Thoughts on Tiger Mothers
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences.
- Amy Chua
This, right here, is something that Westerners are really bad at remembering. I wouldn’t say that it’s absolutely true; there are some things that are fun for amateurs. It is true of almost anything that’s worth doing, though.
The reviews for this woman’s book on Amazon are unbelievably mixed. As of this writing, it’s 33 five star reviews and 33 one star reviews, with about twenty spread between 2, 3 and 4.
The people who hate the book are really bad at saying why they hate it. A lot of the reviews paint her style of parenting with the broad brush of “emotional abuse” and leave it at that. Of course, they’re absolutely right. Many of the anecdotes she relates could be case studies of emotional abuse. That’s not the point. The point is that we should step back for a minute and re-evaluate our opinions about and labeling of this type of behavior, because they’re getting us nowhere.
A new species?
Readers of the evening paper, radio listeners, movie or TV viewers certainly constitute a mass that has an organic existence, although it is diffused and not assembled at one point. These individuals are moved by the same motives, receive the same impulses and impressions, find themselves focused on the same centers of interest, experience the same feelings, have generally the same order of reactions and ideas, participate in the same myths — and all this at the same time: what we have here is really a psychological, if not a biological mass.
From the book “Propaganda” by Jacques Ellul. Emphasis mine.
I just started reading this book, from 1965. Lately I am preoccupied by this notion, that groups of humans are literally a type of organism. I think it’s another philosophical concept that sits in most humans’ blind spots. We probably don’t like to think of ourselves as components in a larger biological machine.
But if you could talk to a cell, it would probably say, “I’m a cell, I’m surrounded by cells… nobody here but us cells!” I mean, it’s plausible that it wouldn’t notice it was in fact part of a dog.
A very thought provoking post. This is something that is very hard to acknowledge particularly, I would think, as an American. I would add that I think there are some organisms that are easier to be a part of than others. Take for instance the huge hulking monstrosities that are the Republican and Democrat parties, which are so large they pull people in with what one could almost call gravitational force.
It’s also interesting to note, given the time period during which this book was written, that the development of the internet since that time has allowed for the development of smaller, more agile organisms. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we have become single-celled, but there are certainly many alternatives to the evening paper and network television that were simply non-existent 40 years ago.
