The Triple Package (21 page)

My parents always said that a person can lose everything, but what’s inside his head stays there. I had to acquire an education, they said, because our enemies could take everything away from us but that. Little by little, as I became aware of who the enemies were, I began to understand.

In her moving memoir,
The Watchmaker’s Daughter
, Sonia Taitz (again, a second-generation survivor) writes:

When college ended, I had fears of going back to Washington Heights, my mother’s onion-potato kitchen and my own set of pans. I didn’t want to be sent to the wrong line—the death line, then heaped in a pile. I wanted to strive, to win.

One of Hass’s respondents, a television scriptwriter, remembers:

My mother raised us to be self-sufficient, prepared, and success-oriented because she was afraid . . . we wouldn’t be able to take care of ourselves in case something like the Holocaust happened again. We had to do well to protect ourselves, more than to make ourselves happy.

On top of this insecurity, another was layered: survivors’ children frequently describe a pressure to do well in life in order to redeem their parents’ hardships, to make good their sacrifices. One study summarizes this attitude as follows: “
They felt it was up to them to bring joy, pride, and pleasure into their parents’ lives. This obligation to make parents happier through their own lives was described by all participants. . . . The adult children described feelings of constant pressure to fulfill goals that parents had set for them.”

If this burden was in some ways typical of second-generation immigrants, it was especially acute in the case of survivors’ children. This was so not only because of the intensity of their parents’ suffering. A “
need to resurrect their lost families” ran deep among many survivors. Their children were somehow expected to replace the family members whom the Germans (or Poles or Ukrainians or others) had murdered. Children were often named after the murdered; parents would impress on them a “strong need to make up for the loss of their deceased family members by telling them such things as ‘you are all we have left,’ while pointing out similarities to those relatives who perished.” To quote just two second-generation survivors:

I was not David Greber, but my father’s brothers Romek and Moishe and Adamek, and his father David; my brother wasn’t Harvey, but
Herschel, my mother’s beloved brother, or Aharon, her father; my sisters were named for our grandmothers and aunts Sarah and Leah and Bella and Molly, loved ones our parents last saw when they . . . were being separated for transportation to camps from which they never emerged. Representing six million dead is a grave responsibility, and a terrible burden for a child to carry.

I wondered what I could do in my life that would even register. . . . At times, my life seemed to be not my own. Hundreds of people lived through me, lives that had been cut short in the war. . . . My parents, too, were living through me. They saw in my life the years they had lost in the war and the years they had lost in emigrating to America. My life was not just another life, I thought often when I was a child, it was an assignation.

And yet despite these impossible-to-meet expectations, despite the need to suppress their own impulses, survivors’ children repeatedly describe their peculiar heritage in terms not of victimization, but of pride. A corollary of the much more famous “survivor’s guilt,” it turns out, is survivor’s superiority. As another survivor’s child told Hass:

I make a differentiation between Jewish survivors and Jewish nonsurvivors. I always felt almost proud that my parents were survivors. Perhaps I thought they were better Jews because of all they had sacrificed and been through. I always felt I was better than other Jews. I felt proud, almost as if
I
was there.

Epstein reports a similar comment from one of her interviewees:

I may have said
my parents were in concentration camps
calmly, smoothly, but in my ears the sentence rang like a declaration of
loyalty. It put me squarely on the side of “those people,” far away from the complacent, untouched Americans—Jews or Gentiles—who seemed to be so quick to make assumptions about things they did not understand. I answered their pity or embarrassment or confusion with pride.

Taitz expressed a sentiment along the same lines:

My father and mother were both concentration camp survivors. Not victims—survivors, people who had looked death in the face and rebutted it. . . . I never thought of them as weak, but as God-like warriors themselves, however wounded.

Thus, in the children of Holocaust survivors, we find the complete Triple Package, if in a strange and painful guise. Indeed, reading descriptions of this cohort, you’ll find almost express Triple Package terminology: the “
sense of superiority” that many survivors’ children have; the “
lingering insecurities” that drive them “toward educational and occupational success.” Out of this combined superiority and insecurity came an almost compulsive need to work, to persevere, to achieve: “
Permeated by an intense drive to build and achieve, the home atmosphere of fighter survivors was filled with compulsive activity. Parents forbade any behavior that might signify victimization, weakness, or self-pity. Pride was fiercely held as a virtue, relaxation and pleasure were deemed superfluous.”

—

I
T’S FITTING TO CLOSE THIS CHAPTER
with the possibility of group decline. In 2012,
Ron Unz, former publisher of
The American Conservative,
assembled striking data that, he argued, demonstrated a recent “dramatic collapse in Jewish academic achievement.” Using
admittedly imprecise surname-based analysis, Unz estimated that Jews dropped from more than 40 percent of U.S. Math Olympiad top scorers in the 1970s to 2.5 percent since 2000. From 1950 to 1990, Jewish high schoolers made up roughly 20 percent of the finalists in the prestigious, nationwide Intel Science Talent Search; since 2010, only 7 percent. In the Physics Olympiad, Jews accounted for 25 percent of the top scorers as recently as the 1990s; in the last decade, just 5 percent.

If Jewish academic performance is declining, whether or not as dramatically as Unz says (
many have criticized his methodology and claimed his data exaggerate), this drop-off would throw a wrench in a belief held by lot of people: that Jews do better academically for the simple reason that they have higher IQs. By contrast, a decline in Jewish performance would be wholly consistent with the theory of the Triple Package.

The Triple Package and claims of higher Jewish IQ are by no means mutually exclusive. If it were true that Jews had a higher mean IQ—which has not been established
*
—that would feed directly into the Jewish superiority complex, reinforcing their Triple Package. But higher IQ couldn’t by itself explain Jewish success. To repeat: study
after study has proved that
IQ is not a complete predictor of success. IQ without motivation lies fallow. Drive predicts accomplishment better than IQ, and the Triple Package generates drive.

But drive, unlike IQ, is something a group can lose in a single generation. And if the rise and fall of past successful groups in America is any guide, Jews are long overdue for a fall.

Immigrant success in the United States is almost always a two-generation affair. For most immigrant groups, including Asians, Africans, Hispanics, and Afro-Caribbeans, decline sets in at the third generation. For example, “
first- and second-generation Asian students outperform whites, whereas there is no performance difference between the third-generation Asian and white students.” All this is exactly what the theory of the Triple Package would predict: assimilation and success weaken the insecurities and other cultural forces that drove the first and second generation to rise.

Today, the majority of Jews in the United States are
third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans. Most are the children of lawyers, doctors, bankers, or other white-collar workers, relatively
secure both economically
and in their identity as Americans.
Bellow and Roth, who wrote “Jewish American” literature, with predominantly Jewish characters speaking in Jewish voices, have given way to
Matthew Weiner, who created
Mad Men
. No longer the outsiders their immigrant forebears were, today’s affluent American Jews should be ready to follow the seemingly inevitable Triple Package trajectory into decline—
not unlike the mid-twentieth-century WASP establishment that
Mad Men
depicts.

But it’s possible that because of the Jews’ unique history, their Triple Package is less dependent on immigrant status and more durable even in the face of wealth. In no other group has the coupling of a superiority complex and insecurity been so core to its historical identity. In America today, Jews may be part of the economic and
cultural elite,
but the memory yet lingers of Jews just as affluent and assimilated in Weimar Germany. And while Jews may no longer fear persecution in the United States, Israel—with which American Jews often feel
an almost ethnic identification—remains surrounded by
220 million people many of whom deny its right to exist and some of whom openly call for its annihilation.

Perhaps the best evidence that Jews are still insecure is the consistently apoplectic reaction to any suggestion of Jewish decline. By contrast to WASPs, who seem to accept their plight almost cheerfully—time to trade in the sailboat for a canoe!—Jews don’t seem ready to throw in the towel yet. There are no books with titles like
Cheerful Money
: The Last Days of Jewish Splendor.
On the contrary,
Jews are insecure about losing their insecurity and as anxious as ever about their population, their future, their religion, their identity.

From this point of view, looking at math scores or science competitions for evidence of Jewish decline may be misplaced. Concentrating on science and math would have been perfectly logical for American Jews throughout much of the twentieth century, when they had less English proficiency and faced greater barriers to success in fields like law, politics, or publishing (just as East Asian immigrants focus on science and engineering today). It bears remembering that Jews in America top the charts not only in terms of standard metrics like household income or net worth or even Nobel Prizes. To a degree shocking given their minuscule population percentage,
Jews are also among America’s preeminent poets and jurists, directors and journalists, comics and comic book artists, opinion leaders of both the left and right.

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.

AMERICA

W
E 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.

—

I
T’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.

—

B
UT 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 called 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.