Tim Stafford's Blog, page 26

How to End Slavery

Last week I went to see 12 Years a Slave, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It’s a harrowing portrayal of slavery in the American South. One of the galling features is the repeated church services in which Paul’s instructions to slaves to obey are read. Although there seems to be some historical exaggeration in the movie version–Master Ford was, according to the real Solomon Northrup, an exceedingly kind master–there’s no question that those verses were  regularly repeated to slaves. Their Christian sensibilities were used to control them.

For those who see Christianity as inherently conservative and repressive, Paul’s views on slave obedience are of a piece with the whole. For those of us who understand Christianity as fundamentally liberating and pro-justice, those verses are a puzzle–one that I, for one, generally prefer not to think about.

Any close reading of Paul will show that he is not actually pro-slavery, any more than he is anti-woman or pro-emperor. For example, he tells the Galatians that “in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith…. There is neither slave nor free… for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (3:26-28, also Colossians 3:11) He warns slave masters not to threaten their slaves, for both slave and master serve a Master in heaven “and there is no favoritism with him.” (Ephesians 6:9, also Colossians 3:25) In 1 Timothy 1:10 he puts slave traders in the same list with murderers, the sexually immoral, liars and perjurers.

If slaves and free are all one in the Messiah; if God shows no favoritism one over another; and if trading in slaves is the worst kind of immorality, then the highly hierarchical Roman way of thinking about slavery (and many other things) is undermined, to say the least. How can you own your brother or sister? How can you sell them? Tom Wright says that Romans could no more imagine life without slavery than we can imagine life without electricity–it was the way things got done. Yet there is clearly subversion going on. And it goes on even more powerfully whenever the church gathers. For, walking down the Roman street on the way to the ekklesia, the difference between slave and free is a chasm like the Grand Canyon. But once inside, there is no difference. They sit together, eat together, pray together, lay hands on each other, learn together as complete equals. They would never do this outside, but they always do it inside. When you have that kind of experience inside the church, how can you help thinking differently about the slave or master who walks out with you and down the street? In class-ridden, honor-obsessed Rome, the ekklesia was a revolutionary institution.

Yet Paul, while showing no respect for slavery, equally shows no interest in overthrowing it. Even if he thinks institutional change is impossible, he could at least betray the wish. He doesn’t. He tells slaves to obey, in very strong language. He tells masters to treat their slaves well. If they both do what they are told, slavery may last forever.

Is Paul conservative, then? Well, no. He believes that the present world is being turned upside down, and that it is being replaced by a new order that is ruled by the Messiah. In that order there is no slave or free. The God who freed the slaves from Egypt is not going to leave some of them in slavery in Rome’s outposts. All slaves will be freed under the new government. The question is, how do you get from here to there?

I think it is fair to say that Paul’s attention is focused on what happens within the ekklesia. It seems as though everything happening outside of that fellowship is just a passing and ephemeral reality for him. He, Paul, goes to prison unjustly, some of his friends are tortured or put to death, there are shipwrecks and famines and other mishaps, but he can barely be bothered to talk about all that because he wants to talk about the church. When its members are fighting or mistreating each other, that is a disaster worth discussing at length.

So Paul is miles away from our present-day approach to change. He believes in change completely, but seems disinterested in change that is based on institutional or coercive power. He believes in change that is implicit in the Messiah’s execution and resurrection, that has begun within the walls of the ekklesia, fueled by the power of the Holy Spirit, that will spread as those walls open out to cover the entire world. Not to mention that the Messiah will come back to call out those ekklesia to himself and then, with them, to rule.

That vision of change is precisely the pattern we see in Philemon, in which Paul writes his old friend in a letter carried by that friend’s runaway slave, Onesimus. Onesimus has become a Christian, and (in the process?) a very precious aide to Paul. But there is this little matter of his legal status. Paul sends him back–what courage and trust Onesimus shows, to go carrying the letter. Paul wants Philemon to free Onesimus and send him back to Paul unfettered. (Alternatively, he might want Philemon to give Onesimus to Paul, whereupon Paul would free him.) But that legal transaction–which Paul never actually mentions–is not at the urgent heart of Paul’s appeal. He wants the slave and his master to become brothers, exactly as Paul and Philemon are brothers. He begs Philemon to welcome Onesimus back “as you would welcome me.” (v. 17) He wants them to become partners (v. 6)–as unthinkable a relationship for slaves and masters as anyone could name. He wants them to share in the ekklesia.

And interestingly, he also himself longs to have that kind of relationship with Philemon. For just as a master controls his slave, so Paul, as Philemon’s benefactor (“not to mention that you owe me your very self” (v. 19)), could in Roman society order Philemon to do whatever he asks. He will not make that power play. It would be simpler and more direct, but it would bypass the more needful thing: love. (v. 9)

What about us, today? Can we, in the name of Christ, work to change institutional injustice? As reformers can we fight modern-day slavery, with its allies in sex trafficking, police and courtroom corruption, labor abuse? I feel sure Paul would say yes. For one, we are no longer in the Roman empire. Political power is widely democratized, and there are laws protecting human rights. “If you can gain your freedom, do so,” Paul advises slaves in 1 Corinthians 7:21. As opportunity is given to do good, we are certainly meant to do it. Regarding slavery, Christians did. It was abolished. A little late, but nonetheless.

All the same, Paul’s theory of change ought to challenge us to think bigger. We tend to think that practical and institutional reform is the only way to bring change. But Paul would surely want to enlarge our hopes.

After all, social reformers (many of them Christians, or inspired by Christian ideas) have been working hard for hundreds of years. Have they made progress? Yes. Are there signs that we will ever–let alone soon–reach our destination? No. We will never become the society we are meant to be by that route.

Paul’s grand hopes shine through his letters repeatedly. He believes in the coming kingdom of Jesus, and he knows he has been called to help found the ekklesia that presage it. That ekklesia in principle contains the material both for reform–for its members have their ideals stretched upwards and outwards–and something ultimate. ”And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters….Just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man…. We will be changed. ‘” (Romans 8: 28, 29; 1 Corinthians 15: 49-52)

Small Light

“It is easy to feel hopeless, but Syrians who were once an occupation army controlling Lebanon are now needy refugees in Lebanon, and Lebanese Christians have swallowed their resentment to serve them. This is God’s people growing to be more like God. It is a small light in the darkness.”

–Frances Fuller, publisher in Lebanon, asked about her hopes for the Middle East since the Arab Spring.

 

 

The Future of Books

In the February 17 & 24 edition of The New Yorker George Packer has a long, well-reported piece on Amazon and its impact on books. It’s an article every book junkie will love, full of angst over the future of book publishing, independent bookstores, and mid-level authors who need support (big advances) to do their work. Also lots of publishing gossip, some quite juicy.

The internet in general and Amazon in particular have greatly disrupted book publishers and bookstores. Packer contends that the highly secretive Amazon never thought that much of books in the first place, but saw the book industry as an opportunity waiting to be plucked, a gateway into internet commerce (and a rich database of customers). Amazon always wanted to be the everything store, and books were merely a convenient place to begin.

The thing about books was that they store well and are easy to ship, and there are far too many of them for any physical location to stock. Thus the internet is a far more efficient vehicle for selling them than are bookstores. (Even though the internet will never match the cozy environment that the best bookstores offer. But what are you buying, books or atmosphere? Amazon bet on books.)

The thing about publishing was that it was too comfortable. There was a lot of inefficiency. Book prices were padded, salaries were padded, expenses accounts were padded, Manhattan office rents were padded, egos were padded. It was ripe for serious challenge, or so Amazon thought, according to Packer.

One can blame Amazon for the changes in bookselling and publishing, but in my opinion Amazon simply accelerated the inevitable. The internet is a more efficient way to distribute books, and bookstores were bound to suffer. The publishing industry has, quite apart from the internet, been under competitive pressures that have led to huge consolidation, increased fascination with blockbuster bestsellers, less interest in editing, less loyalty to writers who are developing their craft, and other crass aspects of modern publishing that may be blamed on Amazon but are fundamentally part of the corporatization of publishing.

Nevertheless, Amazon has been and continues to be a force that has aided and abetted the decline of bookstores and of publishing, and these are surely to be regretted.

However, there are two other parties involved: readers and writers–and arguably, they are the parties that matter.

Start with readers. As a reader I love Amazon. I don’t buy many books for pleasure, I get them from the library. But in my work I am often buying books that would be practically impossible to find at even the best bookstore: books on biblical studies, history, philosophy, obscure and out-of-print books. I find them easily and instantly from Amazon. I also use Amazon as a tool of reference to see what is available on a particular topic. I send gifts of favorite books to family and friends–a huge savings of time, since I don’t have to go to the bookstore and the post office. When I travel, I load up my Kindle with e-books, some free, some not, so that I can have a small library available without breaking my shoulder every time I have to carry my suitcase upstairs. As a reader, I love Amazon.

Some people worry that an Amazon book universe is a flat universe, with uncountable books published with nothing to distinguish them:  no thoughtful editors selecting and promoting the best books, and few critics publishing book reviews enabling us to find and buy the best. So, they suggest, it will be a vast plain in which good books simply disappear in a swamp of self-promotion and drivel. I’m not sure. There are some pretty good blogs already reviewing books–my niece Jenny Brown, for example, publishes shelflove.wordpress.com in her spare time, check it out. And with the enhancement of peer-review sites like goodreads.com there are a lot of eyes out there reading and commenting. Also, the prize committees–Pulitzer, Booker, etc.–seem to be as active as ever and there are new prizes every time I turn around. The situation is far from perfect but I don’t think it’s hopeless, either. I still manage to find good books to read, don’t you?

As a writer, my feelings are more ambiguous. The destruction of the publishing industry and the bookstore industry has meant that my book sales are down. I don’t write blockbusters or best-sellers. (Wish I did.) For books like mine there’s little money for marketing, and anyway, marketing is now dominated by self-promotion on social media. If you’re good at this–and some authors are very good promoters–it’s all to the good. For me it’s more a disaster. I dislike self-promotion, and I don’t care to spend my life on Twitter. If a tree falls in the forest, is there any sound? That’s a parable for my books on the open market.

Also, I love good editing, but it’s become a very scarce commodity. Though truthfully, I’ve never found it very plentiful.

On the other hand, digital publishing in general and Amazon in particular have freed me from the gatekeepers. I found this very helpful in publishing Birmingham. I couldn’t get agents, let alone publishers, to read a single chapter. I think it was because my track record included several novels that didn’t sell. (You never really know why you don’t get a response to your emails.) In earlier times, Birmingham would have been put in a drawer and never seen again, until the grandchildren cleaned out the house. But I was able to publish it for minimal expense. I’m very proud of it. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve written. I’m glad that it’s available for people to read.

That is what writers ought to want, more than anything. Money is great, and celebrity is naturally desired, but a writer’s ambition has got to begin with the desire to be published. There’s a great line at the end of “Babette’s Feast,” the film based on the Isak Dinesen story: “Throughout the whole world sounds one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me the chance to do my very best.” For Babette, you may recall, that involved cooking one great thanksgiving meal for an audience that had no taste in food at all.

I gain some solace from the reminder that in the history of civilizations, there have been few times when a writer could make a living as a writer. Even as late as the nineteenth century some of the really astonishingly great writers scraped by on poverty wages or depended on their family. (George Eliot, for example.) Book publishers were also booksellers and they were hardly authors’ friends. Yet great literature was written, and great literature was published.

(So was drivel. In Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now Lady Carbury’s writing abilities are described as follows: “She could write after a glib, commonplace, sprightly fashion, and had already acquired the knack of spreading all she knew very thin, so that it might cover a vast surface. She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that the critics should say was good.”)

Don’t get me wrong, I am extremely grateful that I make a living as a writer. I am also grateful that I have been able to invest significant time and money in research, for The Adam Quest most recently, thanks to a good advance and the support of a foundation. Without time and money for interviews and research, some books just can’t be written. If publishing ends up utterly dominated by Amazon and its kin, those who make a living as writers will be those who are good at self-promotion and write books for wide audiences (romance, anyone? parenting?). Others will have to make a living in another way, by teaching, for example.

I would hate to have that choice put to me. But–do you know any poets? I do. They have been operating by these rules for all eternity. And there are some extraordinary poets.

 

Paul’s World: #3 Quotations from N.T. Wright

  Here are more quotes from N.T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. These have to do with the symbolic world that the apostle Paul sees as replacing the symbolic world of the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus.

Theology itself plays a new symbolic role in Paul’s worldview. It takes the place, within his revised worldview/symbolic universe/social imaginary (or whatever we want to call it), that had been occupied by more tangible things in the world from which he came.  [352]

First, the Temple….You are the temple of the living God, he says,: not to the Philippians he loved so much, not to the Thessalonians in the midst of their suffering and danger, but precisely to the recalcitrant, muddled, problem-ridden Corinthians. This is not, in other words, a sober judgment based on the noticeable holiness, or gospel-inspired love or joy, of this or that ekklesia. It is simply, for Paul, a fact: the living God, who had said he would put his name in the great House in Jerusalem, has put that name upon and within these little, surprised communities, dotted about the world of the north-eastern Mediterranean. Unless we are shocked by this, we have not seen the point. [355]

Their point was not so much that the old Temple was corrupt or wicked, though those who were running it might be, but precisely that the one God was doing the new thing he had always promised…. This, I believe, is at the heart of the theology of Acts itself, in which Jesus himself has become the place where, and the means by which, heaven and earth are brought together, so that the Pentecost-scene in Acts 2 takes the long-awaited place of a second-Temple scene in which Israel’s God comes back at last to live with and among his people. [356]

The holiness of the ekklesia comes to be, in itself, a central part of Paul’s positive symbolic world, and here is the reason: this community is the transformed new reality to which Paul saw the Jerusalem Temple itself as the advance signpost. [357]

…Paul’s point was not that there was anything wrong with the original promise or symbol. Far from it. When you have arrived at your destination, you switch off the engine and park the car, not because it has not done its proper job but because it has. It is eschatology, not religious superiority, that forms the key to Paul the apostle’s radical revision of the symbolic world of Saul of Tarsus. [367]

The final Jewish symbol to be examined here…. is scripture itself. ….Though scripture was of course put to many different kinds of use by the many varieties of Jewish life in this period, one central strand of these uses was to see scripture as the great, controlling story through which Israel understood its own existence: to see it, indeed, as a story in search of an ending, an ending whose shape and content would not be in doubt (the fulfillment of the promises, the coming of the Messiah and so forth) but whose conditions and hence whose timing, were open not just to doubt but to centuries of agonized searching and questioning. [373]

…Paul’s always-astonished awareness that when he worshipped the God of Israel he now knew that this God had a human face, that he had lived a human life and died a human death. The resacralization of the world begins with Jesus.

But it doesn’t stop there…. whereas the Stoic aimed at living “in accordance with nature,” what Paul envisaged was a radical transformation of “nature” itself–human nature, and the entire cosmos–by the powerful indwelling of the divine spirit. [378]

It turns out that some of the greatest, most central themes of Paul’s deepest teaching–those to do with Jesus the Messiah as the revelation of Israel’s God, as the place where God’s people were summed up and their story brought to fruition, as the one before whom, now, every knee was summoned to bow–grew visibly out of Jewish traditions; they were not, in other words, invented to match or to square off against, the imperial rhetoric. And yet they did in fact confront that imperial rhetoric at point after point. Jesus is “son of God”; he is “lord of the world;” he is “savior;” the worldwide revelation of his rule is “good news,” because through it “justice” and “peace” are brought to birth at last. He is the one who “rises to rule the nations.”

…As far as I can discover, one of the extraordinary innovations in the imperial claims of the Caesars was the production of a “salvation-history,” a thousand-year narrative designed, like the new streets in Ephesus, to lead the eye inexorably upward to the imperial glory. All those years of the republic were a preparation for… this! For the first time, the great Jewish narrative which had lain at the heart of the worldview of Saul of Tarsus, and still lay at the heart of that of the apostle Paul, found a story which matched it, so it seemed, and backed up its claim with an impressive public record. Paul does not mention this story explicitly, any more than he speaks of the imperial claim made by coins, statues and other obvious imagery. Yet we should not ignore the subversive nature of the retold Jewish story which undergirds so much of his writing. If this–the story of Adam, Abraham and Israel, climaxing in the Messiah!–is the grand narrative of the creator’s design for his world, then the grand narrative of Virgil, Horace and Livy, and the visual symbolism which went with those writings, cannot be true, or the ultimate truth. [382-3]

We are simply asking the question: what were the main symbols, and symbols-in-action, of Paul’s newly envisaged and constructed world? And we are about to find, large as life, on the basis not of a theological a priori but simply by asking this question, scratching our heads, and looking around, that the primary answer is the ekklesia: its unity, holiness and witness. [385]

The Messiah’s people are a single family, and must strain every nerve to make that a reality that goes all the way down into their hearts and minds. The way they will do that is by allowing the Messiah’s own “mind,” as worked out in his own astonishing career-path of “giving up” status and rights, to shape their own. [390]

Christian America

This excerpt from historian George Marsden’s latest book is worth reading if you want to understand the Christian right. He traces in a fairly brief fashion how an apolitical group became, during the Reagan era, highly politicized. The most interesting part, I think, is his analysis of how the Christian right mixes an absolutist puritanism with classic liberalism–usually without acknowledging or perhaps even understanding that the two streams do not really fit together. Thus the rhetoric may sound scarily autocratic, but actually works to defend certain freedoms. This rather dense paragraph sums it up:

The complex heritage of the evangelical religious right, as shaped, among other things, both by biblicist bornagain revivalism and broader principles developed during the eighteenth-century American enlightenment, helps to explain some of its paradoxes, apparent contradictions, and blind spots. The biblicist side is often absolutist and militant, invoking stark choices between serving the Lord of Hosts or the Baal of secular humanism. The enlightenment heritage allows militantly conservative fundamentalists to in fact affiliate with the wide coalition represented in the Republican Party and to participate in the give-and-take of practical politics, despite all the compromises that inevitably requires. In the strict biblicist view, the American nation can be seen as having forfeited any claim to God’s blessings and as being under judgment for its open sins, so that the only hope is to trust in Jesus to return to set things right. But the enlightenment heritage tells the evangelical religious right that the American principles of civil freedom, self-determination, and free enterprise are the best there are, and that evangelicals can therefore unreservedly embrace the American civil religion and condemn anyone who questions that America has a special place in God’s plan. The strictly biblicist heritage fosters a rhetoric that sounds theocratic and culturally imperialist, and in which a Christian consensus would seem to allow little room for secularists or their rights. The enlightenment heritage means that the leading motif in their politics is the necessity of protecting freedoms, especially the personal and economic freedoms of the classically liberal tradition. So when members of the evangelical religious right speak about returning to a “Christian” America, they may sound as though they would return to days of the early Puritans; yet, practically speaking, the ideal they are invoking is tempered by the American enlightenment and is reminiscent of the days of the informal Protestant establishment, when Christianity was respected, but most of the culture operated on more secular terms.

Fox News!

Another milestone in life: I appeared on Fox News this morning, talking in an interview format with Michael Behe, one of the scientists I profile in The Adam Quest. I think it went pretty well: I didn’t drool, nod off, or forget my thought in mid-sentence.

Here’s the clip–almost ten minutes:

http://video.foxnews.com/v/3203351374001/author-science-and-faith-arent-mutually-exclusive/#sp=show-clips

Philosophers and Atheism

Philosophy is one of the only academic disciplines where outspoken Christians form a significant and respected cadre. At the same time, according to this NY Times opinion piece, an unusually large number of philosophers declare themselves atheists. It’s an interesting and unusual situation, explored in an interview with one of the premier Christians in philosophy, Alvin Plantinga.

Plantinga says a number of things that make it worth your 15 minutes of reading time, but this particularly struck me:

G.G.: But even if this fine-tuning argument (or some similar argument) convinces someone that God exists, doesn’t it fall far short of what at least Christian theism asserts, namely the existence of an all-perfect God? Since the world isn’t perfect, why would we need a perfect being to explain the world or any feature of it?

A.P.: I suppose your thinking is that it is suffering and sin that make this world less than perfect. But then your question makes sense only if the best possible worlds contain no sin or suffering. And is that true? Maybe the best worlds contain free creatures some of whom sometimes do what is wrong. Indeed, maybe the best worlds contain a scenario very like the Christian story.

Think about it: The first being of the universe, perfect in goodness, power and knowledge, creates free creatures. These free creatures turn their backs on him, rebel against him and get involved in sin and evil. Rather than treat them as some ancient potentate might — e.g., having them boiled in oil — God responds by sending his son into the world to suffer and die so that human beings might once more be in a right relationship to God. God himself undergoes the enormous suffering involved in seeing his son mocked, ridiculed, beaten and crucified. And all this for the sake of these sinful creatures.

I’d say a world in which this story is true would be a truly magnificent possible world. It would be so good that no world could be appreciably better. But then the best worlds contain sin and suffering.

A Healing World

I have a nasty cut on the end of my “bird” finger. I got it grating cheese  on a wonderful grater, a gift from a friend, that is really sharp. You haven’t lived until you have grated cheese with a really sharp grater! You also haven’t cut yourself! Grater cuts are nasty. It’s been almost a week and it’s still red and intermittently painful. No, it’s not infected.

Even though it’s irritatingly slow to heal, and occasionally really painful, I’m not worried about it. I know it will heal. Why? Because I’ve had cuts before. They heal. My body is designed to heal. In fact, all life is designed to heal. Yes, things go wrong, but in general, this is a healing universe. I have had hundreds of cuts, and every single one of them has healed.

A few days ago my daughter told me she admired how calmly I responded to apparent crises. I told her that it may be partly my temperament, but it’s also a product of experience. Things work out, most of the time. If people have good character qualities–persistence, politeness, hard work, and so on–things almost always work out, not immediately but eventually. When you’ve lived long enough, you gain a certain amount of confidence in that. Yes, things go wrong, dreadfully wrong, and that’s awful. Confidence doesn’t require blindness. But most of the time, confidence is warranted–in the long run. So you don’t panic.

I’m reading through the Psalms again, and I must say that nothing else in literature so captures the psychological and spiritual ambiguities of this. Many of the psalms are downright jubilant. They are brilliantly thankful–whether observing the weather, the crops, the state of the nation, or whatever–and this thankfulness is directly linked to God. Yes, they are confident, and that confidence comes because they know and believe that God is powerful and God is good.

But other psalms are extremely woeful. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (22:1) They just can’t believe that things have gone so bad. They scream protest. They cry out in misery. But here’s the thing: they protest because they believe that God is powerful and God is good. They are sure something is wrong. It’s not supposed to be this way! How can it be this way?

Thus, whether jubilant or woebegone, they believe that things should work out. In the short run, obviously they don’t. In the long run, they still believe. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t protest. They would just quit.

There’s no proof in the world that they are right. Reading the history of the Jews, you can make the case either way. On the downside, the Holocaust. How can anybody claim ever again that God is good? On the upside, the continued existence of the Jews, their Scriptures, their spiritual descendants (for that is what we Christians aspire to be), their impact on the world. Hope is in the balance.  The only way to cling to it is by faith, which is not blind at all but hopeful in its reading of the evidence. “In the long run” really does depend on what kind of universe we live in, and what kind of God watches over it.

Sexuality and Success

Ross Douthat has a long and eloquent blog post regarding sexual and family moralism. Essentially his assertion is one that I made years ago in my columns for teenagers: promiscuous sexuality may be harmless for cultural elites in Hollywood and elsewhere, but it is devastating to the lives of the poor and the less-educated. Ironically, divorce and single parenting are rare among the well educated and rich–ironically because as a class they are shocked, shocked that anybody still holds to old-fashioned moralisms. But divorce and single parenting have utterly devastated the poor and lower-middle classes. And surely those well-insulated cultural elites bear some responsibility.

Of course, it’s more than sexuality and marriage. There are other important causes of devastation: the imprisoning of young men in huge numbers, the loss of industrial jobs, the failure of schools, the insane cost of health care, the epidemic of drug use. But since all the data I’ve seen show a very tight linkage between marriage and success, and an even tighter linkage between divorce and single parenting and disaster, there’s plenty of reason for people who genuinely care about the poor to take seriously divorce and single parenting and all the sexual scripts that lead up to them.

The Success Trifecta

The Tiger Mom, Amy Chua, is at it again. She and her husband Jed Rubenfeld have written a book about the qualities that make some groups successful in America.  (Here’s a piece they wrote summarizing their idea for The New York Times.) Mostly they are thinking about the usual suspects, i.e. Chinese, Indians, Koreans. But they add others, most interestingly Mormons.

Their idea is that it’s not ethnicity, it’s culture–and in particular a Trifecta of qualities: Superiority, Insecurity, and what they call Impulse Control but which we might as well call The Work Ethic.

Security and Insecurity are paradoxical. On the one hand, you need to believe that you have The Right Stuff, because of your ethnic heritage, your IQ, or whatever. (God’s Chosen People may also enter here.) On the other hand, you need sufficient Insecurity to always feel you must try harder than everybody else. That’s where Work Ethic comes in: it’s not enough to believe you must try harder, you must actually try harder.

These are all classically attributes of immigrants–at least, of some immigrants. They are highly motivated because they have taken an incredible dare and it is incredibly hard, particularly if they are learning a new language. If they didn’t believe in themselves, if they weren’t incredibly motivated and didn’t work incredibly hard, they probably couldn’t do it at all.

I find it interesting to think about these qualities not just in ethnic groups but also in families. For instance, my family. There was certainly a moderate amount of Superiority. I remember my dad telling me that it would be an insult to get a B in school. He meant, for us. My mother passed on a sense of Superior Scottishness: Scots were tougher than other people. Insecurity? Not much on the Scottish side, but some coming from my dad’s growing up very poor. There was a bit of chip on the shoulder. Most fundamentally, though, a lot of work ethic. My mother insisted on taking us out to the fields to pick grapes when we were little, just so we would know what hard work is. She picked with us. It was about 150 degrees. Hard work has never been hard for me, or for my brother and sisters.

A word of caution: this approach can turn into racialism. There are other factors that lead any group to experience success: educational base, network of supportive contacts, financial capital, cultural capital. This Time Magazine article is critical of Chua on this basis. It’s a helpful corrective.

Nevertheless, I think Chua is touching on something important, just as she did in her Tiger Mom book on parenting. There are inspirational, aspirational aspects of living that may make all the difference in families and even in individuals. Yes, there are other factors at play, often societal. But the Success Trifecta focuses on qualities that can be inspired or caught. A good teacher, a determined grandparent, a Boy Scout Leader, a pastor may foster them in others.