晨读英语美文100篇 Passage 88. Ambition

[00:00.32]Passage 88. Ambition

[00:05.57]It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the drive of society,

[00:16.62]holding many of its different elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much.

[00:22.64]Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart.

[00:27.57]Ambition is intimately connected with family,

[00:31.06]for men and women not only work partly for their families;

[00:34.45]husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other,

[00:37.85]but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children.

[00:42.01]Yet to have a family nowadays—with birth control readily available,

[00:46.93]and inflation a good economic argument against having children—is nearly an expression of ambition in itself.

[00:53.38]Finally,though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats,

[00:58.85]it has, in more recent times,increasingly become the domain of the middle classes.

[01:04.11]Ambition and futurity—a sense of building for tomorrow—are inextricable.

[01:09.25]Working, saving, planning—these, the daily aspects of ambition

[01:13.84]—have always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class.

[01:18.02]The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for.

[01:23.81]Like it or not, the middle class has done much of society’s work in America;

[01:28.41]and it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition.

[01:32.68]It is not difficult to imagine a world short of ambition.

[01:37.71]It would probably be a kinder world:without demands, without abrasions,without disappointments.

[01:44.35]People would have time for reflection.

[01:46.43]Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the collectivity.

[01:51.79]Competition would never enter in.

[01:54.86]Conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past.

[01:59.45]The stress of creation would be at an end.

[02:02.30]Art would no longer be troubling, but purely entertaining in its functions.

[02:08.10]The family would become superfluous as a social unit,

[02:11.70]with all its former power for bringing about neurosis drained away.

[02:16.52]Life span would be expanded, for fewer people would die of heart attack or stroke caused by overwork.

[02:23.74]Anxiety would be extinct.

[02:25.82]Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart.

[02:30.74]Ah, how unbearably boring life would be!