The Triple Package (15 page)

This is certainly true of Asian immigrants, as evidenced by rates of substance and alcohol abuse. Asian American teenagers—and Asian Americans on the whole—have
dramatically lower rates of drug use and heavy or binge drinking than any other racial group in the United States. Asian American girls also have by far the
lowest rates of teenage childbirth of any racial group (around 11 births per thousand Asian Americans in 2010, as compared with around 56 for Hispanics, 52 for blacks, and 24 for whites). Because giving birth for teenage girls, and being convicted of a drug crime for teenage boys, are
so highly correlated with adverse economic outcomes later, Asian Americans’ impulse control in these domains contributes to their disproportionate success.

—

O
NE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE THINGS
about impulse control is that it transfers over from one domain of life to another.

Impulse control is like stamina. If you ran five miles every few days for several months, you’d build up stamina, which would allow you not only to run farther, but to perform all sorts of unrelated physical tasks better than you could before. As numerous studies have now proved, it’s the same with impulse control. If people are made to do almost any impulse-controlling task—even as simple as getting themselves to sit up straight—on a regular basis for even a few weeks, their overall willpower increases. Suddenly they’re stronger in all kinds of unrelated activities that also require concentration, perseverance, or temptation resistance.

Which is why stricter child rearing can make such a difference,
even when the forms of impulse control emphasized in a particular culture have nothing to do with getting ahead in school. Consider the Mormons.

—

M
OST PEOPLE KNOW THAT
Mormons don’t drink. As interpreted by the LDS Church, the Word of Wisdom—the Mormon “
health code” traced to an 1833 revelation—requires Latter-day Saints to abstain not only from alcohol, but also tobacco, coffee, tea, and of course drugs. Gambling, pornography, adultery, and abortion are considered evil. Premarital and extramarital sex is absolutely forbidden, “a
sin exceeded in seriousness only by murder and ‘denying the Holy Ghost.’”

Discipline and self-control are inculcated in Mormon children when they are very young. Mormon families spend
three hours at church every Sunday, with kids beginning Sunday School at age three. At fourteen, Mormon teenagers are encouraged to attend “seminary,” and many get up at five a.m. every day to attend an hourlong scripture study class before regular school starts. These efforts to raise “clean-living” children appear to be effective. According to the four-year
National Study of Youth and Religion, Mormon teenagers are less likely to have sexual intercourse, consume alcohol, smoke pot, or watch X-rated films than teenagers of any other faith.

For most male and many female Mormons, however, a central life-defining experience is the mission—a two-year stint in an assigned location that is basically impulse-control boot camp. The experience begins at a
Missionary Training Center; the flagship center is in Provo, Utah. There, young men and women spend up to two strenuous months learning languages, studying scripture, and drilling missionary techniques with “military efficiency.” (“What’s the difference between the MTC and prison?” runs a popular joke. “You can call home from prison.”)

Once on location, which can be anywhere from New Jersey to Ghana, missionaries dressed in suit and tie (or neat skirts) work
ten to fourteen hours a day, six days a week, cleaning house on the seventh. They receive no financial compensation; they must give up cars, movies, and romance. Most live in relative poverty and experience
constant rebuffs, rejections, or insults from the strangers they attempt to convert. “
The thing a mission does is teach you persistency,” says Gary Crittenden, a former CFO of American Express.

Another extraordinary feature of the Mormon mission is the “
companionship” requirement. Latter-day Saints are required to do their missions in pairs. Companions spend twenty-four hours a day together, eating, working, studying, praying, sleeping in the same room—not even allowed to take a walk or go to a store alone. For some, companionship turns into lasting friendship. For others, it is itself an exercise in impulse control. As one missionary put it, “
The idea of having a companion, at first, is pretty traumatic. You grow up in a society that stresses individuality and privacy for nineteen years and then . . . that all changes. You are constantly with someone else and this someone else is not of your choosing. In some cases, he is definitely not of your choosing.” In almost every case, companionship works for one or both missionaries as a way to monitor and encourage compliance with the mission’s arduous regimen.

The strictures of Mormon youth prove too much for some, but there can be no doubt that they translate into a great many sedulous Mormon adults. Mormon businessmen are well known for
not
playing golf,
not
having a beer at the firm barbecue, and
not
going out for even a one-martini lunch. They also refrain from many nonforbidden social activities, reserving their “free” time for church, community, and customs like
Family Home Evening, the Monday nights most Mormon parents set aside—religiously—to spend with their children.

Thus Mormons present a fascinating instantiation of the Triple Package. Here we have a group who believe they are literally God’s children—“
gods in embryo”—placed on earth to lead the world to salvation. They know their way of life is superior to the “
sea of moral decay” they see around them. Yet at the same time, in the United States, they remain marginalized, regarded with suspicion, persistently viewed as cultish, deviant, or “
creepy” (as Mitt Romney’s sons were repeatedly described). Several Protestant denominations have officially stated that they
do “not regard the Mormon church as a Christian church.” In a
2006 South Carolina poll, 44 percent said they believed that Mormons still practice polygamy; in a nationwide poll, 53 percent said they had “some reservations” about or were “very uncomfortable” with Mormon candidates.

Among many Latter-day Saints, these suspicions give rise to deeply conflicted feelings. On one hand, Mormons may long to refute their doubters, to fit in, to be seen as “normal” Americans. On the other, they want to preserve their identity as God’s “
peculiar people,” with their own distinctive beliefs, values, and practices. In the “
cognitive dissonance” that follows, Mormons sometimes present themselves with a
clean-cut, all-American image so exaggerated that many Americans actually find it peculiar—which of course Mormons aren’t sure they mind.

This inner conflict has been instinct in Mormonism ever since
Joseph Smith ran for president even while Mormons were being threatened with extermination. (
Orrin Hatch, the veteran Mormon senator from Utah, wears a Jewish mezuzah
—
a piece of parchment inscribed with biblical verses—around his neck, explaining, “I wear [it] just to remind me, just to make sure that there is never another holocaust anywhere. You see, the Mormon church is the only church in the history of this country that had an extermination order out against it.”) Throughout its history, as the sociologist and practicing
Mormon Armand Mauss describes it, the LDS Church has
vacillated between assimilation and retrenchment, between respectability and uniqueness.

Entire dissertations could be written (and undoubtedly are being written) on the inner Mormon turmoil revealed by a story in which a chaste, saintly, alcohol- and tobacco-abstaining young woman is seduced by a supernatural being who is simultaneously a blood-sucking vampire and a radiant angel—which is of course the plot of the mega-smash
Twilight
books, whose author is an observant Latter-day Saint. Such is the nature of Mormon insecurity: half in, half out; half normal, half strange; wanting acceptance, wanting to convert others; indeed, wanting to be accepted by the very people they want to convert.

In classic Triple Package fashion, the result among many Latter-day Saints has been an intensely disciplined drive to prove themselves through business success and other badges of esteem. “
As somebody who grew up in Utah . . . I have always felt like there was a little bit of a chip on the shoulder,” explains Dave Checketts, formerly the CEO of Madison Square Garden. “We feel like we’re really good citizens, good people, and misunderstood.” “
A big part of my drive,” says Checketts, “is this sense of needing to prove myself.” David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue, feels that “the Mormon Church is
one of the most misunderstood organizations on the planet” and says of his own intense discipline, “
It’s all about doing better than everyone else.”

Just as it was for the early Calvinists, whose work ethic Max Weber studied, success in business is for Mormons not only a way of proving the superiority of their values and way of life. It’s also a proof of their
divine favor. Harold Bloom was hardly exaggerating when he called Mormonism a “kind of
Puritan anachronism,” perhaps “the most work-addicted culture in religious history.”

—

A
SCETICISM HAS NEVER LOOMED
large in Judaism, but impulse control is without doubt foundational to the Jewish religion and to the traditional Jewish way of life.

The Ten Commandments could have been called the Ten Big Impulses to Control, and they were but a fraction of the hundreds of injunctions—
613 to be precise, according to Jewish tradition—given to Moses as everlasting
law to bind the Jewish people. Early rabbinic Judaism posited self-control as one of the highest ethical values. “
Who is strong?” asks the Talmud. “One who subdues his passions. As it says: ‘One who is slow to anger is better than a hero and one who has control over his will is better than one who conquers a city.’” According to Philo, the Jewish philosopher of the Hellenistic era, the Stoic virtue of
enkrateia
—self-control or self-mastery—was at the heart of the entire body of Mosaic law, and in this respect the
Jews were a model for all other nations: Moses “exhorted [the Jews] to show [
enkrateia
] in all the affairs of life, in controlling the tongue and the belly
and the organs below the belly.”

Over the long centuries, rabbinic interpretation and application multiplied the rules of Jewish law, until by the sixteenth century one abbreviated code—the
Shulchan
Aruch
—contained thousands of regulations governing every aspect of life, from waking until sleep. Exclusion and anti-Semitism may have intensified Jews’ habits of self-control in societies where their position was precarious. Immanuel Kant offered an account of Jewish abstemiousness along these lines in the late eighteenth century. “Jews,” wrote Kant, “normally do not get drunk, or at least they carefully avoid all appearance of it.” The explanation, he said, lay in the Jews’ “civil status,” which was “weak” and insecure. As a result, Jews needed to be circumspect, “for which sobriety is required.”

It’s true that American Jews of the nineteenth century, who were
largely German, often favored the assimilationist Reform movement, which repudiated most of the age-old strictures of Jewish law.
Circumcision, declared the leading Reform rabbi in America in 1885, was a “remnant of savage African life,”
the bar mitzvah an obsolete ritual. At an 1883 banquet celebrating the inaugural class of rabbis graduating from Hebrew Union College—the first Jewish seminary in the United States and a crowning achievement of the Reform movement—
the menu included littleneck clams, “Salade de shrimps,” and frog legs.

But the millions of Eastern European and Russian Jews pouring into New York beginning around 1890
brought with them an orthodox Judaism still committed to all the old restrictions. As described in a
1914 book about Jewish life, the strictly observant Jews in America’s new Jewish enclaves, like the orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe, still “regulate[d] every day in their lives, from the cradle to the grave, by the minute and comprehensive laws of the mediaeval codex,
the
Shulchan Aruch
.” This was the Judaism of the Pale and
shtetl
, where ghettoized Jews lived “
bound and shackled”—as one (Jewish) observer of their poor villages put it—by impulse-constraining rules they imposed on themselves:

[The Jews] tend even to forsake whatever pleasures Jewish law allows them. They are constantly placing new yokes upon themselves. They hide their natural impulses. They renounce the darker elements in their nature. They have ears only for the reading of the law, eyes only for scrutinizing sacred texts, voices only for crying “Hear, O Israel.”

Even the
Jewish Sabbath—which many Jews cherish as a family-centered day of rest—was a highly disciplined regimen of
self-restraint. Observance included hours of services and Torah study. If a family had a horse and wagon, they could not use it (because riding is forbidden on the Sabbath). Under finely nuanced rabbinic reasoning, recreation too could be forbidden. If, for example, Jewish children were lucky enough to have a river or lake nearby, they could not swim in it, because swimming might entail use of a raft, and a raft might need repair, and repairing the raft would be work—forbidden on the Sabbath.

In America, the core Sabbath ban against remunerative work became itself an acute form of impulse control—where the impulse being controlled was the urge to make extra money. In
What Makes Sammy Run?
, the popular 1941 rags-to-riches novel that became a long-running Broadway musical, a Lower East Side Jewish father is horrified when his son returns home on a Saturday with money in his hands:

“
I hadda chance to make a dollar,” Sammy said.

“Sammy!” his father bellowed. “Touching money on the Sabbath! God should strike you dead!”

The old man snatched the money and flung it down the stairs . . . . 

On top of the innumerable religious restrictions, typical Jewish American parenting in the first half of the twentieth century was a match for any Asian immigrant parenting today. Surprisingly early on, Jewish newspapers in New York began to record objections (from Jews themselves) to the pressures and after-school discipline being imposed on children—objections that sound eerily familiar to some of us. In 1911 a Jewish doctor wrote in the
Forward
: