The Triple Package Read Online Free PDF Page A

quintessential “learning culture.” Yet many of the Ellis Island Jewish immigrants were barely schooled, having lived most of their lives in
shtetls
or ghettos in extreme poverty. Perhaps these unintellectual butchers and tailors transmitted to their children the great Jewish “learning tradition” through synagogues, Passover rituals, or the respect they accorded rabbis. Or perhaps not.
    Nathan Glazer says that his immigrant parents and many of their generationknew nothing of Jewish learning. The influential social psychologist Stanley Schachter made a similar point:
    I went to Yale much against my father’s wishes. He couldn’t have cared less about higher education and wanted me to go to a one-year laundry college (no kidding) out in the Midwest and join him then in the family business. I never have understood what this intellectually driven Jewish immigrant business is all about. It wasn’t true of my family, and I know very few families for which it was true.
    Indeed, the Jewish subgroup arguably most dedicated to and organized around the old tradition of Talmudic study is theultra-Orthodox Satmar community of Kiryas Joel, in Orange County, New York, which is one of the poorest groups in the entire nation.
    What is it about certain groups that makes their members, however poor or “uncultured,” seize on education as a route to upward mobility? It’s simply not illuminating to say that these groups come from “hardworking cultures” or “education cultures.” That’s one step away from saying that successful groups are successful because they do what it takes to be successful—and two steps from saying that unsuccessful groups are unsuccessful because they come from “indolent cultures” and don’t do what it takes to be successful.
    In short, education—like hard work—is not an
independent
, but a
dependent
variable. It’s not the explanatory factor; it’s a behavior to be explained. Successful groups in America emphasize education for their children because it’s the surest ladder to success. The challenge is to delve deeper and discover the cultural roots of this behavior—to identify the fundamental cultural forces that underlie it.
    —
    F OR ALL ITS VAST DIVERSITY, America has an overarching culture of its own—a very strong one. That’s why we hear so much about America’s worldwide “cultural hegemony” or how “globalization is Americanization.” Which raises the question of whether American culture is a Triple Package culture.
    Certainly it used to be. In fact, America was for a long time the quintessential Triple Package nation, convinced of its exceptional destiny, infused with a work ethic inherited from the Puritans, seized with a notorious chip on the collective shoulder vis-à-vis aristocratic Europe, and instilling a brand-new kind of insecurity in its citizens—a sense that every man must prove himself through material success,that a man who doesn’t succeed economically is a failure. Tocqueville observed all this when he described Americans’ “longing to rise.”
    But as we’ll discuss at length later in this book, America has changed, especially in the past fifty years. Today, American culture—whether high or low, blue state or red, blue collar or ivory tower—is much more ambivalent about, and undermining of, everything the Triple Package stands for. The overwhelming message taught in American schools, public and private, is that no group is superior to any other. In America, embracing yourself as you are—feeling secure about yourself—is supposed to be the key to a successful life. People who don’t live in the present are missing out on happiness and life itself. Whatever kernels of truth may underlie these propositions, the irony is this: America still rewards people who don’t buy into them with wealth, prestige, and power.
    In other words, there is a disconnect today between the story Americans tell themselves about how to think and how to