by Amy Chua
Iranian immigrants in this country include numerous ethnic and religious groups: Shiite Muslims of course, but also Armenians, Assyrian Christians, Jews, Kurds, Turks, Zoroastrians, and Bahá’ís. As a whole, they have tended to keep a relatively low profile: in the 1980s, because of American hostility in the wake of the hostage crisis, and later because of concern about being associated with Muslim terrorists. An exception is the Iranian community in Los Angeles, by far the country’s largest and currently the subject of a reality TV show, Shahs of Sunset. Featuring a circle of relatively affluent Iranian Los Angelenos, the show has been criticized for presenting them stereotypically as “vulgar, materialistic show-offs.”
One thing Shahs does not focus on is Iranian American academic success. A study based on 2000 Census data found that more than a quarter of Iranian Americans over twenty-five had a graduate degree, reportedly making them “the most highly educated ethnic group in the United States,” with five times the percentage of doctorates as the national population. As of 2010, over 17 percent lived in houses with a value greater than $1,000,000 (compared with a national figure of 2.3 percent), possibly the highest percentage of any Census-reported ancestry group. Their median household income of $68,000 (compared with a national average of $51,000) is higher than that of Chinese Americans. One in three earn over $100,000 a year; the national figure is one in five.
The famously entrepreneurial Lebanese have one of the most successful diasporas in the world. Today, as Beirut continues to suffer from violence and sectarian strife, a Christian Lebanese from Mexico—Carlos Slim, net worth $73 billion—is the world’s richest man. Although tiny in numbers, Lebanese minorities are disproportionately successful throughout Latin America, West Africa, and the Caribbean.
Lebanese immigrants arrived in the United States in two main waves. The roughly 100,000 who came between 1881 and 1925 were predominantly Christian and poor but enterprising. Along with German Jews, they rose quickly as “pack peddlers,” going door-to-door with suitcases weighing up to two hundred pounds, selling everything from ribbons and jewelry to children’s clothes. Many accumulated small fortunes, eventually opening grocery stores and banks; a number even became millionaires. By contrast, the Lebanese who arrived in the United States after 1967, many of them fleeing the Lebanese civil war or the Arab-Israeli conflict, were generally more educated (contributing to Lebanon’s brain drain) and included Muslims and Druze as well as Christians.
Today, the Lebanese American population numbers about 497,000, approximately the same size as the Iranian American population. The Lebanese have income numbers very comparable to Iranian Americans. Among ethnic groups in the United States, Lebanese are close to the top of the charts in terms of median household income, percentage earning over $100,000, and percentage earning over $200,000.
The demographic profile, however, of Lebanese Americans is quite different. Whereas 65 percent of Iranian Americans are foreign-born, only 23 percent of Lebanese Americans are. In fact, most Americans who identify themselves as having Lebanese ancestry are probably only a half or quarter Lebanese. This is true, for example, of former White House chief of staff John H. Sununu (at most half-Lebanese) and his son, the former New Hampshire senator John E. Sununu (at most quarter-Lebanese), who was defeated in his 2008 bid for reelection by Jeanne Shaheen, wife of attorney Bill Shaheen (three-quarters Lebanese).
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THE GROUPS DISCUSSED in this chapter are by no means the only successful ones in America. Many other ethnic and national-origin groups are disproportionately successful too. We could, for example, have included Japanese Americans, who significantly out-earn the national average, or Greek Americans, whose remarkable economic ascent in the second half of the twentieth century is well documented. Both these groups have median incomes not far below the groups we focus on.
In an endnote to this paragraph, we offer more detail about how we chose the eight groups we focus on. But in a nutshell, five of our groups—Jewish, Indian, Chinese, Iranian, and Lebanese Americans—were by standard metrics arguably the five most successful in the country as of 2010. Two are stark outperformers among a larger class of statistical underperformers; the success of Nigerians (as well as certain other African immigrants) is exceptional given the relatively poor outcomes of other black Americans, as is the success of the Cuban Exile community given the relatively poor outcomes of other Hispanic Americans. Finally, Mormons may be the most economically dynamic group in the country, rising in a few decades from average or even below-average status to extraordinary levels of corporate success.
The rest of this book attempts to explain the common key to these groups’ disproportionate success.
CHAPTER 3
THE SUPERIORITY COMPLEX
THE DESIRE TO SEE one’s group as superior may be one of those rare universals in human culture. William Graham Sumner, who coined the term ethnocentrism in 1906, believed that every group suffered from this vice, and anthropologists today confirm that the impulse to paint “one’s own group (the in-group) as virtuous and superior . . . and out-groups as contemptible and inferior” is a “syndrome” found in human societies virtually everywhere.
So do all groups have a superiority complex?* The answer is no. Some have had their superiority narrative ground into the dirt for so long it’s hard to reclaim (typically this is done by other groups to entrench their own superior status). Some celebrate the idea of their middle-ness, neither high nor low. Some have so internalized modern postulates of equality that they frown on or even censor notions of group superiority. Some may lay claim to a sense of specialness, but in a way that exalts their victimization (for example, most downtrodden people ever), often revealing a lack of belief in their superiority.
At the very least, in some groups a superiority complex runs deeper and stronger than it does in others. Such is the case with every one of America’s most successful groups.
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JEWS MAY HAVE INVENTED the idea of a “chosen people.” Certainly the Jewish claim to chosenness is the most famous; for three thousand years, it’s been a source of inspiration, derision, and imitation. Colonial Americans believed that New England was the New Israel; before that, Oliver Cromwell had pronounced himself an “Israelite”; and long before that, the New Testament told Christians that they were now the “chosen” ones. Every new “Israelite” heralding a new chosen people reminds the world of the Jewish claim to that status and acknowledges its priority, if only in time.
The Jewish understanding of why God chose them has always been a little mysterious. It wasn’t because they were already a great and flourishing people: “The Lord,” Moses tells the Jews, “did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all people.” And it certainly wasn’t because of their purity of heart. “Not for thy righteousness,” says Moses after having led the Israelites through the desert for forty years. At various points the Old Testament refers to the Jews as “corrupt,” “warped,” “foolish,” “perverse,” “unfaithful,” and “a nation without sense.”
Nevertheless, in the face of mammoth historical evidence to the contrary, and despite all the self-questioning without which the Jewish conception of chosenness would not be Jewish, Jews maintained for millennia the idea that they were God’s chosen people. Wherever Jews settled, whatever their hardships, Jewish children were raised hearing that proposition in synagogue, celebrated in the home on Sabbath evenings, and by the entire community on holy days. (“Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who hast chosen us above all people and exalted us above all nations.”)
The utter brazenness of the idea—that there is only one God, maker of all the universe, and He has chosen us (not you, or anyone else) as His people, His “peculiar treasure” (Exodus 19:5)—remains to this day a special burr for many. The reason Jews are a “contaminated” people, said the Portuguese novelist José Saram
ago, honored with a Nobel Prize in 1998, lies in their “monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that . . . there exists a people chosen by God.” Beloved Greek songwriter Mikis Theodorakis, who scored the film Zorba the Greek (and composed the Palestinian national anthem), has said that Jews “are at the root of evil”; in an interview with an Israeli reporter, he emphasized “the feeling that you are the children of God. That you are the chosen.”
But do modern Jews still believe in their “chosenness,” and does chosenness imply superiority?
The great Jewish philosophers of the modern era have long been uncomfortable with these ideas. Spinoza believed that, fundamentally, “God has not chosen one nation before another”—and was excommunicated at the age of twenty-three. Walking the tightrope of Jewish assimilation in anti-Semitic eighteenth-century Germany, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (grandfather of the composer Felix) held that God had revealed “legislation” to the Jews, not a “religion”; Jews had no special claim to salvation or any eternal religious truths.
The early generations of Jewish Americans felt especially conflicted about the idea of the Jews as a separate, divinely chosen people. “To abandon the claim to chosenness,” as Arnold Eisen puts it, would have been “to discard the raison d’être that had sustained Jewish identity and Jewish faith through the ages, while to make the claim was to question or perhaps even to threaten America’s precious offer of acceptance.” Reconstructionist Judaism, founded by an American rabbi in the 1920s, renounced chosenness as incompatible with equality and democracy. Reform Judaism speaks of a Jewish “mission” to be “witnesses to God’s presence,” deemphasizing if not rejecting the idea of chosenness.
But even as the notion of chosenness waned, Jews rarely gave up the idea of their exceptionality. “There is no doubt,” wrote Freud of the Jews, “that they have a particularly high opinion of themselves, that they regard themselves . . . as superior to other peoples.” As Jewish Americans rose in prominence in the early twentieth century, they grew less afraid to express this sense of exceptionality. In 1915 Louis Brandeis, soon to be a justice of the United States Supreme Court, made the following extraordinary statements at a speech in New York City:
And what people in the world has . . . a nobler past? Does any possess common ideas better worth expressing? . . . Of all the peoples in the world those of two tiny states stand preeminent as contributors to our present civilization, the Greeks and the Jews. The Jews gave to the world its three greatest religions, reverence for law, and the highest conception of morality. . . . Our conception of law is embodied in the American constitution.
For Brandeis, the persecution Jews had suffered through the ages was a point in their favor. “Persecution,” he added, had “broadened” the Jews’ “sympathies,” training “them in patient endurance, in self-control, and in sacrifice. . . . It deepened the passion for righteousness.”
The idea of Jewish historical exceptionality made the concept of chosenness practically irrelevant. “The point is not whether we feel or do not feel that we are chosen,” declared Martin Buber, the Austrian-born Jewish philosopher. “The point is that our role in history is actually unique.” This feeling of historical uniqueness, seemingly proven by a three-thousand-year record of survival and accomplishment, beats close to the heart of Jewish culture everywhere.
But uniqueness is a double-edged sword. Michael Chabon has described the “foundational ambiguity” in Jewish exceptionalism: simultaneously a “treasure” and a “curse,” a “blessing” and a “burden,” a “setting apart that may presage redemption or extermination. To be chosen has been, all too often in our history, to be culled.” Yet even the Nazi genocide became a kind of twisted emblem of Jewish superiority for some Jewish leaders—particularly in America, starting around the 1970s—who engaged in what many other Jews, such as the historian Peter Novick, viewed as a “perverse sacralization” of Auschwitz, competing with other groups over “‘who suffered most,’” and behaving as if they were “almost proud of the Holocaust.”
Most American Jews today would politely applaud Britain’s former chief rabbi Lord Sacks, who in 2001 condemned the notions of both “Jewish superiority” and “Jewish inferiority” as “two sides of the same coin.” But they might take greater satisfaction, if only in private, from articles like “Jewish Genius,” Charles Murray’s 2007 catalog of the “extravagant” Jewish overrepresentation in “the top ranks of the arts, sciences, law, medicine, finance, entrepreneurship, and the media.”
In 2009, 70 percent of Israeli Jews said they still believed that Jews were God’s chosen people. The figure cannot be nearly so high for American Jews, given that less than half say they believe in God, but even for those without theological faith, the sense of Jewish exceptionality is often part of their upbringing. Some are taught to locate this exceptionality in a Jewish commitment to justice, law, or morality; others, in a Jewish insistence on questioning; others, in Jewish intellectual achievements.
Or, according to the novelist Philip Roth, there may be no articulated basis for it whatsoever. Roth said that American Jews inherit from their parents “no body of law, no body of learning and no language, and finally, no Lord,” but rather “a kind of psychology,” a “psychology without content” that could be “translated into three words: ‘Jews are better.’” He added: “There was a sense of specialness, and from then on it was up to you to invent your specialness; to invent, as it were, your betterness.” Whether rooted in divine election, history, intellect, morality, or “a psychology without content,” the Jewish sense of being somehow exceptional has lasted three thousand years and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
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MORMON SUPERIORITY IS, like Jewish superiority, historically founded on the idea of chosenness—only without the angst.
Mormons aren’t subtle about claiming the Jewish mantle. Mormon leaders call their community “Israel.” Utah’s Salt Lake Valley is “Zion”; Mormon prophecy calls for the building of a “New Jerusalem.” Mormons had their Moses in Brigham Young; they had their exodus when, following Young, they made their arduous trek across the American wilderness away from the enemies who persecuted them and who had murdered their prophet, Joseph Smith. Every Mormon child is taught about the “extermination order” issued against them in 1838 by Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs.
But in terms of its beliefs, origins, and spirit, Mormonism has much less to do with Judaism than with American manifest destiny. Often described as “a religious genius,” Smith essentially made a church out of the idea of America’s providential place in the world, rewriting Christian scripture to fit that idea. To Smith were revealed previously unsuspected truths: that the Garden of Eden had actually been located in Jackson County, Missouri; that Adam and Eve had lived in America; that a band of Israelites had voyaged to the Western Hemisphere around 600 BC; that Christ himself, after the Resurrection, came to America; that great wars between Christ’s followers and his enemies had been fought all over the American continent; that the true Christian gospel was preserved in America, recorded on plates of gold buried in upstate New York; and that Christ will return to America in the Second Coming. “The whole of America is Zion,” Smith proclaimed, and he was to be its prophet and leader.
Thus was Mormonism infused from its inception with American exceptionalism—with America’s belief in itself, with what Mormon scholar Matthew Bowman calls America’s “confident amateurism”—even as Mormons found themselves rejected, ostracized, and attacked by their fellow Americans. As Mormons crossed the country in their covered wagons, braving rattlesnakes, fever, hunger, and the mile-wide Mississippi, they added a pioneer spirit to their already “quintessentially American religion.” On their westward trek they fed not on manna or matzo, but on hardtack and salted bacon.
Finding deliverance in the isolated Salt Lake Valley only strengthened Mormons’ belief in their divine election. America had turned its back on true religion; all
Christendom had fallen into a “Great Apostasy.” Theirs alone was Christ’s true church on earth. To them alone had God entrusted his priesthood, his truth, and the task of redeeming mankind in anticipation of the imminent Second Coming. This self-understanding—as God’s end-of-days special emissaries—has remained central to Mormon identity.
Mormons believe they can and do receive direct divine communications and revelations. Every Mormon male above the age of twelve can receive the “priesthood,” enabling him to “access the power of God: to heal, cast out demons, bless, and dedicate.” Mormons go on “missions,” to spread the word to the rest of mankind. And they’re good at it. All over the world Mormon temples are rising up—which, once dedicated, non-Mormons may not enter.
Although some Christians argue that Mormonism is not a Christian faith, Mormons firmly believe they are followers of Christ, praying to him, hallowing his name, and believing in the Atonement and Resurrection. But in addition to supplementing the Bible with its own scripture, Mormonism departs on key theological points from most Christian denominations (as many Christian denominations do from one another).
In particular, Mormons reject the doctrine of original sin. “Unlike other Christians,” writes Columbia Professor (and Mormon) Claudia Bushman, “they consider themselves free from the original sin that degraded mankind.” Indeed, Mormon theology disavows Christianity’s usually categorical dualism between the human and the divine, holding rather that God is a corporeal, essentially man-like person, and that man in turn shares God’s divine nature. Thus Mormonism teaches, as LDS leader B. H. Roberts put it in 1903, that “it is no robbery to be equal to God.” Even today, Mormons commonly believe that if they have proven worthy in this life, “they will inherit godhood of their own” in the next.
