#341 About That Tiger Mother

A pro-homeschooling post is forthcoming, I just have to find the article (I think it was in an issue of First Things) where I found the argument.  But for now, here's the other side.  As we know the spelling bee winners are always Asian.  How did they get so smart?  Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a critique of the softer American style of parenting, shows how:

"Chua didn’t let her own girls go out on play dates or sleepovers. She didn’t let them watch TV or play video games or take part in garbage activities like crafts. Once, one of her daughters came in second to a Korean kid in a math competition, so Chua made the girl do 2,000 math problems a night until she regained her supremacy."

The quote is from a David Brooks editorial and lists other examples of what we might consider a harsh parenting style, but we get the idea.  Critics of Chua are up in arms about her book, in which she recounts her own story and criticizes the laxity of American parenting.  So while everybody is criticizing her for being overbearing on her children, David Brooks takes a different approach:

"I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.  Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.  Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement..."

The key phrase there is that, again, "She's protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn't understand what's cognitively difficult and what isn't."  And there I thought that he's captured years of my own struggle in one sentence.  It is still far more mentally taxing for me to walk on any given night into a party filled with strangers made up of various cliques than it ever was to take any of the most difficult academic tests I've ever attempted such as the SAT, the CPA exam, and others.  I'd rather spend 2 hours working on a difficult accounting issue than spend five minutes getting the answer from my boss.

I realized early on in my working career that everybody in my profession is actually pretty smart whether they went to private, public, or home schooled.  What separates those who stay at the bottom from those who rise to the top is not smarts at all.  It's the ability to schmooze, to socialize, to say the right things, to be the alpha dog.  This is all stuff you only learn in battle.  Smarts will only get you in the building.  They won't get you off the floor of that building.  Brooks goes on,

"Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.  This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from by making them rush home to hit the homework table.  Chua would do better to see the classroom as a cognitive break from the truly arduous tests of childhood. Where do they learn how to manage people? Where do they learn to construct and manipulate metaphors? Where do they learn to perceive details of a scene the way a hunter reads a landscape? Where do they learn how to detect their own shortcomings? Where do they learn how to put themselves in others’ minds and anticipate others’ reactions?"

Harvard, Yale, and Oxford don't hold a candle to the elementary school bus ride, the middle school cafeteria, the high school dance, or even the weekend sleepover.  Those are the times that try men's souls.  Childhood is hell.  We extend that hell when we fail to discern the "truly arduous tests" in life.

#340 Interesting Links XL

Patrick Deneen delivered a lecture entitled "Making Whole Our Historical Sense."  From the intro:

"Liberalism (and the market economy it advances) emphasizes the present tense; Progressivism (and its belief in the future transformation of humanity) emphasizes the future tense; and Nostalgism overstates the perfection of the past tense. I argue instead on behalf of the need to repair the historical sense to include the past and future more fully into the present.

Interestingly, while one might have thought that a group of conservative students would be most exercised about my indictment of "nostalgism" - which might implicate conservatism's tendency to look to the past for wisdom and correctives - it was my indictmnent of liberalism - and especially the "free market" - that seemed most to bother a number of the students who posed questions and approached me afterwards. La plus ça change..."

Here's another one from Deneen on The New World Order we are living in.

John Hobbins quotes Michael Spencer regarding the term innerrancy in discussions about the Bible: "we have to understand why 'inerrancy' is a required term, when the church operated just fine without it for centuries."

Sometimes you go to preach Jesus and you find he is already there.  Without preaching at all, I got a taste of that when I read Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, by Denis Covington.  I wrote about it before here a few years ago.  Hobbins says,

"By the time you’re done with the book, you will feel a kinship with the snake-handlers. A massive achievement."  He goes on, "One of the great self-deprivations of 'respectable' forms of Judaism and Christianity is the outsourcing of the imagination, archetypal, eschatological, utopian, and dystopian, to practitioners of the comics and science-fiction genres, to adepts of New Age spirituality, or worse still, the occult. To put it strongly: why should one bother to attend synagogue or church if the whole person, down to the dark depths of one’s psyche, is not attended to? It is there that healing needs to take place. A more holistic approach : the resourcing of human imagination based on traditional content from the Bible and beyond. The relevant texts are numerous."

Joel Willits questions "Love the sinner, hate the sin."

Dr. Robert Atkins has been posthumously vindicated.  Ultimately Michael Pollan's simple advice is the best advice: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.  The key to Pollan's formula, I think, is in the word food. the meaning of which he unpacks in his books.  I never had a problem with the Atkins diet as a science, though I barely made it through any science class I ever took above the elementary school level.  But what Atkins was lacking that Pollan provides is sustainability.  Atkins was a diet and diets cannot be sustained for a lifetime and so are only good for disappointment and depression.  The only thing that works is a lifestyle change and Pollan offers a framework that opens up that possibility.

Truly, Waldo is "a man unstuck from place and time."  This is a funny YouTube video.

The Supreme Court basically refused to settle the real dispute behind the dispute regarding a cross displayed on government property used as a war memorial.  I agree with the sentiments of University of Missouri law professor Carl Esbeck:

“I’m not a big fan of religious symbols on government property,” said Esbeck. “I believe there is a detriment because it dilutes the real purpose of the symbol. They’ve taken a symbol of the church and turned it into civil religion. This can be bad for evangelicals because when people look at a nativity scene or a Roman cross, we want people to think of the God of the Bible. If these too become simply civil religion to Americans, it makes the task of evangelism harder for Christians.”

I think that Chrisendom made a big historical mistake somewhere along the way the moment it first decided to display a cross without a suffering Christ upon it.  It allows the cross to be used like a tidy corporate logo and a marketing tool.  There is a bumper sticker which uses symbols from the various religions of the world to spell the word coexist.  It looks like this:

This was made possible by those who decided an empty cross was a better public face to put on Christianity.  How?  Can you imagine them coopting a true crucifix complete with a haggard-looking, bloodied, suffering Christ for their bumper sticker?  While preached and resolved to know nothing but Christ and him crucified, we've lost our capacity to shock the world.  It looks more like a lower case "t" on the end of that bumper sticker than it does a stumbling block for Gentiles.

Aric Clark points to a study which shows that Somalia has actually fared better under 20 years of anarchy than under the years of corrupt centralized dictatorships to which it had been subjected.  An argument from the extreme for anti-federalism, distributism, and maybe even a certain form of anarchy itself.

Chris Blattman links to an Amartya Sen article about misreading Adam Smith.  He includes the following quote which you'd think came straight out of the mouth of some left-wing politician if you didn't know that Smith himself said it: "When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters."  Well I'll be.  The point of the Sen article is that history has read The Wealth of Nations and neglected The Theory of Moral Sentiments to its own disadvantage.

The lowest form of humanity is probably a talk-radio host who also happens to be a political hack.  There are plenty of them on Atlanta radio and national radio and the bigger names are very influential.  Conor Friedersdorf has come up with an interesting experiment to try to pop their bubble:

"Who can better insulate themselves from inconvenient facts than broadcasters with a microphone in one hand, a team of screeners to vet calls, and one finger on a button that can cut the mic of anyone with a devastating rebuttal?  Until a few years ago, the realities of the talk radio medium enhanced the ability of hosts to lie with impunity, and kept their listeners safely inside an information bubble.  But maybe social media changes everything.  I’ve got an idea about how to pop the talk radio bubble. Please join the experiment."

In John Hersey's Hiroshima, I read the story of an encounter between a survivor of Hiroshima and the man who dropped the bomb from the Enola Gay on the old television show This is Your Life.  You can see a small portion of the awkward encounter at that link.  The producers of the show who set that up must have been some pretty fucked up people.  Here's another strange encounter: Alex Gibney, the man who exposed torture and Don Rumsfeld, the man who authorized it.  This time, the victim couldn't make it for the fancy Washington dinner party.  He had been murdered.

#339 Superlatives Get Out the Vote

Thanks to wife, I am a reluctant semi-expert on ABC's the Bachelor.  Through the years, the show's host, Chris Harrison, has frequently hyped up the next episode with previews after each week's show which claimed that next week, we would witness "the most dramatic rose ceremony ever."  Better yet, without fail a few episodes later, he would say the exact same thing, and on and on through the seasons.  The show seems to be always raising its standards.

I think our nation is also constantly raising its standards.  During the 2008 election cycle, I heard the phrase, "This is the most important election of our lifetimes," in a scary voice more times than I care to count.  And much like Chris Harrison, our rulers, cable news contributors, radio personalities, and fellow citizens also said the same in 2004 and 2000.  I remember '96, but not all the commentary surrounding it.  Was it also said then?  What about '92, '88, '84 and so on?  I'm sure it was so, because according to Charles Dickens, it was so as far back as 1859 in London and even 1775 in Paris.  I know because of these two cities he said,

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Maybe the standards of "importance" have been raised.  But maybe they only appear to have been raised by the relative descent into hackery and sophistry of our own noisiest authorities, whether they be rulers, newsmen, pamphleteers, or fellow citizens.