Described both at the “Dutch Wunderkind of new ideas” and “one of Europe’s most prominent young thinkers,” historian and journalist, Rutger Bregman is the best-selling author of three books. His latest book, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference is newly out in English. It is an aspirational call to action for young people to pursue meaningful lives of substantive and scalable impact. Moral ambition for Bregman is the commitment to eschew a life oriented around personal gain to focus upon solving the world’s most pressing problems. The book is an extended plea to act.
This book is fun, cleverly written and filled with both current data and historical examples of moral exemplars. The range of materials Bregman brings in support of his argument is extraordinary. Bregman begins with a simple typology of ambition and idealism. Low idealism and low ambition individuals have what David Graeber (2018) would call “bullshit jobs” providing no discernable social good and who are just hanging on for retirement. Low idealism, high ambition individuals include many of the highest paid individuals in careers of tech and finance whose work serves little higher purpose. High idealism low ambition individuals have strong moral commitments but they don’t often translate into action. The fourth and high rare category are those who are high idealism, high ambition individuals. These are individuals who put their beliefs into action. For these individuals there is little or gap between moral ideal and moral action. Reducing this gap is Bregman’s mission both in the book and his school of the same name, the School for Moral Ambition, created to “fund ambitious idealists to leave behind to empty careers and build lives of impact.”
Bregman’s notion of the good life isn’t about the pursuit of excellence. It is not about intention. It is not about the things you don’t do. It is about action. “You don’t do good things because you are a good person. You become a good person by doing good things.” (p. 39)
So far so good. Bregman’s diagnosis is spot on. Much of what the best and the brightest amongst us–those who often have the most resources–are doing with their lives contributes little to the common good. At best there is lots of talk and little action. Goodness is performative. This first part of the books is wonderfully seductive and truly inspiring. I wish it concluded there.
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The problem with the book comes with the second half solution. Here Bregman offers alternative, preferred lives of positive impact. But these impactful lives are cliched and trivialize their potential moral import. Positive impact for Bregman becomes what can be quantified and scaled. And despite the language of scale this is an impact that is too “small,” too ungenerous, in large part because it is not centered on relationships that invariably anchor meaning. It is impact analytically divorced from virtue. We are left then with ambition that seems soulless and idealism that is bereft of meaning. Strategery at scale often overwhelms the transcendent beauty of moral change. Indeed, maximizing our way into a moral revolution seems counter to Bregman’s own rich examples of how Thomas Clarkson, Margaret Mead or Ralph Nader each lived and worked. Each had powerful vocations animated by meaning and beauty. It was precisely their pursuit of the sublime, their humanness, that often caused them to stumble. The maximal moral revolution that the book ends with is also, ironically, at odds with Bregman himself, with the wise, honest, and relentlessly human voice that narrates the first half of the book. Deflated, I am left wondering, worrying if this is just another bullshit pursuit.
