.17]Ambition, as opposed to mere fantasizing
[00:22.39]about desires, implies work and discipline
[00:25.34]to achieve goals, personal and social,
[00:27.56]of a kind society cannot survive without.
[00:30.88]Ambition is intimately connected with family,
[00:34.43]for men and women not only work partly
[00:37.68]for their families; husbands and wives
[00:39.80]are often ambitious for each other,
[00:41.85]but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions
[00:44.78]for their children. Yet to have a family nowadays—
[00:47.39]with birth control readily available,
[00:49.76]and inflation a good economic argument
[00:52.45]against having children—
[00:54.00]is nearly an expression of ambition in itself.
[00:56.68]Finally, though ambition was once the domain
[00:59.36]chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats,
[01:01.95]it has, in more recent times,
[01:05.30]increasingly become the domain
[01:07.79]of the middle classes. Ambition
[01:09.97]and future—
[01:10.98]a sense of building for tomorrow—
[01:12.61]are inextricable.
[01:13.85]Working, saving, planning——
[01:15.81]these, the daily aspects of ambition—
[01:18.26]have always been the distinguishing marks
[01:20.57]of a rising middle class.
[01:22.86]The attack against ambition
[01:24.41]is not incidentally an attack
[01:26.35]on the middle class and what it stands for.
[01:28.72]Like it or not, the middle class
[01:30.63]has done much of society's work in America;
[01:33.72]and it, the middle class,
[01:35.68]has from the beginning run on ambition.
[01:38.07]It is not difficult to imagine a world
[01:41.63]short of ambition.
[01:43.32]It would probably be a kinder world:
[01:45.45]without demands, without abrasions,
[01:47.64]without disappointments.
[01:49.20]People would have time for reflection.
[01:51.84]Such work as they did would not
[01:54.58]be for themselves but for the collectivity.
[01:57.18]Competition would never enter in.
[02:00.22]Conflict would be eliminated,
[02:02.55]tension become a thing of the past.
[02:04.82]The stress of creation would be at an end.
[02:08.52]Art would no longer be troubling,
[02:10.59]but purely entertaining in its functions.
[02:12.95]The family would become superfluous
[02:15.48]as a social unit, with all its former power
[02:18.38]for bringing about neurosis drained away.
[02:21.20]Life span would be expanded,
[02:23.80]for fewer people would die of heart attack
[02:26.24]or stroke caused by overwork.
[02:28.13]Anxiety would be extinct.
[02:30.04]Time would stretch on and on,
[02:32.91]with ambition long departed
[02:35.22]from the human heart.
[02:36.61]Ah, how unbearably boring life would be!