The Triple Package

by Amy Chua

  In other words, Jews in the United States are further along the Triple Package trajectory than America’s other disproportionately successful groups; Jews have confronted the “problems” of success and assimilation in a way that America’s other Triple Package groups have not. In a sense, the fundamental difference between American Jews and Asian Americans is that the Jews are three generations ahead of them. As mentioned at the outset of this book, there are several fates that can befall a successful Triple Package group in America. One is disappearance through assimilation and out-marriage. Another is decline. But the more intriguing possibility is that a group might find a way to turn its Triple Package capacities and energies in new directions, maintaining its identity but achieving previously uncharted (as well as conventional) forms of success. All these possibilities are open to American Jews today; all might be realized, to one extent or another.

  The same issues are already facing Mormons, a growing number of whom—especially in the younger generation—are bridling at the culture of conformity that has become part of the Latter-day Saint image. Chinese American business leaders are increasingly pointing to an “Asian” reluctance “to speak up, stand out and make waves” as a factor “limiting their own upward opportunities as corporate officers.” Indian Americans are already looking beyond corporate success; “no longer confined to walking the corridors of corporate America,” they are achieving renown as public intellectuals, judges, or authors. Whether breaking out of type in this fashion will allow these Triple Package groups to avoid the common trajectory of decline, in which disproportionate success fades by the third generation, remains to be seen.

  To return to the Jews, the Achilles’ heel in their Triple Package may turn out to be impulse control. If superiority and insecurity are almost hardwired into Jewish culture, impulse control doesn’t seem to have quite the same purchase. As we’ve seen, self-control and discipline have long been associated with Jewish culture, but Jews in America are much less observant than they used to be, and Jewish parents today are often described as “permissive.” Jews in the U.S. are no longer hyphenated Americans. They’re just Americans; as such they are drawn to American attitudes toward impulse control. And these attitudes do not favor the systematic sacrifice of present satisfaction for future returns, which is the hallmark of every Triple Package culture.

  The United States has a Triple Package trajectory of its own. Once a quintessential Triple Package nation, America has in recent decades moved in a very different direction. This trajectory—along with its reversibility—is the subject of the next and final chapter.

  CHAPTER 8

  AMERICA

  WE TURN NOW TO a very different kind of question: whether America itself, as opposed to one of its many groups, has the Triple Package.

  At the most basic level, the answer is simple. American culture today is not a Triple Package culture. On the contrary, the Triple Package runs directly counter to major tenets—almost mantras—of contemporary American thinking. That’s why Triple Package groups do so well in the United States. Triple Package groups have an edge in America precisely because America as a whole lacks the Triple Package.

  But in reality, the story is much more complicated—for two reasons. First, nations aren’t groups. A nation as large and diverse as America can’t be analyzed the same way that an ethnic or religious group can. America doesn’t have only cultural variety. It has culture wars: protracted, impassioned debates about the country’s basic values.

  Second, there is the fact of historical change. As we’ll show below, America’s relationship to the Triple Package has shifted dramatically in the nearly two and a half centuries since the nation’s birth. To cover this subject in any detail would take a book of its own.

  Nevertheless, in this chapter we’re going to offer a broad-brush portrait of the Triple Package in America. Despite America’s diversity and all its political disagreements, there is still an overarching, recognizable American culture—otherwise we wouldn’t hear so much about the “Americanization” of other parts of the world—and it’s important to see, even if just in rough outline, when and how American culture broke away from the Triple Package. We’re only going to book-end this history, focusing on America at the founding and today, and even so we can’t possibly do justice to the details.

  The United States was born with the Triple Package. All the usual trappings were on display: the drive, the grit, the chip on the shoulder, the longing to rise. These cultural forces helped propel Americans across a continent, turning thirteen ragtag colonies into an industrial and commercial giant, a military juggernaut, and eventually the most powerful country in the world.

  But then something changed. After two hundred years, America lost its Triple Package, damaging our economy, our health, our relationship to future generations. This chapter is about how that loss took place. In the last half of the twentieth century, America declared war on both insecurity and impulse control. By 2000, all that remained of the American Triple Package was the superiority complex—which, by itself, leads not to success, but to swagger, complacency, and entitlement.

  —

  IT’S FUNNY THAT TODAY everything is bigger in America than in Europe—bigger cars, refrigerators, buildings, bathrooms, and especially beverages—because in Thomas Jefferson’s time the idea was that everything American was punier.

  “In America . . . all the animals are much smaller than those of the Old Continent,” wrote the eminent French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. “No American animal can be compared with the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the dromedary, the camelopard, the buffalo, the lion, the tiger, &c.” Having no great animals, reasoned Abbé Guillaume Raynal, another influential Enlightment writer, America could never be a great nation; any species transplanted from Europe to America would likewise grow small and feeble, including Europeans and their offspring. No wonder, concluded Raynal, that America had not “produced one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science.”

  Everyone knows about American “exceptionalism”: the belief dating back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony that America was destined to be a New Israel, a light unto nations. John Winthrop told his fellow Puritans that their colony was to be a “City upon a Hill.” A century and a half later, the first Federalist paper reminded Americans that it had been “reserved to the people of this country” to determine whether a nation based on political freedom could exist on earth. “[W]e Americans,” as Melville would put it, “are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time . . . we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”

  What’s often forgotten is that side by side with America’s superiority complex came a deep insecurity and massive chip on the shoulder—a need to prove itself to a supercilious Europe.

  From Paris, Jefferson wrote home exhorting his hunter friends to send him a giant moose to refute Buffon. As president, he sent Lewis and Clark on their expedition in part to collect bones of large mammals, especially a mammoth—and sent one proof after another to the Natural History Museum of France. In his Notes on Virginia, Jefferson included a chart demonstrating that America’s quadrupeds were bigger than Europe’s, and observed that the “tremendous” mammoth (no sign of which had ever been found in Virginia) was by far “the largest of all terrestrial beings,” at least “five or six times the cubic volume” of the Old World elephant.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans nursed the feeling—probably justified—of being looked down on by the older, more cosmopolitan nations of Europe. Andrew Carnegie, even after becoming “King of Steel” and the wealthiest man on earth, wrote an entire book cataloging America’s “ascendancy in every department,” including manufacturing, commerce, education, literature, and fecundity. “It is, I think, an indisputable fact,” wrote Henry James, that Americans are “the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to
the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.”

  In addition to this underdog’s determination to prove itself, a second, more personal kind of insecurity developed as well. The radical difference between America and Europe, as Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, was that in America there were no “stations”: America had no rankings of lord and commoner, no birth-based restrictions on what a man could own or what occupations he could pursue (slavery being the obvious and massive exception). In theory, any man could do anything, rise to any height. Thus each man’s place in society became dependent on his own conduct, his worth a reflection of personal economic performance. As the economy matured it became possible, perhaps for the first time in history, for every man to be judged—and to judge himself—a “success” or “failure” depending on how well he did, how much he made.

  We might call this the insecurity of capitalism itself—or perhaps even the insecurity of individualism. It was a new form of insecurity, unknown in aristocratic societies where people knew who they were based on the family into which they were born. From this followed the irony so central to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. In a society where so many had so much, each was afflicted with a restless desire for more. In a society committed at its core to equality, every man suffered from a “longing to rise.”

  If Jefferson and his mammoth exemplify early America’s simultaneous feelings of superiority and insecurity vis-à-vis Europe, the indefatigable Ben Franklin epitomizes American-style impulse control. Franklin’s parents were Puritan, and his practical homilies in Poor Richard’s Almanack cajoled his countrymen with the values of moderation, self-control, industry, saving for the future, never wasting time, and refusing to give up in the face of adversity:

  Industry, Perseverance & Frugality, make Fortune yield.

  Dost thou love Life, then do not squander Time, for that’s the Stuff Life is made of.

  There are no Gains, without Pains.

  No man e’er was glorious, who was not laborious.

  Be at War with your Vices, at Peace with your Neighbors.

  He that can have patience can have what he will.

  To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.

  Leisure is Time for doing something useful.

  Diligence is the mother of good luck.

  Thus the United States came into the world a quintessential Triple Package nation: with a chosen-people narrative rivaling that of the Old Testament; an acute insecurity simultaneously collective and individual; and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.

  —

  BUT THAT’S ONLY PART of the picture. Right from the beginning, alongside Triple Package impulse control, there has always been another side of America: its vibrancy, its dynamism, its individualism, its rebelliousness. The penchant for defying authority and going your own way is as deeply rooted in American history as Puritanism. After all, the United States was created through an act of rebellion, and Revolutionary America was bursting with antiauthoritarian ferment at every level.

  Contemporary observers reported that the Revolution had “loosened the bonds of government everywhere”: “children and apprentices” had become “disobedient,” “Indians slighted their guardians, and Negroes grew insolent to their masters.” As social historian Claude Fischer observes, local elections became more “boisterous,” involving more “common folk” and “more crowd attacks on the authorities.” More wives filed for divorce. College students grew “rowdier.” Young couples no longer believed they needed their parents’ permission to marry—or needed to be married in order to have sex. A third of the brides in several New England towns were already pregnant.

  Uniting all this ferment was an urge to throw off the yoke of the past. America was “a country of beginnings,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, where men could leave their past behind, as Alexander Hamilton had when he came to a country that didn’t know he was a bastard. “With the past,” wrote Emerson, “I have nothing to do; nor with the future . . . I live now.” Emerson was giving voice to a new way of thinking about how people should live: imprisoned neither by the past nor the future; living rather in the present.

  The desire to live in the present runs deeply against the grain of impulse control. As a result, the Triple Package in America has always had to fight against—to find a way to rein in—America’s live-in-the-present dynamism. To get just a glimpse of how profoundly this conflict has shaped American social and political life, consider the country’s two most important founding documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Most Americans may not realize it, but there’s a deep tension between these two foundational charters of American liberty.

  The Declaration of Independence was the consummate expression of America’s live-in-the-present rebelliousness. The Declaration threw off the yoke of America’s past, insisting on the right of the people to be governed by nothing but their own present will. “[T]he earth belongs to the living,” wrote Jefferson, the Declaration’s author. Indeed Jefferson went so far as to argue that one generation of Americans could not make law for the next; all laws would automatically expire after nineteen years.

  But rebellion, once begun, is hard to contain. Today, with democracy so well established, it’s easy to forget that America was an unprecedented experiment, which many expected to fail, and which very nearly did fail. The years immediately following the Revolution were full of lawlessness, ineffectual government, and popular insurrections, such as Shays’s yearlong rebellion in Massachusetts. The fledgling United States came perilously close to anarchy.

  This is where the Constitution came in. If the Declaration captured America’s throw-off-the-past, antiauthoritarian streak, the Constitution was the Triple Package writ large. At its core was impulse control.

  The political theory behind the Declaration of Independence was simple. Government gained its just power from one source alone: the “consent of the governed.” But if the majority themselves turned tyrant, what then? An inflamed populace might turn into a mob. It might want to persecute heretics or seize the property of the rich. If the people were sovereign, there appeared to be no check against what the founding generation called popular “passions.”

  It took the Framers over a decade of upheavals and disintegration before they found a solution to this problem—the only solution possible without denying the principle of popular sovereignty itself. Because the people were sovereign, the people had to agree to restrain their own passions. That was exactly how James Madison understood the Constitution’s purpose. The “passions . . . of the public” could not be permitted to govern, wrote Madison in The Federalist; but “[a]s the people are the only legitimate fountain of power,” they had to agree to “control” and “regulate” themselves. Countless Americans since then have seen it the same way. “Constitutions are chains with which men bind themselves in their sane moments that they may not die by a suicidal hand in the day of their frenzy.”

  In other words, the Constitution’s very purpose was to bring the structure and restraint—the checks and balances—of impulse control to the vibrant energies of democracy. The Constitution established a structure of government and a set of principles that would check majoritarian intemperateness and impulsiveness for generations to come. At the same time, the Constitution strengthened the rule of law—and after all, in a nation, the rule of law is impulse control—creating a powerful national government with vastly expanded lawmaking and law-enforcing powers.

  Jefferson saw immediately the departure from the principles of government by the present, for the present, in which he believed. The Constitution, he would argue, was itself a form of tyranny—the tyranny of one generation imposing law on the future. But the future was, precisely, the Framers’ principal concern.

  It’s no coincidence that the Constitution didn’t mention “the pursuit of happiness,” which the Declaration of Independence call
ed an inalienable right. Triple Package cultures do not focus on happiness. The Constitution’s proclaimed objects were to forge “a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” These are future-oriented, objectives, looking to the nation’s prosperity, freedom, and success over ensuing generations. They are, in other words, Triple Package objectives; individual happiness is not mentioned.

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  THUS THE CONSTITUTION cemented the American Triple Package, helping to launch the nation on its extraordinary rise to continental and then global preeminence. But as a Triple Package nation, America had Triple Package pathologies. Characteristically, the Achilles’ heel was superiority.

  Lofty as its ideals may have been, Revolutionary America had all the moral failings of its time. The American superiority complex of the late eighteenth century, and for a long time afterward, did not accept the idea that all men are created equal. A great many Americans believed in the superiority of one race over the rest; of “civilization” over “savagery”; of men over women; and of Christianity—specifically Protestant Christianity—over all other religions.