Ambition and Compassion
Saint Helena, CA
20 June 2006
A question recently arose about the relationship between ambition and compassion. It is not important here exactly how the question came to be; it just did. And a particular question emerged from that larger question: Can I be ambitious and compassionate at the same time, or does one always trump the other? My immediate reaction was to take the trumping position. Now I am not so sure. So, once again I have returned to the question.
Could I not hold the ambition to be more compassionate? How would that look in the world? Specifically, how would such an ambition express itself in my everyday life, in my work, in my personal life?
What can the words themselves teach me here?
Ambition comes from a Latin word, ambitio, which literally means “the act of soliciting for votes”. At its very heart, then, ambition is about asking for, or wanting, something for myself. In a more general sense it is about taking. If I can hold a certain neutrality about that taking, and not get caught up in the generosity-stinginess polarity, it can clearly be about taking in and crystallizing energy that will allow me “to make something happen”.
Compassion, not surprisingly comes to English unchanged from the Latin. The root here is compati, meaning “to sympathize”. Not much there. But the pati root is valuable. Pati means “to bear, to suffer”. It is akin to the Greek, pÈma, suffering. Pati in another Latin form is patient.
So, now we have two words with clear root structures that seem to indicate that they cannot co-exist. I wonder, though, if I were to look at their modern meanings, if that might not help with this distinction.
Compassion is “a sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.” Ambition is “an ardent desire for rank, fame, power; desire to achieve a particular end”. In one sense, then, both ambition and compassion are expressions of human desire.
I am sure that I have written about desire before. It has its roots in the stars, as I recall. Sidus means “star, constellation, heavenly body”. A desire is a longing to attain. In a sense desire is following a star. Maybe that is why we wish upon stars.
Where I am now in this question about ambition and compassion is that the desire to follow some star, to long for, or hope, or wish for, some far off goal is hard wired in us. We humans possess the capacity for both boundless ambition and unfathomable compassion. But we humans can navigate these chaotic currents of our lives by following only one star at a time. If I fix my sextant to ambition, then I can move my life in the direction of that star. Although I must do so with the awareness that I will not be able to alleviate my longing to be ever closer to that chosen goal.
The compassion star may not shine as brightly as the ambition one, but I suspect the pursuit of compassion lessens my longing, rather than sharpening it. Perhaps its the case that, as my desire to alleviate the suffering of others increases, that particular star intensifies, while the closer I come to the ambition star – to the source and end point of my longing – the dimmer that star gets. And it may well be that over the course of my life I navigate from star to star, from taking and giving, from striving upward to reaching outward, tacking back and forth the way a sailor works to catch the shifting wind currents.
At the end of the journey, though, I imagine that I am left with this: Ambition creates longing, while compassion creates belonging. And the longer I fix my gaze each time on one particular star, the more difficult it becomes to see the other.