Some thoughts after the Itaewon Halloween’s Day tragedy

The alleywaynext to the Hamilton Hotel, Itaewon, Seoul, photographed after the tragedy.

Two events happened to me in 1966 that now, in retrospect, I can see have helped shape my life.

I was eight years old.

The first event took place on 21 October. The Aberfan disaster. A colliery spoil tip above the south Wales’ village collapsed after heavy rain and  engulfed part of it, including a school. 109 children of more or less my age and 5 adults were killed in the school. In all, 116 children and 28 adults died in Aberfan.

I vividly remember learning about  the tragedy on the evening BBC television news. For some reason, I was at home all alone, which exacerbated the impact of the disaster. The room was dark, the only light was that coming from the black-and-white tv screen. Suddenly, as I took in the awful news, my bubble of childhood innocence burst.  I learned that life is tragic.

In fact, you could say that Aberfan was important because, for me, it was a small version of the primal scene that is especially central to Buddhism: Prince Siddhartha’s awakening to the reality of suffering. In the story, his father had sought to protect him from the awful truth,  and the prince was already in his late twenties when he is finally exposed to the reality of suffering for the first time. He witnesses three instances: someone very old, someone stricken with illness, and a corpse. Siddhartha was so deeply disturbed by what he saw that he realized he could not go back to his old coddled life. But he’d also been exposed to a fourth  sight: a wandering monk seeking spiritual freedom. It was this exemplary figure that helped him see what path he must follow.

I guess you could say that without being conscious of it, of course,  the discovery that late October day in 1966 that life included seemingly random and meaningless tragedies, and to people just like me, signalled the moment that I too out on my own ad hoc and decidedly less world-historically significant life journey in search of answers to why there is suffering. I seemed to be immediately aware that the answer was not  to simply ignore such awful events and carry on, which is another version of Siddhartha’s father’s goal, and one that society colludes in encouraging. The Aberfan disaster was clearly part of the totality of human existence, and needed to be included somehow in life’s meaning. At first, it seemed the Christianity in which I was brought up had the answers, but I eventually got disillusioned and began looking for alternatives, and I’m still looking.

But there was another momentous event for me in 1966, and this was also brought to me via television.  This life-changing event happened  about three month earlier, on 30 July. This was the day when England’s soccer team won the World Cup, beating West Germany 4-2 after extra time. It was a truly ecstatic moment!

Again, I remember it well. Immediately afterwards, I ran out into the garden, where all was sunlight, warm and bright, and started to kick around a football. In fact, I was so inspired that, there and then, I decided to take the game seriously, and soon was very good at it,  or at least, good enough to play right-wing for my schools’ teams up to the age of 18.  

Now, England winning the world cup was obviously a very very different kind of decisive moment to the one triggered by the Aberfan tragedy. This event, which seems in my memory to be wonderfully illuminated, awoke me to joy.

When I look back over my life I see it is arraigned along a dark line of tragic events unfolding relentlessly one after another - from Aberfan to, now the latest, Itaewon. But I also see a luminous line of glory and joy. It seems to me obvious that for a philosophy of life to be complete it needs to somehow incorporate both these responses to the world. You can’t have one without the other.  In fact, they define each other, are co-dependent, as exemplified by the Taoist symbol:  

Eventually, Siddhartha answered his question about why there is suffering and how to overcome it by discovering what in Buddhism are known as the Four Noble Truths. Here they are, as listed on the ‘Theravada’ website:

1. All beings experience pain and misery (dukkha) during their lifetime:
   “Birth is pain, old age is pain, sickness is pain, death is pain; sorrow, grief, sorrow, grief, and anxiety is pain. Contact with the unpleasant is pain. Separating from the pleasant is pain. Not getting what one wants is pain. In short, the five assemblies of mind and matter that are subject to attachment are pain“.

2. The origin (samudaya) of pain and misery is due to a specific cause:
   “It is the desire that leads to rebirth, accompanied by pleasure and passion, seeking pleasure here and there; that is, the desire for pleasures, the desire for existence, the desire for non-existence“.

3. The cessation (nirodha) of pain and misery can be achieved as follows:
   “With the complete non-passion and cessation of this very desire, with its abandonment and renunciation, with its liberation and detachment from it“.

4. The method we must follow to stop pain and misery is that of the Noble Eightfold Path (Right View. Right Thought. Right Speech. Right Action. Right Livelihood. Right Effort. Right Mindfulness. Right Concentration).

The problem I have with at least some versions of Buddhism is that they can suggest that to transcend suffering you also have to transcend joy.  Isn’t this what “complete non-passion” implies? 

Well, yes and no. There are certainly tendencies within Buddhism that push a rigid asceticism in the name of overcoming desire, and so seem to throw the baby of joy out with the bathwater of suffering. But other tendencies within Buddhism seem to be able to strive to accommodate both. For example, take these words of the Korean Seon  (Zen) Buddhist SongChol, who died in  1993, from the wonderful collection of his Dharma messages, ‘Opening the Eyes’:  

Everyplace we sit or stand is a golden cushion or a jade stool and we all dance to lively tunes amidst the beauty of nature. Lift up your eyes and look at the infinite great light that always pervades the universes. In fact, the universes themselves are this great light. So let’s join hands and move forward in this eternal light, for there is nothing but peace and freedom and joy and glory right before our very eyes.  

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It is striking that my two ‘epiphanies’ in 1966 came courtesy of television. Interestingly, the transfer of the information via technological mediation did not significantly diminish the emotional and personal impact on me of the events taking place far away. Of course, I was less affected than I would have been if I’d actually been present at the events that moved me. But I was still powerfully impacted.

Perhaps nowadays it’s different. Are people so thoroughly inundated with information or immured in ‘hyperreality’ that events communicated via the mass media no longer have such a visceral impact? The fact that the daily news programs continuously transmits bad news suggests otherwise. It also suggests that they are responding to a very directly emotional proclivity. Psychologists talk of a ‘negativity bias’ which makes us tend to see things in a detrimental light, while evolutionary psychologists suggest that this tendency derives from the time long ago when it was safer to expect a cave bear is lurking in the darkness of a cave rather than rush on in out of the cold.

We are the ancestors of people who erred on the negative appraisal of situations and thereby survived. But what thinking about my dual ‘epiphanies’ leads me to conclude is that we also have a ‘positivity bias’; we are also hardwired for the experience of emotional elevation, ecstasy and joy. And this means we are the descendants of humans with a pronounced capacity for such positive emotions, too. This is quite an emotional payload!

Image and Text Sources:

Itaewon photo: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2022/11/281_339362.html

https://www.theravada.gr/en/about-buddhism/the-four-noble-truths/

SongChol, Opening the Eyes, translated by Brian Barry, Seoul: Gimm-Young International, 2004, pp.122-123

Authority v Liberty. The curious case of South Korea

In my last post, I mentioned the censorship I have experienced in relation to the Chinese translation of my book, Seven Keys to Modern Art.  Last week, in my class here in Korea  with mainland Chinese students I brought it up with as much subtlety as possible. In the class, I discussed sociological approaches to modern art. As I am using Seven Keys as a textbook, and between them the ten Chinese and one Korean students have the Korean, English, and Chinese versions, they could compare editions. I pointed out the gap in the Chinese version between Barbara Kruger and Bill Viola, which is where Xu Bing should be. He’s gone because in my discussion in the book I refer to his shocked response to the repression in Tiananmen Square, which is still very much taboo in mainland China.

The students seemed very  surprised. But also understandably rather tight-lipped about the omission.

I taught them the word ‘censorship’.

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In the same class I showed the diagram above. It’s a rather good way of tracking the difference between China and the West, but also the unique position of the Republic of Korea. The West lies at the bottom right: ‘Individual Liberty’. China is up at the top right: ‘Collective Authority’. Hence the censorship.  South Korea is somewhere in between. It’s an experiment in ‘Collective Authority plus Individual Liberty’.  

The way in which these societies dealt with Covid helps to illustrate the differences. With its ‘zero tolerance’ attitude, China applied from the start its ‘Collective Authority’ model to the crisis. The West, by contrast, adopted an ‘Individual Liberty’ approach. South Korea dealt with Covid by mixing the two.

At first, ‘Collective Authority’ seemed the best option for everyone. The East Asian countries, being more attuned to this model, were quick to respond by introducing the necessary measures.  China went to lockdown. The Western nations panicked, because ‘Individual Liberty’ is so obviously inappropriate in such a crisis, and they too went for lockdowns as an extreme recourse.  South Korea managed to avoid lockdown, by contrast, but also  any extreme spread of the virus.  This is because with its unusual blend of ‘Collective Authority’ and ‘Individual Liberty’ it was able to steer a  middle course, epitomised by the skilful tracking of cases and the strict implementation of individual quarantines.

But with the evolution of the virus into the Omicron variant, ‘Individual Liberty’ has proven, rather surprisingly, in the long run a more robust social structure for dealing with the pandemic. China is now castrating itself by still pursuing the impossible goal of zero covid, even imposing lockdown once again in Wuhan, where the whole thing started. Only a society founded on ‘Collective Authority’ could work this way, that is, could be so rigid and maladaptive. Meanwhile, South Korea has segued to a situation in which the pandemic is confidently under control but in which people are still wearing facemask, because of the ‘Collective Authority’ component of this society. But it seems to me that the West has careened too fast away from the disagreeable experience of imposed ‘Collective Authority’  back towards a dangerous level of maskless ‘Individual Liberty’.  

In this context, the tragic  events in Itaewon, Seoul, over this Halloween weekend can be interpreted as an unfortunate unintended consequence of South Korea unique social blend, or social experiment. Inevitably, ‘Collective Authority’ and ‘Individual Liberty’ exist in uneasy tension. South Koreans tolerate a – to Westerners - very high level of group control, but they are also primed by Western ideals of ‘Individual Liberty’. The result in this particular case was a massive feeling of release amongst the young after the restrictions imposed during  the pandemic. But, ironically, their desire for individual liberty expressed itself in a very collective fashion!

Image source: http://factmyth.com/understanding-collectivism-and-individualism/