Free Men by Laura Kipnis Page A

the same story. For Clemens and the rest of the jocks, the problem is that bodies aren’t indestructible; for Frey it was that he actually wasn’t enough of a reckless law-flouting desperado to satisfy the addiction-memoir readership’s demand for life stories that read like novels but are packaged as nonfiction. So they tweaked their games to meet the performance demands of their industries. In Rosin’s language, they retooled.
    Which brings us to another knotty issue: ambition. Now, I don’t wish to obscure the essential obnoxiousness of possessing overly copious amounts of the stuff, but what a lot of hypocrisy attends this subject! Please be aware that when I speak of ambition’s excesses, I offer myself as a prime example, which no doubt explains why I’m so guiltily fascinated by contemporaries who’ve been raked over the coals for their immoderacy. Still, my question is, who decides how much is too much?
    As we know, modern market societies require ambition, because they’re premised on social mobility, which is essential to a flourishing democracy. Ambition is a social good because we believe in growth and innovation, and meritocracy is supposed to promote such things. This is our modern religion. The problem, of course, is that ambition is distributed a lot more liberally than talent or ability. The founding principle of democratic society is supposed to be that your position in the world derives from your capacities and achievements, not your origins: call it the myth of the “level playing field.” But the painful truth is that talents and capacities are just as inequitably distributed as noble birth once was—there’s no democracy of talent, there’s no equality of ability. Those not lucky enough to have been blessed with one or the other are just out of luck, and headed for the lower ranks in a system like this one.
    But even for the lucky few favored with some quantity of talent, it has to be the right sort of talent for your particular time and place. Meaning that in a market society, it has to be a monetizable sort of talent, because talent is only measured according to what someone’s willing to pay you for it. In other words—to return once again to myself—a talent for wishy-washiness is no talent at all in a critical “meritocracy” based on ruthless moral severity.
    I mean, how come when they were handing out moral seriousness, Leon Wieseltier got so much and I got so little? What kind of level playing field is that? Even for those with relatively modest ambitions, how can you not resent people who rise faster or further based on genetic flukes or temperamental happenstance? Why them, not you? Frankly, if they distilled moral seriousness and sold it in dime bags, I’d be shooting it up like there’s no tomorrow, until I was bristling about everyone else’s moral bankruptcy and intellectual shabbiness too, just like my steely ego ideal (who not so long ago won the half-million-dollar Dan David Prize for his achievements in cultural standard setting, by the way—speaking of monetizing your talents).
    From where I sit, it’s not difficult to see how the ambition-afflicted keep falling in the soup of professional scandal. We’re just trying to rectify life’s inequities—maybe boost our position in the world a notch or two by patching up the weak spots, where necessary: a bit of muscle mass here, some dramatic incident there, or whatever it takes. Sure, anxious types get over-zealous: inventing degrees, fudging scientific data, cribbing sentences, and onward into ignominy. Transfusing your own blood to win a bike race is a little creepy. But when I think about what I’d do to boost my performance, I can’t get that judgmental. And let’s not forget the tens of millions who can’t get through the day without their little performance enhancers: the Prozac, the Viagra, or whatever you take