4 minute read
Considering the Lottery of Birth
Over the years, I have been very fortunate to have travelled the country quite extensively and was lucky enough to get to do so again recently. The thing I enjoyed even more than seeing lodges filling up with tourists again after the COVID years, was a local Namibian tour guide hosting and speaking to visiting tourists in a foreign language. I don’t just mean German because, in a way, that can be downplayed as an easy language to pick up in Namibia (though I’ll admit it is still one that I am less than comfortable speaking). Rather, it is when I hear them speaking French or Italian, or some other international language, that I get a real thrill because it just proves that, given the right opportunities, there is nothing that is out of reach for Namibians.
It always gets me thinking once again about the “lottery of birth” – the fact that certain opportunities are either given to, or withheld from, a person simply due to where, when and to whom they are born.
It is easy to say that certain people are geniuses, visionaries, or that they got where they did because of hard work, and I am not necessarily saying that it is not the case. Without a doubt, Jeff Bezos was a visionary when he came up with the idea to start selling books online and founded Amazon, but he was also supremely fortunate to have been born in the United States of America to parents who were wealthy enough to loan him the $250,000 he needed, despite him having told them that there was about a 70% chance they would lose all of it. I imagine it would have been a lot harder for him if he had been born to a single mother who cleans houses for a living in Windhoek.
There are of course cases where people succeed and do great things despite their circumstances. Charles Dickens famously had to leave school at the age of 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory after his father was sent to debtors’ prison, but even he can be thought of as fortunate to have been born in England – then the major economic and political power of the world – at a time when literature was more accessible than ever due to various journals publishing stories in a weekly or monthly serial format that made literature more affordable to all sectors of society.
This is not to take anything away from genius where it exists but, as American palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist and historian of science, Stephen Jay Gould is quoted as saying: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
The danger of ignoring the “lottery of birth” concept is that it can lead to the idea of exceptionalism, where people begin to believe there is something innately special about them, or that they got where they are through sheer hard work and determination, and that the only reason other people have not achieved what they have is because they are lazy, or do not want it badly enough. Sure, some of the richest or most “successful” people on the planet probably do work hard, but so do people at the till at your local supermarket or mopping the floors at the local mall. There are other factors that got the “rich and powerful” to where they are, and a little humility would not go amiss. Even Warren Buffett, considered by many to be the most successful investor of all time (and as I write this the tenth richest person on the planet), is humble enough to say: “No great credit to me. I was just lucky at birth… I shouldn’t delude myself into thinking I’m some superior individual because of that.”
Getting back to the linguistically skilled tour guide who started this train of thought, and the idea that there is nothing that Namibians cannot do: beyond merely acknowledging the lottery of birth, what also gets me wondering is how much more those affected by it would have been able to achieve had they been afforded the same opportunities as others?
How different would Namibia, Africa, and the entire world look if those many hundreds of years ago we would have been able to encounter people we had never met before with respect and treated them fairly and equally?
But perhaps that is a topic for another column…
Until next month, enjoy your journey.
