MBTI. Some more thoughts

A screen-grab from the website ‘16Personalities’ - one of the most popular in South Korea for learning about MBTI.

In the previous post I discussed young Korean people’s enthusiasm for MBTI personality profiling and argued that one of the reasons why MBTI has become so popular here is that it provides the possibility of organizing the messy reality of human identity in an efficient manner that draws attention only to positive character traits.

In this post I want to dwell on the word ‘efficiency’ and its role in Korean society.  I think there’s no doubt that visitors to the Republic of Korea are likely to be struck by the feeling that this country is highly efficient. I don’t think I’ve ever waited for a subway or mainline train because it’s late. The country has the fastest broadband internet connection.  When Koreans decide to emulate something foreign they always seem to do it with greater efficiency.

The contrast between the contemporary inefficiency of Western European societies (the ‘Wild West’, as I like to call it nowadays) and the ROK’s obvious efficiency was especially striking during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the recognition has stayed with me even after things are moving back to some kind of ‘normal’.

This ‘efficiency’ is all the more striking because in the early days of  contact with the West and the initiation of modernization first under the Japanese, and then under the watchful eyes of the military government between the 1960s and 1980s, it was precisely the nation’s inefficiency that was criticized – both by foreigners and by Korean modernizers. Ahn Sang-ho (1878 – 1938), a prominent politician and independence activist under Japanese colonial rule, one of the first Koreans to emigrate to the United States who then in 1926 returned to Korea and engaged in anti-Japanese activism for which he was imprisoned - an experience that led to the ill health that caused his death - deplored Koreans’ parochialism, depravity, laziness, and dependence.

Ahn called for a radical reform of social behaviour through education and self-cultivation, but the spirit of modernization he admired in the West, which had led to the exponential expansion of the West’s wealth, power and influence, and the establishment of a democratic political system, was also fundamentally driven by what the German sociologist Max Weber (1864 – 1920) termed ‘bureaucratization’.  This  involved the organization of Western society around functional, formal, rational systems with well-defined rules and procedures. It required hierarchy, specialization, training, impartiality and managerial loyalty. A society moved through rationalization towards greater efficiency and effectiveness, and this in its turn meant that the citizens would reap the benefits in terms of greater security and wealth. But Weber warned that excessive reliance on and adherence to rules and regulations also inhibited initiative and growth. The tendency is for a managerial-bureaucratic society to treat people as machines rather than individuals. In other words, the system is de-humanizing. There is the danger that emotions and feelings are not incorporated into the way a bureaucratic society is run. The impersonal approach to the organization of a society shunts these dimensions of human existence to the margins, dismissing them as obstacles to social efficiency. For Weber, the systematic ‘dis-enchantment’ of the world was the price of rationalization. Technological expertise  replaced priestly vision, and rationality and efficiency replaced mystery and magic.

Is it too much to say that in its avid desire to join the ranks of modernized nations, the ROK adopted a version of the Western  bureaucratic model, one that from the 1970s onwards proved to meld very effectively with elements of pre-modern Confucianism, such as social hierarchy and the sense of the community as a collective rather than made up of individuals? Is it too much to suggest that young Korean’s weakness for MBTI today is a side-effect of the excessively bureaucratic version of capitalist modernization adopted by the ROK, manifested on the level of questions pertaining to personal identity?

Another screen-grab from 16Personalities.

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In the previous post I mentioned the cultural theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, members of the so-called Frankfurt School and exponents of ‘critical theory’ – critical’ being the key word. For these left-leaning German Jews, writing in the wake of Hitler’s rise in Germany and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, its seemed that modernization in general was fundamentally unhinged. They believed the seemingly ‘open’ and democratic United States was simply more insidiously ‘fascistic’ than the obvious culprits. Capitalist modernity was synonymous with the degradation of human life to a level where the experience of alienation from the world and from each other was pervasive. Building on the social theory of Weber and others, they diagnosed modern society as having shrugged off one metaphysical system for another – religion for rationality. 

In the more recent writings of the Frankfurt School sociologist Hartmut Rosa, which I  have also mentioned in an earlier post, the uncompromisingly bleak prognosis of Adorno and Horkheimer cedes to a more nuanced perspective on the price of modernization. Alienation is still the norm, but Rosa stresses that modernization is also unique in seeking multiple remedies for alienation. One such remedy is art. Others include pop music and getting drunk or high -  anything that can perhaps deliver the antithesis of alienation, which Rosa calls the experience of  ‘resonance’. This benign world-relating to which Rosa refers is fugitive, structureless, and inherently invisible. “[R]esonance is not an echo, but a responsive relationship, requiring that both sides speak with their own voice”, Rosa writes in Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019). It is precisely because of the anti-structural properties of resonance that it is so highly valued and desired, because ultimately what is at stake is our profound yearning for a relationship to the world that is without hierarchy, divisions, and boundaries,  in which we feel a deep sense of sharing, intimacy and harmony, and where all people and things are equal.  Rosa’s choice of the term ‘resonance’ is largely determined by its anti-structural nature, and indicates that benign relationships with the world involve responsiveness on both sides – of the subject and the world. For Rosa argues that “resonance appears not as something that first develops between a self-conscious subject and a ‘premade’ world, but as the event through which both commence”.  The experience of resonance can therefore only potentially occur when there is “a relation between two bodies that are at once open enough for a relationship while at the same time remaining sufficiently stable and closed so as to ‘sound’ at their own frequency or ‘speak with their own voice’.”  

Rosa sees all people in developed countries as living lives mainly of alienation, and considers this to be primarily because modernity is inherently about aggressive control. As Rosa puts it in his most recent work to be translated into English,  The Uncontrollability of the World (2020): “Modernity has lost its ability to be called, to be reached” becausewithin in it “[w]e are structurally compelled (from without) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things – segments of world – within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliably controlled.”  Rosa sees four dimensions to modernity’s obsession with guaranteeing maximum control which thwart the possibility of achieving resonance: the world is made visible and therefore knowable by “expanding our knowledge of what is there”, the world is made physically reachable or accessible, manageable, and the world is made useful. As a result, the price of achieving a historically unprecedented degree of control is that the modern subject exists mostly in a condition of profound alienation, inwardly disconnected from other people and from the world.  

It seems to me that the contemporary Republic of Korea is especially prone to this rage for control, and that the craze for MBTI is one manifestation of this overwhelming tendency which is an intrinsic part of the modernization process through which the ROK has gone at breakneck speed. As Rosa writes: “Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself.”  

In a future post I will consider how MBTI can also be understood within a broader Korean historical and cultural context that predates Westernization. I  will also explore how in the West the alientation of which Rosa writes plays out in terms of a lack of the very secure identity sign-posts that MBTI provides Koreans, and  is causing so much trouble. Perhaps the South Koreans may be recognizing something important we in the West are not…...

References

The image at the beginning of today’s blog is from: https://www.16personalities.com/country-profiles/republic-of-korea 

Max Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy was described in Economy and Society, published in 1921. 

Hartmut Rosa’s books are Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, translated by  James C. Wagner, and published by Polity Press in 2019, and The Uncontrollability of the World, also translated by  James C. Wagner, and published by Polity Press in 2020..