Ambition seems to us desirable and dangerous. We’re egalitarians in many respects, but we also want to achieve greatness. We want to be superior to others, but only in the right ways. We strive to be great so that our greatness will make the world a better place. But we also recognize the ways in which ambition is dangerous to our society, and perhaps to our own happiness. Can we really be great for the greater good?

In this session, we will look at contemporary accounts of ambition in New York and read David Brooks’s famous essay “The Moral Bucket List.” Should we be ambitious, and can it make us happy?

On Monday, November 17 at 6 PM, join Nathaniel Peters (Morningside) for a seminar series on how our views on ambition have changed from antiquity through the early days of the American Republic, up to our own time. We read Paul Graham, “Cities and Ambition”; Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That”; and David Brooks, “The Moral Bucket List.”