Kevin Fischer is an award-winning veteran broadcaster who has been seen and heard on Milwaukee TV and radio stations for nearly three decades.
Kevin, who is a legislative aide to state Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin), can be seen offering his views on the news on the public affairs program, “INTERchange,” on Milwaukee Public Television Channel 10. He lives with his wife, Jennifer, in Franklin.
Dinesh D' Souza, an immigrant from India who is now a U.S. citizen, is the Robert and Karen Rishwain Scholar at the Hoover Institution and author of the New York Times best-seller What’s So Great About America. A few years ago, he wrote a paper for the Heritage Foundation called What’s Great About America. For seven days, I'm posting, one each day, the qualities D'Souza listed in his paper. Here's #3
The Pursuit of Happiness
America offers more opportunity and social mobility than any other country. In much of the world, even today, if your father is a bricklayer, you become a bricklayer. Most societies offer limited opportunities for and little chance of true social mobility. Even in Europe, social mobility is relatively restricted. When you meet a rich person, chances are that person comes from a wealthy family. This is not to say that ordinary citizens cannot rise up and become successful in France and Germany, but such cases are atypical. Much more typical is the condescending attitude of the European “old rich” toward the self-made person, who is viewed as a bit of a vulgar interloper. In Europe, as in the rest of the world, the preferred path to wealth is through inheritance.
Not so in America. Success stories of people who have risen up from nothing are so common that they are unremarkable. Nobody bothers to notice that in the same family, one brother is a gas station attendant and the other is a vice president at Oracle. “Old money” carries no prestige in America—it is as likely to mean that a grandparent was a bootlegger or a robber baron. Rather, as the best-selling book The Millionaire Next Door documents, more than 80 percent of American millionaires are self-made.
Indeed, America is the only country that has created a population of “self-made tycoons.” More than 50 percent of the Americans on the Forbes 400 “rich list” got there through their own efforts. Only in America could Pierre Omidyar, whose parents are Iranian and who grew up in Paris, have started a company like eBay. Only in America could Vinod Khosla, the son of an Indian army officer, become a leading venture capitalist, a shaper of the technology industry, and a billionaire to boot.
The critics complain that equal opportunity is a myth in America, but there is more opportunity in this country than anywhere else in the world. European countries may have better mass transit systems and more comprehensive health care coverage, but nowhere does the ordinary citizen have a better chance to climb up the ladder and to achieve success than in the United States.
What this means is that in America, destiny is not given but created. Not long ago I asked myself, what would my life have been like if I had never come to the United States, if I had stayed in India? Materially, my life has improved, but not in a fundamental sense. I grew up in a middle-class family in Mumbai. My father was a chemical engineer; my mother, an office secretary. I was raised without great luxury, but neither did I lack for anything. My standard of living in America is higher, but it is not a radical difference. My life has changed far more dramatically in other ways.
If I had remained in India, I would probably have lived most of my life within a five-mile radius of where I was born. I would undoubtedly have married a woman of my identical religious, socioeconomic, and cultural background. I would almost certainly have become a medical doctor, an engineer, or a software programmer. I would have socialized within my ethnic community and had cordial relations but few friends outside this group. I would have had a whole set of opinions that could be predicted; indeed, they would not have been very different from what my father believed, or his father before him. In sum, my destiny would, to a large degree, have been given to me.
Let me illustrate with the example of my sister in India who got married several years ago. My parents began the process of planning my sister’s wedding by conducting a comprehensive survey of all the eligible families in our neighborhood. First, they examined primary criteria, such as religion, socioeconomic position, and educational background. Then my parents investigated subtler issues: the social reputation of the family, the character of the boy in question, rumors of a lunatic uncle, and so on. Finally, my parents were down to a dozen or so eligible families, and they were invited to our home for dinner with suspicious regularity. My sister was, in the words of Milton Friedman, “free to choose.” My sister knew about, and accepted, the arrangement: She is now happily married with two children. I am not quarreling with the outcome, but clearly, my sister’s destiny was, to a considerable extent, choreographed by my parents.
By coming to America, I have broken free from those traditional confines. I came to Arizona as an exchange student, but a year later, I was enrolled at Dartmouth College. There I fell in with a group of students who were actively involved in politics; soon I had switched my major from economics to English literature. My reading included books like Plutarch’s Moralia, The Federalist Papers, and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; they transported me to places a long way from home and implanted in my mind ideas that I had never previously considered. By the time I graduated, I had decided to become a writer, which is something you can do in America but which is not easy to do in India.
After graduating from Dartmouth, I became managing editor of a magazine and began writing freelance articles in newspapers. Someone in the Reagan Administration was apparently impressed with my work, because I was called in for an interview and hired as a senior domestic policy analyst. I found it strange to be working at the White House, because at the time I was not a United States citizen. I am sure that such a thing would not happen in India or anywhere else in the world. I also met my future wife during that time. She was born in Louisiana and grew up in San Diego; her ancestry is English, French, Scot–Irish, and German.
If there is a single phrase that encapsulates life in the Third World, it is that birth is destiny. I remember an incident years ago when my grandfather summoned my brother, my sister, and me and asked us if we knew how lucky we were. Was it because we were intelligent? Had lots of friends? Were blessed with a loving family? Each time, he shook his head and said, “No.” We pressed him: Why did he consider us so lucky? And finally he revealed his answer: “Because you are Brahmins.”
The Brahmin is the highest ranking in the Hindu caste system and is traditionally a member of the priestly class. Actually, my family has had nothing to do with the priesthood. Nor are we Hindu: My ancestors converted to Christianity many generations ago. Even so, my grandfather’s point was that before we converted, hundreds of years ago, our family used to be Brahmins. How he knew this remains a mystery, but he was insistent that nothing the three of us achieved in life could possibly mean more than our being Brahmins.
This may seem like an extreme example, only revealing my grandfather to be a very narrow fellow indeed, but the broader point is that traditional cultures attach a great deal of importance to data such as what tribe you come from, whether you are male or female, and whether you are the eldest son. Your fate and your happiness hinge on these things. If you are Bengali, you can count on other Bengalis to help you and on others to discriminate against you. If you are female, then certain forms of society and several professions are closed to you. And if you are the eldest son, you inherit the family house, and your siblings are expected to follow your direction. What this means is that once your tribe, caste, sex, and family position have been established at birth, your life takes a course that has been largely determined for you.
In America, by contrast, you get to write your own script. When American parents ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the question is not merely rhetorical, for it is you who supplies the answer. The parents offer advice or try to influence your decision: “Have you considered law school?” “Why not become the first doctor in the family?” It would be very improper, however, for them to try to force their decision on you. Indeed, American parents typically send their children away to college, where they can live on their own and learn to be independent. This is part of the process of developing your mind, deciding your field of interest, and forming your identity. What to be, where to live, whom to love, whom to marry, what to believe, what religion to practice—these are decisions that Americans make for themselves.
In America, your destiny is not prescribed; it is constructed. Your life is like a blank sheet of paper, and you are the artist. The freedom to be the architect of your own destiny is the force behind America’s worldwide appeal. Young people, especially, find the prospect of authoring the narrative of their own lives irresistible. So the immigrant, too, soon discovers that America will permit him to break free of the constraints that had held him captive while offering the future as a landscape of his own choosing.
If there is a single phrase that captures this, it is the “pursuit of happiness.” Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul analyses it in this way:
It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other, more rigid, systems in the end blow away.
