Notes on the Amy Chua Debate

Amy Chua’s WSJ article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” is well worth the read, if only for socio-historical reasons. The debate that it kicked off centers around the basic questions of what it means to be alive today. These questions only benefit from the the fact that they’re featured in a Rupert Murdoch publication by a woman who would reduce the great issues of the ethical life to the demands of the college application process. While this might not be the best way to look at life, it’s probably closest to the one that I as a Harvard student have chosen to live. And so long as I’m prepared to admit that I care — that I care about the question of what, as a competitive meritocrat, it takes to succeed in the upper crust of American elite society — then I’m also prepared to admit that the article is very good.
Her thesis is basically the following: Chinese parents have the cultural leverage to apply much greater and much more brutal degrees of parental pressure to their children. This pressure overrides their children’s natural desire to quit things that are hard, helping them to succeed.
Anecdotally at least, this seems true enough. Meanwhile, it’s also clearly true that the ability to endure pain in service of achievement — what we typically call “will power,” the propensity to suffer for some cause — is perhaps the most basic feature of all successful people. A famous psychology study, profiled here in the New Yorker, finds that a child’s capacity to resist eating marshmallows for a long period of time predicts how successful he’ll be in life.
My critique of “Western Moms” — the social category, not the residential fact — is that they don’t value this type of self-restraint and hard work as an essential component of the successful life. Without the ability to restrain our desire to do that which is not right, that which is not just, practically nothing of true lasting importance could get done.
A critique of Chua’s parenting, on the other hand, would bring up the fact that success also depends, in a big way, on the having of good ideas. And it’s simply a fact that new ideas tend to emerge within non-authoritarian environments. As Steven Johnson has argued in a recent book, innovation has a specific “architecture”: it usually happens in places that allow ideas to flow freely and to combine with others. Innovation, he points out, depends quite literally on the old attaching itself to the new. Cities, college campuses and coral reefs are all innovative because they’re undisciplined and crowded, with lots of mental spill overs and lots of context transitioning.
And what about the skills she’s emphasizing? A look at the history of technology — which hews closely to the story of which types of people succeed in society — suggests that computers will continue their relentless expansion through the domain of all algorithmic tasks, which means that anything that conceivably can be repeated will be repeated, at some point, by command lines in a computer program. (We see this happening, for example, with self-driving cars and on-sight machine translation.)
This suggests that the domain of commercially valuable human activity will be fundamentally “anti-algorithmic,” what you might call poetic, that which is expansive and reorganizational, even transgressive, rather than merely productive. The value of non-computer skills will only increase — a fact that strikes me as bad news for children in the 21st century, like Chua’s, who are being trained to repeat The White Donkey on the piano all day.
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