A couple of weeks ago, Yale Law Professor Amy Chen created a huge stir with an article she penned in the Wall Street Journal about the superiority of Chinese mothers over Western mothers. In the article, Chen describes how Western moms are indulgent with their children, impose no discipline and ultimately serve their children badly by leaving them poorly trained for the rigors of adulthood because they are guided by bogus measures of parenting success such as their child’s self esteem. A lot of readers was hostile to the premise but felt uncomfortable saying so. Hostile, because the Spartan environment she imposed on her children and the harsh methods she used to get them to excel (including, but not limited to, verbal abuse and corporal punishment) is at odds with the Dr. Spock inspired notions of child rearing in today’s mainstream. At that same time, their hostility made them feel uncomfortable because multiculturalism has ingrained within these same people the commandment that thou shall not criticize a foreign culture and (especially) say that it is inferior to the West.
In contrast, my first reaction upon reading her was: Yeah! About time somebody stood up to the decadence of today’s permissive parents; too bad it can only be said in polite company by a member of a protected minority; Amy Chen is right, childhood should be a training ground for a successful life, not a hedonistic playground; the influence of immigrants from north Asia, unaffected by the sixties youth culture, is the much needed antidote to today’s laissez faire parenting.
While I certainly do still believe that Amy Chen’s Gen. Patton approach to motherhood is an overdue corrective, after reflecting on the matter some more, I am not sure that it is entirely a pure, unalloyed good.
What got me doubting the wisdom of Amy Chen is this: consider China, Japan and South Korea. North Asia has about 1.5 billion people with the highest average IQ in the world: roughly 105. And yet with all this raw computational horsepower and all the emphasis placed on academics by parents there, remarkably little creativity takes place there. Take Japan: While it has perfected many things invented elsewhere (the car, the colour TV, the VCR), very few things are invented there. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything.
So I then asked myself, why has Western culture been so creative in the first place? I think one reason is the presence of a quintessentially Western phenomenon – the inventive outsider. Throughout the history of the West, a small set of alienated individualists - men (and they are almost always men) who avoided social norms, marched to their own drummer and synthesized existing concepts in a way that nobody ever did before them - was always present. At the very beginning of Western civilization, we find the founder of Western philosophy, Socrates and the architect of Christianity, St. Paul – two men of middle-class background who chose to live outside the mainstream. Going forward, we can add to this list polymath Leonardo Da Vinci, inventor Johannes Gutenberg, crackpot and monomaniac Sir Isaac Newton, amateur scientist Charles Darwin, inventor Thomas Edison, bicycle repairmen Orville and Wilbur Wright, amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Reed College dropout Steve Jobs. I could go on but it is at once obvious that no other civilization has produced such a long and stellar list of productive individualists. One reason why the West has so many is because it is about the only culture that celebrates this sort of people. Take one example from the film industry: the auteur who does it his own way from the very beginning and does everything himself is far more respected than the craftsman who dutifully worked his way up through the ranks of the studio system to be a director.
The reason why eccentric outsiders have created so much is because it is usually only an outsider who can put disparate elements together in a completely unique way – like the way Walt Disney did when he merged cartoon drawing with the new technology of motion pictures. Insiders typically create much less because they are too immersed in conventional wisdom to see the forest through the trees. Thomas Kuhn, in Structure of Scientific Revolutions, points out the fact that scientific discoveries are usually made by people who are inside enough to understand the problem but outside enough to be alienated from the accepted answers.
The negative side of the West’s tolerance of aggressive individualists, is that for every Steve Jobs, there are thousands of iconoclastic dropouts who will amount to nothing. These people are, by any practical definition of the term, losers. Read the ‘early years’ section of Steve Job’s Wikipedia page and tell me that the most likely trajectory his life could have taken would be that of a burned out hippie dude, bumming around Venice Beach. But this didn’t happen because Jobs got spectacularly lucky.
Needless to say, Amy Chen-style parents would not be very understanding if their child grew up to be like the Jeff Bridges’ character (The Dude) in The Big Lebowski. If she were Steve Job’s mother, Steve Jobs would not have become The Dude, but he wouldn’t have become the founder of Apple either. He would have likely been a moderately successful businessman. As a result, north Asia produces few Dudes. When comparing the West with the East, this is definitely a checkmark in the plus column for the East.
On the other hand, it is the fortune of the West that this tradeoff is worth making - in fact, spectacularly so. The long-term benefit to society of a very small percentage of creators is a million times greater than the incremental amount of resources eaten up by a small (but not insignificant) number of eccentric but useless parasites. And as a result, perhaps a little bit of hippy-dippy permissiveness in childrearing is a good thing.
