"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell

Fox

Mon, May 17 2010, 10:49 am

Okay, so here are a few of the things I was thinking as I read the book:

The concept of cultural legacy really struck a chord with me. To refresh everyone's memory, the examples Gladwell used were the sensitivity to insult that characterizes U.S. Southerners (they are largely descended from herdsman, who had to present a strong "face" to avoid having their property poached); and the problem of "mitigation" in aviation (Asian and some other cultures value deference to one's superiors to the extent that flight crews have difficulty communicating with the captain or flight control -- to the extent of causing plane crashes).

However, just as some elements of Asian are ill-suited to the cockpit, there are elements of Asian cultures that give them an advantage: the year-round element of rice production means that Asians have a "cultural legacy" of hard work -- in contrast to the cultural legacy of wheat and corn production, which follows a seasonal cycle.

So this made me wonder: what elements of frum culture serve us well and help our communities flourish and what elements might be holding us back. Let me clarify that I am not talking about halacha or hashkafa -- I'm talking about the cultural assumptions and habits that we have adopted over the years. Another question would be how our cultural assumptions have changed in the post-WWII United States, which has obviously offered a somewhat unique opportunity for Jews.

Tamiri

Mon, May 17 2010, 11:18 am

Fox wrote:

So this made me wonder: what elements of frum culture serve us well and help our communities flourish and what elements might be holding us back. Let me clarify that I am not talking about halacha or hashkafa -- I'm talking about the cultural assumptions and habits that we have adopted over the years. Another question would be how our cultural assumptions have changed in the post-WWII United States, which has obviously offered a somewhat unique opportunity for Jews.

Based on what I read here on imamother, in all seriousness, I think, for example, U.S. Jews have lost much of their edge. The Jews (remember the chapter about the lawyers in the 40s and 50s) did have an advantage: hunger to succeed, and thus the willingness to proceed where "white-shoes" dared not tread. We are now hobbled by another Jewish trait: it's all for the children. That, in many cases, is now working to the disadvantage of many brought up by U.S. religious Jewry: the kids are not as hard working (to put it mildly), expect life to be handed to them on a silver plate and believe that Hollywood movies are real life.
I personally was taught that there is no such thing as a stupid or lazy Jew. Um, yeah.
So, I am glad the author didn't continue into the third generation of successful U.S. Jews. Who knows that he may have found.
Other countries do not have the material advantage awarded to the Jews of the U.S., that's why I am singling that group out.

Fox

Mon, May 17 2010, 11:43 am

Tamiri wrote:

I personally was taught that there is no such thing as a stupid or lazy Jew. Um, yeah.
So, I am glad the author didn't continue into the third generation of successful U.S. Jews. Who knows that he may have found.

Boy, oh, boy! I had exactly the same thought! Of course, I had slightly mixed feelings about the examples; they were all Jews who started as relatively unobservant and become even more distant from Yiddishkeit as they experienced financial and professional success.

I'm not sure, though, if the problem is a lack of "hunger to succeed" or the fact that we can't quite decide how to define "success." On one hand, we say that we measure success in learning, middos, and yiras Shemayim. And we then prance out and act to the contrary: that "success" means financial success. I do think it's interesting that religious Jews seem less focused on professional prestige than the secular world. Other things being equal, the upper-middle-class doctor or lawyer is certainly respected, the millionaire garment manufacturer will probably have more practical status.

Tamiri wrote:

We are now hobbled by another Jewish trait: it's all for the children. That, in many cases, is now working to the disadvantage of many brought up by U.S. religious Jewry: the kids are not as hard working

You are absolutely right! I was rummaging my brain, trying to put my finger on it, but this is it!

We have tons of threads ranging from nursing to seminary, where the underlying issue is actually, "Am I a bad mother if I don't/do . . . .?" There's a vein -- no, an artery -- of real insecurity about where the boundaries lie.

What I notice, though, is that kids are increasingly being told both explicitly and implicitly, that their parents owe it to them to give them "all" -- at any cost.

In the Litvish/Yeshivish world, this has all gotten a little mixed up with the support of learning, too, so we have that added.

We seem to cultivate respect for the full-time learner and the brilliant businessman -- the "outliers," if you will. But we seem to heap disrespect on the middle-class professional or worker who learns when he can and supports his family in modest circumstances. That, of course, is the condition of the vast majority of us.

Tamiri

Mon, May 17 2010, 11:53 am

Fox wrote:

Tamiri wrote:

Fox, Outliers are not the full time learner OR the brilliant businessman. The Outliers are the ones on whom "fortune" shined, in addition to their natural talents. You can be a brilliant businessman but never make it if your stars don't align exactly on the correct day. That's the point I think he was trying to make. Of course, those 10,000 hours and being Asian help. Just like being Jewish used to help.
If you read a different book (and I can't think of any one off the top of my head) which revisits the sucess stories in their third or fourth generation, many times you will find that those descendants, blessed with every advantage BESIDES hunger, have gone to seed. Like a lot of our own youngsters today, whose accomplished parents are either paying for them to find themselves, or paying to have them do nothing useful with their lives.

Fox

Mon, May 17 2010, 1:09 pm

Tamiri wrote:

The so-called "brilliant" businessman is an outlier. Why? We identify him as "brilliant" because of his success. However, his success is actually due not simply to his intelligence or even his hard work -- but because of a confluence of demographic circumstance and hashgacha pratis. Even his hard work is a product of such circumstance -- Bill Gates and Bill Joy would not have been able to log the 10,000 hours they needed to master their discipline if they'd been feeding keypunch cards into a computer. Each of them just happened to have access to a terminal connection. So they deserve credit for being willing to log the 10,000 hours -- but putting in that same 10,000 hours working with keypunch cards wouldn't have prepared them in the same way.

The "learner as outlier" motif seems to me to be a very strong one in the yeshivish world, at least. Our schools have a very clear picture of how success builds on itself. For example, we are very concerned with how boys are taught Mishnayos and Gemara in the early years, and most schools attempt to assign experienced, charismatic rebbeim to those pivotal grades. In other words, we attempt to do the kind of "concerted cultivation" that Gladwell describes -- and the kind that produces unexpected opportunities.

However, I think it's important to delve a little into what a "hunger to succeed" actually meant for Gladwell's examples as well as the many similar examples we could probably point to privately. As Gladwell explains, the Jews who came as part of the immigrant surge in the late 19th/early 20th century were proficient in skills that just happened to be in demand. So while they worked unbelievably hard, they could easily see the progress they were making -- and the meaning of their work.

A "hunger to succeed" cannot be produced simply by cutting back on what we give our children. Our children have to be able to see that their work has meaning and that they will profit directly in some way -- that they aren't just spinning their wheels doing busywork.

And that's why the 2nd and 3rd generations often have to "find themselves" and pursue various spiritual paths. How are they going to improve themselves? Especially if their parents benefited from some of the demographic trends or hashgacha pratis help that characterizes "outliers." Even if they outstrip the "success" of their parents, what will it mean? A bigger house? A boat? Many affluent kids realize early on that they need to redefine success in some way. Of course, some are more successful than others, and we find the efforts of some to be more palatable. The Jewish trust fund kid who becomes a baal t'shuva will probably be better received in our circles than the kid who hies off to India in search of an ashram.