Sultan Knish
The hysterical responses to Amy "Tiger Mom" Chua's book discussing why
some cultures succeed and others fail are revealing. Even though Chua
was talking about cultural elements, rather than genetic ones, the
accusations of racism are entirely predictable.
Chua's
thesis, like most similar arguments, is plausible in some areas and
implausible in others. Any explanation that tackles as big a subject as
that is bound to have as many hits as misses.
And yet it's undeniable that some cultures succeed where others fail.
The
politically correct left has long ago lost the ability to distinguish
between culture and race; denouncing everything from criticism of Islam
to complaints about gang culture as racist. It treats culture as
equivalent to race because it doesn’t believe that people are capable of
change.
The left views people as static. Culture is equivalent to
race for them, because they don’t believe that people can change. Or
that they should change.
The cast of successful cultures in
Chua's book is more than racially diverse enough, but it's the idea that
people succeed or fail because of their attitude toward life, rather
than because of their privilege or lack of privilege that infuriates the
left.
Setting aside the details of her positions, Chua's last
two books can be boiled down to the simple fact that people who try
harder are more likely to succeed and that is not an argument that the
left wants aired in the public square. What was once common sense is now
dangerously reactionary.
No one succeeds on their own, Elizabeth
Warren and Obama insisted. They succeed only through the grace of state
institutions. It's not family or culture that matters. It's the support
of the state.
But the support of the state isn't enough for
individuals or for businesses. Obama lavishly doled out government money
to Green Energy companies only to see them fail. With corporate
welfare, as with social welfare, the need for government money is a
reliable predictor of failure. Those who cannot succeed on their own,
will not succeed through the government.
Government money could
not compensate for what was inherently wrong with companies like
Solyndra, Fisker or A123. It also can't compensate for what is
inherently wrong with individuals and communities that are prone to
failure, not because of someone else's privilege, but because they have
never learned how to try.
The left does not want to deal with
the question of why some people succeed and others fail since its entire
ideological infrastructure is built around the argument of unequal
access. Individuals don't fail, progressives from Obama to Bill de
Blasio insist, social institutions fail them.
The New York Times
trotted out a young black girl named Dasani living in a dilapidated
homeless shelter as its argument that the city had been subdivided
between the rich and the poor. Dasani made another appearance at Bill de
Blasio's inauguration as a prop for class warfare.
But the city
didn't fail a girl whose parents are criminals and junkies and have
burned through tens of thousands of dollars. Dasani isn't living on the
margins because Mayor Bloomberg or the institutions of the city failed
her. On the contrary those institutions have lavished huge amounts of
money and resources on her schooling and on every aspect of her life.
If
Dasani fails, it's not because the larger society failed her, but
because her parents failed her. And the roots of their failure lie in
communities where drug use and delinquency have become accepted and
commonplace.
The left insists that people are interchangeable. They
are not. It insists that their failures and successes belong to the
guiding hand of the state. They do not.
Institutional determinism
is why the Great Society measures failed. The progressive response to
these failures has been to discover new and more abstract forms of
racism culminating in white privilege to explain why the lack of access
is holding some groups back.
There
is an entire academic industry dedicated to turning out proofs of
racism to explain failure and yet there are indisputable studies out
there documenting things such as the diminished grade levels and higher
crime rates for students from single parent homes on a worldwide scale.
While
the left pushes harder for its post-family world of powerful
institutions, there are reams of data showing how destructive trading
the family for the state is. And there is no group of people that
embodies that better than African-Americans whose lives have been taken
over by the state.
Black families have fallen apart while state
intervention in their lives has dramatically increased. It was a bad
bargain and its consequences can be seen in the streets of every major
city and the lives of little girls like Dasani who are used as props by
activists calling for more welfare from a government that can spend
millions of dollars, but can’t fix the lack of responsibility of her
family members and her community.
And she is not alone.
Welfare not only correlates with social failures, it causes them. And it doesn't just cause them in our own country.
Third
World activists complain that Western aid destroys local capabilities
and cripples domestic economies while promoting a culture of corruption
and violence. The best evidence of that may be in the world's biggest
welfare state in the Palestinian Authority where the locals know how to
do little except make demands and threaten to kill everyone if they
don't get what they want.
The Jordanian and Egyptian Muslim
populations within Israeli territory who act this way bear a lot of the
blame for their own miserable behavior, but it was their Western patrons
clamoring for them to have a state who have crippled their ability to
take responsibility for their own lives.
During the election,
Mitt Romney was blasted for suggesting that cultural differences were
responsible for the successes of Israelis and the failures of their
neighbors. But Romney was right and his critics were wrong. Obama's
latest peace process bid is already imploding because it's not a state
that the Palestinian Authority wants; but an international welfare
state.
Institutional determinism promotes learned helplessness.
It teaches people that their failures can only be remedied by blaming
someone else. And that can never lead to success. Without individual
responsibility, all that's left are institutional subsidies for failure
and there are only so many companies that can be bailed out and only so
many individuals who can live off the welfare state without the entire
economy collapsing past the point where it can subsidize them.
Many
of the cultures that Chua lists are refugees with no place to return
to. That distrust of government may be a powerful antidote to Hillary
Clinton's village of the state.
And all of the cultures on the list are family oriented.
A
basic difference between Asian-Americans and African-Americans is that
the former are most likely to be married and the latter are least likely
to be married. It is why Asian students succeed in the same “bad” urban
schools that are supposedly failing the other minority students.
The
magic ingredient is a stable family and parental involvement. It is the
difference between Dasani and a Chinese girl who is already working
toward getting into Stuyvesant High School; that elite city institution
of high-performing students that Bill de Blasio wants to "diversify”.
It’s
not that there are institutional barriers of race that exist for one
girl, but don't exist for the other. It's that one girl comes from a
culture that values success based on long-term planning and short-term
sacrifice and the other one doesn't.
Despite
the best efforts of the left, Dasani and her family are not typical of
African-Americans. If they were the city and the country would be
uninhabitable and there would be no black middle class. But it is the
mission of the New York Times and the rest of the left to convince their
white readers that if not for their social justice campaigns, every
black little girl would be a Dasani.
There are black parents who
push their children to succeed every bit as hard as Amy Chua does. I
have met some of them over the years. The problem is that there aren't
nearly as many of them as there were before the wheels of the Great
Society began to turn and African-Americans were told that they should
accept failure and even welcome it as proof of their persecution.
Culture is just another way of saying that it isn't the state that makes success possible, but the individual and the family.
We
are more than the sum of our institutions, we are our parents and our
grandparents, we are the things we read and the things we believe, we
are the sense of mission that brought our ancestors through thousands of
years of trouble and we are their strengths and their weaknesses.
It's not institutions that make our successes possible. It is our beliefs that make all the difference.
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