Yale Law Professor Amy Chua set off a firestorm in the world of parenting with her 2011 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. She said the book was a self-mocking memoir of how she strove to be a traditional strict Chinese mother to her 21st Century American daughters.
I did not read the book at the time, though I recognized a fellow traveler, a strict parent in this century is more counter-cultural than a hippie in Oklahoma in 1965. I did not think about the book again until February of this year, when I heard Chua interviewed by Bari Weiss on the Honestly podcast. The episode is here.
As I listened to the interview, I became very interested in her latest book Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations published in 2018.
Right from the Introduction, Chua made a strong case for the effect of tribal divisions within America, and how neglect and dismissal of tribal divisions led to disaster after disaster in America's wars and other foreign policy in the past half century. She also introduces the "tribe" that brought Trump to power: the peculiar American heresy known as the "Health and Wealth Gospel." She talks about one of her students who saw his family sucked into the strange Pentacostal Christianity that worships wealth and is devoted to Donald Trump.
Chua shows that when a small minority controls the majority of the wealth in a culture, the rest of the culture will turn against that minority, sometimes violently. In Vietnam during the time of the war, a Chinese minority of just one percent of the population controlled more than half of the wealth of the country. People of North and South Viet Nam were united in their hatred or the Chinese merchants. When America talked about making Viet Nam a capitalist nation, the majority heard America was backing the Chinese.
The Baathist minority under Saddam Hussein in Iraq was a minority with power that was hated by the entire nation. Iraq dissolved into a predictable civil war of Sunni against Shia after the American invasion, with the Kurds defending their territory in the north. But all factions agreed that they were going to get rid of the Baathist minority that controlled the wealth and the government under Saddam.
The book gave me a sad and useful perspective on the tribal forces behind America's military defeats over the past century. Chua also showed the tribal nature of Trump's path to power. Maybe because the book was written in 2018, the ending is more hopeful than her evidence warrants. Trumpism is quite alive and the Republican party is a cult. It's great they are out of power, but for how long?
First thirteen books of 2022:
Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen
A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll
Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson
1776 by David McCullough
The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss
Unflattening by Nick Sousanis
Marie Curie by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)
The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche
Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen
