Ambition and the Love of Learning

It’s good to be with you tonight. I’m surprised to see so many here when there is a basketball game in the Marriott Center. The fact that you’re all here reminds me of a few years ago when the entire First Presidency came to campus for an event. My wife, Susan, and I were with them just upstairs, waiting for the event to start. Impressed by the willingness of the entire First Presidency to come to Brigham Young University, Susan went up to President Hinckley and said, “I’m so glad you’re all here.” Quick as a flash he retorted, “Well Sister Tanner, I’m glad I’m all here too!”

I’m glad you’re all here in every sense of the phrase. The fact that I’m here as your speaker reminds me of another story. A high school principal was looking for a graduation speaker. So he called the nearest university. He said that he needed a speaker and that he wanted nothing lower than a vice president. The person on the phone responded, “Sir, there is nothing lower than a vice president.”

Many of you will soon be graduating into a world where the economy is down and money is tight. This is not all bad. It may teach you to be frugal like a couple I heard about who had lived through the Depression. When the husband died, his exceedingly frugal wife called up the newspaper and asked, “What’s your lowest price for an obituary?” The editor replied “$18.” She said, “Okay, write, ‘George died Tuesday.’” The editor said, “For $18 you get six words. Do you want to write anything else?” She said, “Oh. Um. Yeah. ‘Toyota for sale.’”

I shouldn’t tell jokes, even if it’s expected of an after-dinner speaker. I don’t do it well. My wife warned me on the way over here tonight, “Don’t try to be funny. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t try to be intelligent. Just be yourself.”

I actually want to give a rather serious talk tonight about ambition and the love of learning. These topics were suggested by my experience joining Phi Kappa Phi many years ago. Also they connect in my mind to President Hinckley’s teachings.

My Induction into Phi Kappa Phi

When I was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi as a senior in college, I didn’t know that the Greek letters stood for the motto Philosophía Krateítõ Phõtôn, which the society translates as “Let the love of learning rule humanity.” I was pleased to discover the motto of Phi Kappa Phi when I prepared this talk. I only wish that I had known it when I was deciding to join. It would have made me feel even better about being inducted. For I truly love learning. Learning is not just a duty nor a practical necessity for me—though it is both of these. It is a joy. I feel especially alive when discovering new insights or rediscovering old verities with fresh appreciation.

When I joined Phi Kappa Phi, I did so mainly to put it on my résumé, not for the noble ideal expressed in its motto. I still remember, after all these years, the issues I wrestled with when deciding to join. I was troubled by two considerations.

First, I wondered if it were a sound investment. I was poor. One of thirteen children, I had worked my way through BYU without financial support from my family. Furthermore, by my senior year I had decided to pursue a graduate degree in English rather than go to law school. A PhD in English promised little financial reward. In fact, there were slender prospects even of landing an academic appointment in English. When I was accepted to UC Berkeley, my letter of acceptance contained a few perfunctory sentences of congratulations. The remainder of the letter warned that the academic market for PhDs in English was grim and predicted to get grimmer. My straitened circumstances made it a stretch to pay the Phi Kappa Phi joining fee. But my dad thought it would be money wisely spent. He said it was an honor to be invited, as so it was, and that it might even help me get a fellowship, as so it did. As it turned out, I was chosen as a national semi-finalist for the Phi Kappa Phi fellowship and as a semi-finalist for the Danforth and Rhodes. However, the award was not enough to pay even my first semester tuition. So I worked my way through Berkeley as I had at BYU, working summers and graveyard shifts as a night watchman to supplement what academic work I could find as a TA.

My other scruple about joining Phi Kappa Phi was more fundamental. It concerned not whether joining was a wise financial decision but whether it was an ethical decision from a religious perspective. Was not this to seek after “the honors of men” (D&C 121:35; see also Matt. 6:2; 2 Ne. 26:29; D&C 58:39), something which scripture expressly condemns? To be awarded Phi Kappa Phi was not like graduating with Summa Cum Laude, Magna Cum Laude, or Cum Laude. These distinctions are conferred by universities without our specifically seeking them, the by-products of doing well in college. By contrast, I had to deliberately put myself forward for induction in Phi Kappa Phi. Now for many this scruple may seem hypersensitive, and no doubt it was. But I sensed an important moral question at stake nonetheless, one which I have continued to wrestle with because it affects the quest for fully consecrated discipleship in the disciplines. The question is this: Is ambition for worldly honor compatible with Christian discipleship?

The Moral Status of Ambition

Let’s consider this question and then discuss the place of the love of learning in discipleship. These issues are not unrelated: both focus on our motives for striving for excellence.

Let me summarize what I shall say so that anyone who wants to leave early for the game can do so and still know my thesis. I believe that considered through the lens of Christ’s teachings ambition is a suspect category. It is associated with pride, vanity, and self-regard. In the gospel we are expected to do our best, but not out of vain ambition. If there is such a thing as righteous rather than vain ambition (and I’m not sure there is), then it must be aspiration directed wholly toward righteous ends and without seeking glory. One such righteous end is surely the love of learning. A love of learning is one of the most important things we can learn at BYU. It will fit us for success in today’s flat world and for exaltation in the eternal world to come. That’s my argument. Now let me flesh it out.

There exists a large body of literature in Christian ethics debating the moral status of ambition. Ambition is a suspect category in Christian ethics. The word ambition itself never appears in the Bible, and it appears only once in other Latter-day Saint scripture. Tellingly, however, the only scriptural reference to ambition is pejorative. The Doctrine and Covenants 121:35 warns against indulging “our vain ambition.” The root meaning of ambition, also has pejorative connotations. “Ambition” derives from the Latin roots “to go” (ire) and “around” (amb): ambire. Ambition described one who went around seeking votes—a timely allusion in this election season. From its Latin roots, ambition came to connote an “eager or inordinate desire of honor or preferment.”¹

Ambition acquired negative connotations because going around seeking preferment implied a strong element of self-aggrandizement and vanity. An ambitious person desires not merely to be great but to be thought great. An ambitious person does not strive for excellence alone but for the fame and honor that attends being thought excellent. An ambitious person has one eye on the task and the other glancing toward the Hall of Fame. Kierkegaard defined purity of heart as the spiritual condition of “willing one thing.” Ambition, by contrast, wills two things: excellence and worldly honor. Thus righteous ambition, like righteous pride, becomes almost an oxymoron. If there is such a thing, it is fraught with the potential for vanity. So you can see that both etymology and scripture link ambition with vanity and an improper desire for worldly glory.

Scripture calls this “the honors of men.” The familiar LDS phrase “the honors of men” comes from the same revelation that warns against “vain ambition.” While these phrases are found only in section 121, this is scarcely the only reference to the idea in scripture. The footnote to “honors of men” in D&C 121:35 refers readers to Christ’s warning in the Sermon on the Mount against those who do their alms to gain the “glory of men” (Matt. 6:2), to Nephi’s condemnation of “priestcraft,” whereby people seek the “praise of the world” (2 Ne. 26:29), and to D&C 58:39 where the Lord condemns Martin Harris, “for he seeketh the praise of the world.”

Perhaps the most dramatic warning against vain ambition is found in Matthew 20:20–23 when the Savior himself roundly rebuked the ambition of James and John and of their mother, who lobbied the Lord to give her boys places of preeminence in the Kingdom, on his right hand and on his left. Like a modern-day helicopter parent, she wants her Jimmy and Johnny to be team captains, leads in the play, student body officers. Jesus must teach her and the Twelve that ambition for preeminence of place has no place in the Kingdom. Such vain ambition characterizes the politics of gentile princes, says Jesus, “But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant” (Matt. 20:26–27). Our task, as President Hinckley’s father taught him, is to forget ourselves and go to work. Only by losing our lives can we find them.

What great good has come from those who, like President Hinckley, have forgotten themselves into greatness. By the same token, what great woes have been visited upon the world by vain ambition for the honors of men. I have just finished reading a book about King Leopold II of Belgium. How many millions of Africans lost life and limb so he could erect monuments in Europe to his vanity! History is replete with such figures, great and small, who have exploited others to gratify vain ambition.

Literature too frequently dramatizes the evils of ambition. Remember Macbeth, whose “vaulting ambition” led to murder and his own spiritual death as he became past feeling.² Or Milton’s Satan, who vaunted that he would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven: “To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: / Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.”³ Such pride and vanity kept him in Hell; they locked Hell’s portals from the inside. A true disciple of Christ, by contrast, must always choose to serve rather than reign if this is what God asks of him. As the Psalmist says, “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness” (Ps. 84:10).

Is There Such a Thing as Good Ambition?

But is every sort of ambition bad? The word ambition, to be sure, also bears some positive connotations for us today. After all, we deplore those lacking ambition as lazy, shiftless. And scripture speaks against slothful servants who seem to have no ambition to multiply their talents. So is there such a thing as good ambition? I believe that there is, but I prefer to call it aspiration. The root meaning and connotations of ambition render the term suspect, at least in my lexicon. Hence, I favor the term aspiration over ambition, as it seems to connote larger, higher motives in our quest to be the best.

Perhaps this may seem to you a distinction without a difference, but for me the contrast between aspiration and ambition is similar to the distinction Daniel Boorstin draws between hero and celebrity. A hero is a person who achieves fame based on noble, admirable accomplishments. A celebrity, by contrast, is someone who achieves notoriety for any reason—good, ill, or indifferent—and then turns fame into celebrity, becoming well known for being well known, like, say, Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. Why should we pay attention to these people? What have they done that is truly noteworthy? Popular American culture has become dominated by the cult of celebrity, Boorstin argued, so much so that we are in danger of not being able to distinguish between heroes and the celebrities that dominate the media. I had just read Boorstin’s book before my senior year at BYU. His analysis may have influenced my response to invitations that came that year to pay to have my name in Who’s Who books or to join a number of academic honorary societies. I was young and idealistic: full of aspiration to achieve but worried about succumbing to the spiritual dangers of self-promotion.

In this respect, I greatly admire President Hinckley. A man of extraordinary gifts and accomplishment, he stoutly resisted paying attention to his press clippings and eschewed self-regarding preoccupation with leaving a legacy. He often warned against the snare of that old deceiver adulation. It’s a lesson all of us need to remember. We need to do our best—our very best, as President Hinckley counseled. We need to strive to excel. But we must also resist the temptation of becoming enamored with the adulation that comes when our best results in worldly success and honors. For while it is spiritually healthy to praise and honor each other, it is spiritually dangerous to be honored. It is even more perilous to actively pursue the honors of men.

Ultimately, the question is not whether it is legitimate to set and strive for lofty goals. The question is whether we seek the goals out of love of self or love of God and neighbor. If there is such a thing as righteous ambition, it would describe the aspiration to excel in worthy goals, motivated by pure love. Motives matter. And love is the only wholly pure motive to excel.

The Love of Learning

Which leads me to the final section of my talk: the love of learning. This phrase comes from Phi Kappa Phi’s motto: “Let the love of learning rule humanity.” What Phi Kappa Phi translates as “love of learning” could also be translated as “love of wisdom” (from the Greek philo/sophos). In either case, I like this ideal for it focuses on a noble motive for seeking learning and wisdom: love. I suppose that the love of many things should govern our lives, along with the love of learning. Love of truth, of virtue, of righteousness, of humanity, of God also all strike me as equally important loves. Still, the love of learning ranks high on my list of laudable loves. So I hope that you will let it bear proper sway on your life.

I hope that you have found teachers here at BYU who have awakened this love in you. Great teachers understand, as William Butler Yeats said, that “education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” Their motto might well be taken from the conclusion The Prelude by William Wordsworth: “What we have loved, / others will love, and we will teach them how.”⁴

Likewise, the best students pursue learning for the love of learning and not merely for extrinsic rewards, whether grades, honors, or financial rewards. These students are motivated by passion and curiosity.

Thomas Friedman argues that in the “flat world” you are entering—meaning a world where information is readily available and people are virtually connected in ways that level time and space—what will matter most is not your grades or even your intelligence, but your passion and curiosity. Friedman has reduced this principle to a formula: CQ + PQ > IQ—meaning that Curiosity Quotient plus Passion Quotient is greater than Intelligent Quotient. Friedman says that he lives by this formula. “Give me the kid with a passion to learn and curiosity to discover and I will take him or her over the less passionate kid with a huge IQ every day of the week.” IQ “still matters, but CQ and PQ . . . matter even more.”

So I hope that you will indeed let the love of learning govern your lives. I hope that you leave BYU both knowing how to learn and motivated to keep learning.

I also hope that you can avoid falling prey to “vain ambition” because you know that ultimately what matters in life are not the awards you receive, the money you make, or the fame you acquire. What matters is what kind of person you become.

The true measure of life is what and how well we have loved. I thought about this on Saturday when I attended the funeral of President Hinckley. I was blessed to ride in the cortege and see the moving sight of hundreds of people lining the street waving handkerchiefs and canes. They loved and honored him not simply for the position he held but for the way he occupied it. He greatness was a function of his goodness. In God’s eyes, true greatness always is.

My dad taught me this same lesson. I thought about this when I visited his grave on Saturday. My father’s grave was not far from President Hinckley’s grave. On my father’s tombstone is a statement that he made often to the family. He felt that the words came to him with the force of revelation. It is this: “In God’s divine plan, all achievements will fade into oblivion except personal righteousness.” Now my father sometimes emphasized achieving wealth, success, and the honors of men for himself and his children. But in the end, he knew what was really important. The words he asked to be engraved on his tomb put the honors of men into their proper, eternal perspective. I recommend his words to you tonight as you receive this worthy if worldly honor tonight. “In God’s divine plan, all achievements will fade into oblivion except personal righteousness.”

May you enjoy lives of great achievement! May this be one of many honors that will come to you! At the same time, may you realize that life’s enduring blessings flow from what and how well you love. Therefore may you love not only learning and wisdom but family and friends, neighbors and neighborhoods, and, above all, God very well.