单项选择题

It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the linchpin of society, holding many of its different elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much. Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart. Ambition, as opposed to mere fantasizing about desires, implies work and discipline to achieve goals, personal and social, of a kind society cannot survive without. Ambition is intimately connected with family, for men and women not only work partly for their families;husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other, but harbor some of their most eager ambitions for their children. Yet to have a family nowadays-with birth control readily available, and inflation a good economic argument against having children-is nearly an expression of ambition in itself. Ambition and futurity-a sense of building for tomorrow-are inescapable. Working, saving, planning-these, the daily aspects of ambition-have always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class. The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for. Like it or not, the middle class has done much of society’’s work in America;and it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition. 　　It is not difficult to imagine a world stripped of ambition. It would probably be a kinder world:without demands and disappointments. People would have time for reflection. Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the collectivity. Competition would never enter in. Conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past. The stress of creation would be at an end. The family would become superfluous as a social unit, with all its former power for bringing about neurosis drained away. Longevity would be increased, for fewer people would die of heart attack or stroke caused by confused endeavor. Anxiety would be extinct. Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart. 　　We do not choose our parents, our historical epoch, the country of our birth or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die;nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live:courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or in drift. We decide what is important and what is trivial in life. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what we refuse to do. But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed. In the end, forming our own destiny is what ambition is about. Ambition closely relates to family in that