Pun Salad

Amy Chua (a lawprof at Yale) got a considerable amount of fame a few years back for writing Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, her memoir of the tough-parenting ethos she imposed/blessed upon her daughters.

Professor Chua was also a supporting player (as mentor) in J. D. Vance's book about his upbringing and educational/professional odyssey, Hillbilly Elegy, which was one of the best books I read last year.

I wasn't that much interested in reading about her mothering techniques, but when I saw that Chua had written this book, my interest was piqued enough to put it on the "get" queue for the University Near Here library. (It wound up coming via ILL from Franklin Pierce University, over in Rindge.)

I wished I liked it better. There are two things going on the book, and they don't mesh together that well.

The first part discusses how (mostly) the United States has botched both its foreign policy and war-fighting strategies in the past by failing to appreciate the "tribal" strains and stresses in other lands. Examples: In Vietnam, we failed to recognize the ethnic hatred of the Vietnamese majority toward the Chinese minority that controlled much of the country's economic activity. In Afghanistan, we (and the Russians) treated the country as if it were a Cold War square to be captured, ignoring the tribal history and conflicts between various major and minor warlords. In Iraq, we minimized the Sunni/Shiite/Kurd rivalries, and assumed all sects could get along peacefully once Democracy was imposed. And in Venezuela, we underestimated the ethnic resentment of darker-skinned natives (who brought, to their eventual regret, Hugo Chávez to power) against the whiter elite.

These explications are fine, as far as they go. You can't have read Thomas Sowell as much as I have and not be aware of how much ethnic, racial, religious, and other cultural differences can drive trends, disparities, and policies. But Chua's arguments seem a little too tidy and perhaps more hindsightful that insightful.

Things go a little more off the rails when Chua turns her gaze to 21st-century America. She calls America a "super-group": an agglomeration of immigrant cultures, religions, races, and ethnicities that (at least until recently) were successfully merged into a chunky melting-pot of American identity. While still marred by racial oppression and religious bigotry, we're still arguably doing better at managing tribalism than any other country.

Or not. Chua has plenty of criticism of current events. She is, as far as I can tell, a moderate political liberal, so she lambastes the wackos and bigots on both sides, but asymmetrically toward the right. There are inexplicable diversions; yes, I've heard of the "Prosperity Gospel", but I'm not quite sure what the point of the discussion in the book is.

And Chua occasionally totally misfires. Her contempt seethes (for example) at my hero Kevin D. Williamson and his famous brutally honest look at lower-class white American communities. Chua doesn't use Williamson's name, and calls his article (incorrectly) an "op-ed". She quotes a few paragraphs, but she seems to think Williamson's awfulness is self-evident, commenting only that "it's hard to imagine [Williamson's] kind of language being applied to any other group." Yeah, fine, Professor; but was he accurate? Engage with the argument, instead of pointing with open-mouthed shock.