Is Kim Jong Un Preparing for War?

‘Who wants an Americano?’ Ordering coffee, DPRK-style.

Today’s blog title is borrowed from a scary recent article (January 11th) by North Korea experts Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker on the respected website 38 North. In the first paragraph the authors write:

The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950. That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war. We do not know when or how Kim plans to pull the trigger, but the danger is already far beyond the routine warnings in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo about Pyongyang’s “provocations.” In other words, we do not see the war preparation themes in North Korean media appearing since the beginning of last year as typical bluster from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

A key reason for the heightened concern was the 9th Enlarged Plenum of 8th WPK Central Committee, which met in late 2023 (shown in the photograph above). The Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party, reporting on the Plenum, announced the following:

For a long period spanning not just ten years but more than half a century, the idea, line and policies for national reunification laid down by our Party and the DPRK government have always roused absolute support and approval of the whole nation and sympathy of the world as they are most just, reasonable and fair. But none of them has brought about a proper fruition and the north-south relations have repeated the vicious cycle of contact and suspension, dialogue and confrontation.

If there is a common point among the "policies toward the north" and "unification policies" pursued by the successive south Korean rulers, it is the "collapse of the DPRK’s regime" and "unification by absorption". And it is clearly proved by the fact that the keynote of "unification under liberal democracy" has been invariably carried forward although the puppet regime has changed more than ten times so far.

The puppet forces’ sinister ambition to destroy our social system and regime has remained unchanged even a bit whether they advocated "democracy" or disguised themselves as "conservatism", the General Secretary [Kim Jong Un]  said, and went on:

The general conclusion drawn by our Party, looking back upon the long-standing north-south relations is that reunification can never be achieved with the ROK authorities that defined the "unification by absorption" and "unification under liberal democracy" as their state policy, which is in sharp contradiction with our line of national reunification based on one nation and one state with two systems.

The DPRK claims that as the goal of unification has been made impossible by the United States, and the South is merely its ‘puppet’, there is no point in pursuing it any longer. Since the Plenum, it has therefore formally abandoned unification for the first time. This is the worrying bit for Carlin and Hecker. It does seem to signal a new and dangerous low, especially when seen in the light of recent rapprochement between the two Koreas (and the United States). During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Inter-Korean relations had been gradually improving, despite occasional hickups. In 2000 there was an Inter-Korean Summmit during which the ‘June 15 South-North Joint Declaration’ was adopted. In 2007 another Inter-Korean Summit adopted the ‘Declaration on the Advancement of South-North Relations, Peace and Prosperity’. One tangible sign of this was the construction of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex, which we can see from a local (fortified) hill on a clear day. There, in a bizarre expansion of capitalist entrepreneurial spirit, South Korean companies were permitted to build factories and warehouse and employ cheap North Korean workers. In 2018 two summits in close succession took place, during which Kim Jong Un crossed the border into South Korea and the President of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, successfully brokered the signing of the ‘Panmunjeon Declaration’. This led to an agreement to facilitate further advancements in inter-Korean relations and to establish permanent peace on the peninisula, which included a pledge by the North to aim towards denuclearization via the dismantling of a nuclear test site. There was also the first North Korea-US summit in Singapore with President Trump, who also visited Panmunjeon.

In retrospect, this whole chain of seemingly auspicious events seems to have been little more than an extended publicity campaign on both sides, or more charitably, a case of wishful thinking on the side of the South and the United States. For it seems clear that the North never intended to fulfill its ostensible pledges, or would only do so if the South and the United States went much further than they reasonably could towards ‘normalizing’ relations. For example, ‘denuclearization’ meant very different things for each side.

Over the past five years, North Korea has scrapped the entire agreement. A sign of the souring of relations was the fact that Gaeseong was closed temporarily by South Korea in early 2016 as a response to North Korean missile tests and then immediately permamently shuttered by the North. It’s now a ghost town. North Korean nuclear tests and its development of long-range missiles has grown apace. North Korea is now ignoring telephone calls from South Korea across the multiple Inter-Korean hotlines, which have been a key channel through which to defuse tension.. Key political changes outside the DPRK have also prompted its sea-change; in the South there is now a much more hawkish President who no longer sees any point in being accommodating to Kim Jong Un like his predecessor, and in the United States, Biden has reversed the (ludicrous) ‘buddy’ diplomacy initiated by Trump..

But it seems, fortunately, that not many other NK watchers agree with Carlin and Hecker’s dire, quasi-apocalyptic, warning. As an article posted on BBC online  (23rd January) informs us, other experts note that the country is apparently due to reopen to foreign tourists this month, and has also sold so many shells to Russia it is probably not in a strong position to launch a serious attack. Economically, the DPRK’s is a basket case; in 2022 its economy shrank for a third consecutive year, and the nation is classed as one of the poorest countries on earth (the ROK is the 10th largest global economy). Despite the display of fancy weapons during the numerous military parades, and the firing of of expensive missiles into the sea, the numerically huge North Korean army is poorly equipped and would be no match for the South Koreans and their American allies.

The bombastic rhetoric evident in North Korean media is primarily aimed at the domestic audience, and so obviously shouldn’t be taken at face value. If you read  Rodong Sinmum’s report on the Plenum one immediately gets the general idea. Here’s an extract from near the beginning of the very long article:

Thanks to the outstanding leadership of our Party and the indomitable efforts of our people intensely loyal to it, precious ideological and spiritual asset was provided to dynamically promote the development of the state in the new era, a scientific guarantee was established to definitely set the goal and direction of the new year’s struggle and accurately attain them and the mightiness and invincibility of our great state were strikingly proved by entities of the rich country with strong army.

In a nutshell, we achieved epochal successes in providing favorable conditions and a solid springboard for further accelerating the future advance in all aspects of socialist construction and the strengthening of the national power through this year’s struggle, not merely passing the third year of the implementation of the five-year plan that we had planned.

Years after the Eighth Party Congress were recorded with unprecedented miracles and changes, but there had been no year full of eye-opening victories and events like this year.

‘Epochal success’! It’s all total bullshit, of course. The disjunct between what is publicly pronounced by the only newspaper of the DPRK’s Workers’ Party and the grim reality is truly mind-bending, or gut wrenching.

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Since the end of the Korean War, the term ‘unification’ has always been ambiguous. “Unified’ under which of the diametrically opposite systems? The Korean War began when the North invaded the South with the goal of unifying Korea by force. This has always remained its intention, despite claims to the contrary. Kim Jong Un says as much by protection his regime’s intentions onto the Republic of Korea by claiming its goal is “unification under liberal democracy.” But, actually, he’s right. How else could real unification happen except through political as well as economic union?

No one I’ve talked to in the South over the years – people of all ages – believe unification is a real option. It has long been a fiction neither side really believes in. It’s said that if the North’s regime collapsed and the South took over, like West Germany which absorbed communist East Germany after the end of the Cold War, it would swiftly bankrupt the South. The economic disparity between the two Koreas is far, far greater than between the two Germanys. But so too are the social disparities; South Korea has the fastest broadband connection in the world while North Korea doesn’t even have the Internet (for reasons of social control).

One prosaic reason for the North Korean announcement having less visceral impact than it would once have had is the fact that very few Koreans on either side of the DMZ remember a time when the Korean peninsula actually was united., and if they do, it was because it was a Japanese colony not an independent nation. Many of the graves around where we live are for Koreans born in the North who wanted to buried within sight of their homeland. My wife’s father escaped from Pyeongyang as a young man, fought in the Korean War, married a South Korea and never learned what happened to the family he left behind. Before his death, he tried and failed to find relatives during the family reunions organized since 1985 – the last one was in 2018. These reunions wer part-and-parcel of the thawing of animosity between the two Koreas. For his generation, the loss of ‘unity’ was felt as a very personal level. But Kim Jong Un was born in 1984, and so he has no direct experience of a time when there was one united Korea, nor do most North and South Koreans today.

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In the United States it is also seems that, most obviously for MAGA supporters and QAnon conspiracy theorists, facts are of little importance in framing public and private discourse,. But at least there are alternative narratives within the reach of every citizen. But in North Korea there is just the one narrative. All any North Korean citizen knows is the fairy story the Party tells. Which is why the punishments for accessing alternative narratives, via South Korean tv show and music, for example, is punished severely, and there is no Internet. Human Rights Watch’s report for 2023 writes:

 The North Korean government does not permit freedom of thought, opinion, expression, or information. All media is strictly controlled. Accessing phones, computers, televisions, radios, or media content that is not sanctioned by the government is illegal and considered “anti-socialist behavior” to be severely punished. The government regularly cracks down on those viewing or accessing unsanctioned media. It also jams Chinese mobile phone services at the border, and targets for arrest those communicating with people outside of the country or connecting outsiders to people inside the country.

But the disturbing fact is that even in a country that enshrines freedom of speech in its constitution, people often seem more content when there is only one story to choose from. Anxiety and insecurity (and therefore the potential for change and self-transformation) come when doubt sets in and one questions what one hears and sees. Such doubts are a direct result of encountering alternatives and having to make choices. But the unprecedented access to information made possible thanks to the Internet has not led people to become more open to and comfortable with different narratives. Instead, it often makes them even more insecure. They are overwhelmed by a tsunami of varied and often contradictory narratives, and in defense are inclined to withdraw into ‘siloed’ information zones.. They wrap themselves beneath a comfort blanket comprised only of what conforms to the narrative which makes them feel secure..

Amazingly, it seems a fairy story can trump lived reality. Or, lived reality is all too often experienced through the fairy story. This is sobering evidence of the extent to which we humans exist not primarily in relation to the direct input coming ‘bottom up’ from our senses but to our ‘top down’ memories, prior knowledge, and social conditioning.. Understandably, we all crave certainty, and the role played by often uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or complicated facts in furnishing this state is, so it seems, only marginal.

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And finally, to return to the likelihood of war here on the Korean peninsula, but also, potentially, on a much bigger scale..

As the authors of the 38 North article point out, it’s possible that North Korea will engage in some kind of specific provocation, like when they shelled Yeonpyeong island or sank the ROK navy ship Cheonan in 2010.  But as they also write, mad as it may seem, the regime could now be seriously contemplating a tactical nuclear strike. They remind us that ‘North Korea has a large nuclear arsenal, by our estimate of potentially 50 or 60 warheads deliverable on missiles that can reach all of South Korea, virtually all of Japan (including Okinawa) and Guam. If, as we suspect, Kim has convinced himself that after decades of trying, there is no way to engage the United States, his recent words and actions point toward the prospects of a military solution using that arsenal.’

Oh, dear.

Then again, Kim Jong Un and his cronies surely know that a nuclear strike would be signing their own death warrants, even if they have very deep shelters to hide in. They are not a death cult like Hamas and the Jihadists. They do not believe in Paradise. At least, not in one that transcends this world and awaits them when they die a martyr’s death. Kim and Co. already have their ‘paradise’ on Earth. It’s called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and you can read all about it in the Rodong Sinmun.

NOTES

The image is sourced from: https://m.en.freshnewsasia.com/index.php/en/localnews/44185-2024-01-03-03-18-17.html

The 38 North article can be read at: https://www.38north.org/2024/01/is-kim-jong-un-preparing-for-war/

The BBC article is at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68052515

The Human Rights Watch data is at: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/north-korea

 The Rodong Sinmun article, ‘ Report on 9th Enlarged Plenum of 8th WPK Central Committee’, is available at:

https://kcnawatch.org/newstream/1704027054-512008976/report-on-9th-enlarged-plenum-of-8th-wpk-central-committee/

The end of the year (or one of them)

North Korea’s Juche calendar for 2010.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche_calendar#/media/File:North_Korea_(5015886634).jpg

It's interesting to consider the similarities and differences between South Korean and British attitudes to the Christmas holiday that has just passed. As in my homeland, some Koreans will have celebrated it as a religious occasion, going to church and so on. After all, 28% are now Christian. Nevertheless, I’m sure even the faithful are likely to have embraced the event for what it now truly is:  a celebration of consumer capitalism. But one of the great solaces of living here is  that Christmas is a far less gaudy obstacle to surmount than it is back home. One has to endure the usual execrable Christmas-themed pop music in all the cafes, but life does not ground to a halt under the weight of Santa and his toy-and-commodity laden sleigh as it does in Great Britain.

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I’m living in a country when there are two New Year’s day each year.The latter is approaching fast, while the former isn’t until what in the former’s calendar is called February 10th. But last year it was on 22nd January. This is because the traditional Korean calendar is ‘lunisolar’, that is,  calculated in relation to the cycles of the moon not the sun.

It used to be that way in Europe too. The shift in the arrangement of time away from the moon to bring it closer to the more regular cycle of the solar year occurred under the Roman Empire in 46BC when it was mandated by Julius Caesar – hence its name, the ‘Julian Calendar’. In 1582, the “Gregorian Calendar’, named after Pope Gregory XIII, was introduced. This is still the one we use today. (The main change was in  the spacing of leap years to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long, which even  more closely approximates the 365.2422-day of the ‘solar’ year.)  But it wasn’t until as recently 1752 that the beginning of the year was officially moved from March 1st to January 1st.

All this history pertains, of course, to Europe alone, or at least it used to. Pre-globalization, in pre-modern Korea as in  the other Chinese influenced countries of East Asia,  a lunisolar calendar was traditionally employed called the Dangun calendar. In South Korea, this still remains the basis on which the dates of  holidays and commemorative events are calculated, such as the Buddha’s birthday and Chuseok. So, South Koreans essentially live according to two significantly different  systems for organizing the passage of time over the course of a year. Like so much else, this reflects the nation’s efforts to absorb Western culture while maintaining ties with indigenous and regional tradition.

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Also note that the universally agreed-upon conventions for calculating when to begin counting the years is welded solidly to Christianity. It’s 2024 next year because Jesus Christ was born 2024 years ago according to the Gregorian calendar.  Hence the fact that the convention is to date events as BC – ‘Before Christ’ – and AD – ‘Anno domini.’  This means that every time we use the normal system for structuring time, we are tacitly placing the Christian religion at the centre of our timekeeping. Critical awareness of this rather obvious bias is why we are now inclined to write BCE – ‘Before the Christian Era’ – and ‘CE’ – “Christian Era.’  But this subtle shift in nomenclature only very marginally decenters Christianity.

Whoever controls the measuring and naming of time, controls society, which is why those in a hurry to change it, also change the calendar. After the French Revolution  of 1789 AD (in the Gregorian calendar) a ‘Republican Calendar’ was adopted, the aim of which was to liberate the citizens of France from tutelage to the timekeeping of the royalist Ancien régime and the bane of Christian religion. But such was the chaos of the times that the leadership could never agree when Year 1 actually began, and so it was regularly amended! Once a convention as practical and vital for social interaction as the calendar is deep-rooted it proves impossible to uproot. Imagine the confusion if, say,  the critical race theorists or another so-called ‘wokeist’ factions sought to shift the organization of the calendar to better reflect their pressing concerns.

It was in a similar attempt to forge an independent and ideologically controllable timekeeping system that in 1997 North Korea adopted a calendar known as the Juche calendar. Year-numbering begins with the birth of the first leader, Kim Il Sung, which is 1912 in the Gregorian calendar, and so is called Juche 1 in the Juche calendar. This means that by my calculation we’re now living in Juche 123, and soon will be in Juche 124, although not until April 15th, Kim’s birthday.  The DPRK, at least officially, has therefore abandoned both the traditional lunisolar and the Western solar calendars. But in practice, there are 3 New Years every year, as North Koreans apparently recognize the Western New Year, the Lunar New Year, and the Juche New Year. This seems rather greedy. But whichever New Year it is they all begin with the same obligation: you must first lay flowers at the bronze statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il at Mansudae Grand Monuments in Pyongyang, and statues sited elsewhere throughout the nation.

We can assume with some certainty that the hope for a brighter or better New Year, according to all three calendars, is extremely slim for the children of today’s average North Korean parents,  or even those of the elite. However, through adopting a perverse version of historical consciousness that flattens the past to the mere dozens of years since  1912,  the regime instills in the people a model of history in which the Kim ‘dynasty’ assumes absolute power over past, present, and future. The goal is to  delude them into believing that their children’s better and brighter future is guaranteed – but only if they accept repression by the current regime.  For someone to actually believe this brutal canard must require an extraordinary level of cognitive dissonance. But probably only as elevated as the dissonance required for an American to believe Donald Trump should be the next President of the United States!

NOTES

For more on celebrating New Year (or Years) in North Korea, visit: https://www.uritours.com/blog/north-koreans-celebrate-new-years-3-times-in-one-year/

Decay

The picture above was snapped recently while out walking the dog. What you see is a detail of a metal signboard that has been corroded by the weather and invaded by ivy tendrils. How long has the signboard undergone this attrition? Difficult to say, but probably not that long, and the only reason it’s still there is because it belongs to an abandoned property and so no one has gotten round to removing it.

One reason I took the photograph is because It’s unusual to find such time-worn surfaces here in South Korea. Everything looks new, that is, without a history. Why is this? This question is especially interesting to me because I find surfaces like this that carry the random textures of time very poignant and aesthetically pleasing. But Koreans, on the whole, don’t seem to have a sensibility attuned to enjoying such surfaces. Why?

Koreans seem to have a different sense of time, or of how quickly the ‘past’ becomes the ‘old’.  In this context, the word ‘old’ implies the moribund, redundant, diminished, and lacking in economic value. In short, there’s nothing appealing about being ‘old’. Is this why almost all Koreans dye their hair black as they age? As grey hair is a primary signifier of being ‘old’, it’s not something a society bent on the ‘’young’ and the ‘new’ wants to display. In fact, one could say that Koreans  strive very hard to erase any signs of age – both in themselves and their built environments.  The lifespan of  a new building  is deemed to be around thirty years. I will never forget the day ten years go when some young acquaintances of my wife said they lived in an ‘old’ apartment. When I asked when it was built, they said, in the 1980s! Koreans always buy new cars regularly. Vintage clothes and second-hand goods in general are not appealing. They don’t want something ‘used’ or, as the current euphemism has it, ‘pre-loved’ (ugh!)

One reason for the animus against the past is that for Koreans it is perceived as traumatic. The first half of the twentieth century was a disaster for their country. The Korea of the second half of the century experienced rapid economic progress, but while this economic development brought immense benefits, it also, in a sense, inadvertently consolidated what Japanese colonial rule had begun: the severing of modern Korea from its rich and unique past.

Where I come from, old weathered surfaces are common. We live surrounded by tangible traces of the past in our built environments, with stones and bricks which endure for centuries. Our ‘modernization front’, as the Swiss philosopher Bruno Latour describes it, advanced much more slowly than here in Korea. The Industrial Revolution was, by comparison, an ‘Industrial Evolution’. It  began tentatively in the mid-eighteenth century in England, and so the replacement of the ‘old’ by the ‘new’, the superseding of what was deemed obsolete and redundant, occurred over a much longer period of time and has been far less total. Korea’s economic ‘miracle’ only goes back three generations. It also occurred in what was virtually a tabula rasa – a ruined country decimated by colonial rule and war. After 1953 and the cessation of fighting, there literally wasn’t much ‘old’ Korea left standing.

The westernizing modernization that South Korea embarked upon is premised on the idea that history has a single and developmental direction heading from the past through the present to the future. Consequently, the people of the present must escape the pull of the past on the journey to the future. As Bruno Latour writes in a context that assumes a western reader but which when read here seems to speak directly to the South Korean situation:

What had to be abandoned in order to modernize was the Local…….It is a Local through contrast. An anti-Global. …Once these two poles have been identified, we can trace a pioneering frontier of modernization. This is the line drawn by the injunction to modernize, an injunction that prepared us for every sacrifice: for leaving our native province, abandoning our traditions, breaking with our habits, if we want to ‘get ahead,’ to participate in the general movement of development, and, finally, to profit from the world.

For a nation bent on modernization, the Local is equated with the ignorant, the antiquated, the redundant, the valueless. With failure. In this sense, we can perceive the worn surface pictured above as a sign of the Local that is abandoned because it carries the stain of an archaic past that must be erased as society moves forward into the better future.   And, in a rapidly modernizing country like South Korea, ‘the archaic past’ can be very recent history - just a few years ago.

But this doesn’t of course mean that modern-day Korea has no past. What it means, however, is that this past can only exist as pre-packaged and scrubbed clean heritage. ‘Old’ historical buidlings are often modern recreations, like Gyeonbokgung Palace in Seoul, which is a kind of ‘zombie’ palace, in that it has all been recently rebuilt and therefore seems lifeless – although people love to go there dressed up in rented pretend hanbok costumes and use it as a backdrop for their selfies. In my experince, historical buidlings in Korea mostly lack aura - by which I mean, a distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and is generared by them. But this might just be because I’m not Korean. Or, it might be because aura isn’t something that can be consciously produced or manufactured. In relation to built structures, it’s a kind of spatial resonance that is associated with the time-worn, the random, the unproductive, the neglected.

The contemporary Korean animus against the ‘old’ is rather surprising, however, insofar as South Korean society still also clings to the conventions of Confucian age-hierarchy, which means different forms of language are necessary when talking ‘up’ to older people and ‘down’ to younger. It’s normal for Koreans to say in English that someone is a ‘junior’ or a ‘senior’ in relation to them, which sounds odd to westerners.  One of the first questions a Korean will ask you is your year of birth; this is so they know if you’re a ‘senior’ or a ‘junior.’ They also venerate their ancestors. And yet…..

*

How to have a living relationship with the past? One way is to consciously live with it’s traces. Without them, how can one exist in anything but a shallow present? This might have been sufficient when the future seemed to be a golden invitation. Today, it is not. So, we end up stranded in a present divested of both the appeal of the Local and the Global.

Bruno Latour’s discussion in the book from which I have quoted, unfolds within what he terms the ‘new climatic regime’, by which he means the crisis caused by humanly-engineered climate change. Latour argues that the old binary of the ‘attractors’ Local and Global which dominated the modern period (and determined South Korea’s modern identity) cannot permit us to confront the challenges of the Anthropocene. Instead, these poles need to be   linked to a third, which Latour calls the ‘Terrestrial.’ By this, he means the ‘attractor’ of Planet Earth itself.

It seems to me that living surrounded by time-textured and humanly-made surfaces is one important part of being Terrestrially-minded. These traces remind us of our finitude. Ultimately, they are memento mori. They show us that everything decays and passes away.

 NOTES

 My quotes come from: Bruno Latour, Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime, translated by Catherine Porter (Polity  Press, 2018)

Mimicking America

Today is Halloween, and here in South Korea young people will be celebrating. I snapped this rather sad-looking photograph recently at our nearby ‘dog café’ which has installed the typical Halloween merchandise for its clientele, who come from the apartment towers of greater Seoul to give their dogs a run-around in a safe countryside setting, complete with piped K-pop music, a swimming pool (for the dogs),  and comfy chairs and cups of coffee (for the humans).

This time last year, there was tragedy in Seoul when huge numbers of people gathered to have fun on Halloween and 151 were crushed to death  in a narrow alley in Itaewon. This year, there won’t be any tragedy there, because people will steer clear of the area and the police will be much more vigilant. But in this post I want to ask a simple question:  ‘What the Hell are South Koreans doing celebrating Halloween?”

Let’s start with some history.  What is Halloween? The History Channel explains:

The tradition originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints. Soon, All Saints Day incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows Eve, and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a day of activities like trick-or-treating, carving jack-o-lanterns, festive gatherings, donning costumes and eating treats.

And this is what the website of an (American) company called Gourmet Gift Basket informs us about Halloween’s metamorphosis into a modern-day (and for Gourmet Gift Baskets, very lucrative) event:

American colonists are responsible for initially bringing Halloween to the United States. Most of the colonists were English Puritans who celebrated Samhain before traveling to their new Country. Although the Celtic religious traditions had long been replaced by Christianity, many of the old practices remained. Influenced by a variety of cultures, the Halloween traditions in the American Colonies began to meld and change.

In the New World, All Hallow’s Eve became a time for “play parties”, which were private parties thrown to celebrate the harvest. Many dressed in costume and told scary stories. These first Halloween parties helped shape the history of Halloween into the celebrations we have today!

In the mid-1800s, Irish immigrants came to the United States, bringing their Halloween traditions with them. This included dressing up in costumes, asking their neighbors for food and money, and pulling pranks in the evening on Halloween. Americans started doing the same thing, which eventually turned into what we now know as trick-or-treating. However, it wasn’t until recently that treats became more common than tricks.

For Example, In the 1920s, rowdy pranks had become expensive and costly, especially in major cities. Over time, cities and towns began organizing tame, family-oriented Halloween celebrations, which eventually helped reduce the number of reported pranks. Once candy companies began releasing special Halloween-themed candies, our modern idea of “trick-or-treating” was born.

Halloween, as we know it today, is one of our oldest holidays. It wasn’t always celebrated in the United States, but it has become an important and fun part of our culture. So, we can’t think of a better way to celebrate than by sending Halloween gifts. Because at GourmetGiftBaskets.com, it’s what we do best!

I remember as a child in England in the 1960s also enjoying Halloween. But we didn’t do the ‘trick-or-treat’ thing. We used to play ‘Murder in the Dark’, a game with a fabulous name but whose rules I can no longer remember. I seem to recall knowing that Halloween wasn’t something that we traditionally celebrated in England. I certainly didn’t know back then it originated from Ireland (even though my mother’s family were Irish immigrants); in fact, I didn’t realize  it had Celtic roots until I started researching this post. Back then, I vaguely sensed Halloween was an American import, which is closer to the truth: despite the ‘Celtic’ gloss, Halloween is obviously an overwhelmingly American thing, and this is why young South Koreans also celebrate it.

Halloween is, one could say, a bizarre dimension of the pervasive and hugely successful cultural imperialism of the United States of America.

Actually, this is one of the reasons why living in Korea has been relatively easy for me, a Westerner. As a Brit growing up in Eastbourne, a small seaside town on the south coast, I discovered I shared this imperializing experience with my future Korean wife who was growing up in northern Seoul.

When I was sixteen, I brought a pale blue sweatshirt with the logo of the University of California on it. Why? Because it was cool. It symbolized something glamorous.. I took to wearing Levi jeans, which I had to make a pilgrimage to a shop in the nearby and more cosmopolitan town of Brighton to purchase  (I still wear Levi’s – in fact, by very good fortune there’s a Levi’s store in the nearby Lotte Outlet shopping complex!).  Back then, I listened mostly to American music (although we Brits had our fair share of pop stars) and watched mostly American tv and movies. But to call this influence ‘cultural imperialism’, as my left-leaning and inherently anti-American adult mindset encourages me to do, fails to confront the fact that what I’m referring to is more like a ‘romance.’  If I’ve been colonized, it’s because I wanted to be colonized.  

For the British, this romance began during World War Two (when the American GI’s were ‘over paid, over sexed, and over here’) and was propelled by a bullish Yankee dollar and overwhelming American confidence in their nation’s destiny to be guardian of the ‘free world.’ For my wife and South Koreans, the romance began after World War Two and went into turbo-drive after the Korean War. Nowadays, South Korea is by far the most Americanized East Asian country.

So, what is so ‘romantic’ about America? David Hockney, the British Pop artist emigrated to California in 1964 and later wrote: ‘Within a week of arriving….in this strange big city, not knowing a soul, I’d passed the driving test, bought a car, driven to Las Vegas and won some money, got myself a studio, started painting all in a week. And I thought: it’s just how I imagined it would be.” ‘Just as I imagined it would be.” I know what Hockney means! New York City was ‘just as I imagined’ when I moved there in 1983 (I stayed for three years). America was so familiar because we’d absorbed  it through the mass media. We’d absorbed it willingly and easily because it was so appealing. America seemed so free, so unburdened by the past, so unlike staid, repressed, grey England. It is this promise of freedom that we all desire by becoming ‘trainee’ Americans. I recall  when I lived in New York having very strongly the sensation that everything was potentially within my reach, whereas in England it had felt many things were not, due to class, and my small-town background. Being ‘American’ meant nothing less that becoming truly modern and free.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived in Tel Aviv as a very immature eighteen year old going to work on a kibbutz, was a big Coca-Cola sign written in Hebrew script.  This still sums up for me the pull and reach of American culture. It seems so easy to translate into every world language.  It’s a kind of cultural Esperanto. But how does it succeed in being so democratic? Because it is the lowest-common denominator? American culture is almost synonymous with consumer capitalism and neoliberalism.  On a material level, practically everything is American (though not manufactured there): this Apple computer I’m working on, the clothes I wear, the food I often eat (even in Korea), the social media networks I use. But you can’t really be a diligent consumer – or even just a  person of the modern world - without also embracing a state of being that we could call ‘Americanness’.  In Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes:

The capitalist-consumerist ethics is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interested. This was too tough for most……In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist-consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions – and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.  

Of course, America isn’t paradise. As I grew older, I learned to question the Americanizing imperative. But this often meant focusing on the American ‘nightmare’, on all the ways it patently fails to be the paradise it advertises itself to be: the appalling inequalities in wealth, the racism, the violence, the dysfunctional democratic system,  the superpower overreach, et. etc. But this obsession merely reinforces the fact that whatever we might think of the real America, the one that’s implanted in our imaginations – in the global collective imagination – is overwhelmingly compelling because it syncs so perfectly with the socio-economic reality of modern, ‘developed’ societies.  

The English writer Martin Amis wrote a book called ‘The Moronic Inferno’, published in 1986. It’s a collection of essays about America that are so entertaining because Amis is simultaneously appalled and enamored by his subject.  He wrote:  “I got the phrase ‘the moronic inferno’, and much else, from Saul Bellow, who informs me that he got it from [the English writer and artist] Wyndham Lewis. Needless to say, the moronic inferno is not a peculiarly American condition. It is global and perhaps eternal. It is also, of course, primarily a metaphor, a metaphor for human infamy: mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy.”

There is a steep price to be paid for enjoying this cultural lingua franca. The Japanese philosopher Ueda Shitzuteru calls it the “hypersystemization of the world” - the deadening unifying cultural uniformity imposed by American-stye consumer capitalism, which is “bringing with it a swift and powerful process of homogenization that is superficial and yet thorough-going”.  We live, declares Ueda, in a “mono-world which renders meaningless the differences between East and West”. This ‘hypersytemization’, as Amis noted, also has an ominous, apocalyptic dimension because the United States is a superpower equipped with nuclear weapons: ‘Perhaps the title phrase is more resonant, and more prescient, than I imagined. It exactly describes a possible future, one in which the moronic inferno will cease to be a metaphor and will become a reality: the only reality.”

We wince at the crassness of American culture, it’s deep superficiality, but we cannot escape its profound allure.  I guess people living under Roman rule might have felt a similar compulsion to mimic Roman manners and ways of thinking  - the manners of the rulers. It’s a form of assimilation, but also of being on the right side of history: the winning side. However much China might challenge America economically, it has already been colonized culturally simply by adopting consumerism.  There are very few places left one Earth that have not been colonized. One of them lies just a few miles north of where I write this post. However much we might cringe at what America has become – as if the kind and encouraging Uncle Sam has turned into a serial rapist and murderer -  there’s still nowhere else that can enchant like the idea of America.

NOTES

The quote from Gourmet Baskets is from: https://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/Blog/post/history-halloween-united-states.

The quote from the History Channel is from:  https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/history-of-halloween

The David Hockey quote is from: https://www.thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/chronology/1964

Martin Amis’ book can be purchased at:  https://www.amazon.com/Moronic-Inferno-Other-Visits-America/dp/0140127194

Yuval Noah Harari’s book can be purchased at: https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316117

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.

*

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..

Korea goes crazy for MBTI

Last week in class, one of my students mentioned how Koreans her age (the so-called MZ Generation) are seriously into MBTI – the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality assessment test. As I soon discovered on trawling the Internet, MBTI is practically an obsession amongst the young here in Korea.

So, what is MBTI? It was devised in 1943 in the United States by a mother-daugher team, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Myers.   They were inspired by Carl Jung’s analytic psychology, but neither had professional training in psychology. This didn’t stop their personality assessment questionnaire taking off. It appealed to anyone who wanted simple answers to very complex questions, a clear map to the wilderness of the human mind.  MBTI was therefore appealing to huge corporations and confused teenagers.  

These are the basics personalities you can choose from:

The eight basic types combine to produce 16 composites, ranging from ISFP (Introvert-Sensing-Feeling-Perceiving) which make you kind, spontaneous, and accommodating,  to ENTJ (Extravert-INtuitive-Thinking-Judging), which means you are confident, innovative, and logical.   Of the latter, the website Truity, which has the by-line ‘Understand who you truly are’,  says that it ‘indicates a person who is energized by time spent with others (Extraverted), who focuses on ideas and concepts rather than facts and details (iNtuitive), who makes decisions based on logic and reason (Thinking) and who prefers to be planned and organized rather than spontaneous and flexible (Judging). ENTJs are sometimes referred to as Commander personalities because of their innate drive to lead others.’

Here is the full menu:

If only it was so damn simple! Jung must be turning in his grave.  He is on record as saying that MBTI profoundly misunderstood his analysis of personality. First of all, the assumption of MBTI is that you have a stable, fixed personality that is fully accessible to conscious self-reflection, that we are objective in our appraisal of our own personality traits. Secondly, you will note that according to Myers-Briggs, everyone’s personality is basically comprised of positive traits. This is very far from the thinking of the man who urged us to descend deep into the murky darkness of our consciousness, where we must face our ‘shadow’. As Jung wrote: ‘Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself to wants to be.’  It is also obviously very different from the prognosis of Jung’s mentor and then rival, Sigmund Freud, concerning human nature (think, Oedipus Complex, the ID, and the Death Instinct).

MBTI is a sanitized, feel-good bowdlerization of very complex modern, but now dated, insights into the human psyche. In fact, if it wasn’t such an influential test, one might dismiss it as innocent fun, like astrology.  And now, eighty years after it was first devised, and on the other side of the world, MBTI has been especially adopted by South Koreans. They are far and away the most avid adopters of the test, and the MBTI categories are routinely used in formal and informal social situations, and as a dating tool.  Why?

There are several obvious reasons. Above all, perhaps, there is the influence of Korea’s collectivist social structure.  This inclines individuals to seek to identify themselves not as independent, unique, selves but as members of clearly defined groups. In other words, as I noted in a previous post, when considering their identity, Koreans tend to struggle to associate their private self with a publicly recognizable self. But MBTI facilitates this by providing sixteen clear personality types. As Sarah Chea writes in the Korea JoongAng Daily: ‘Koreans tend to easily feel anxious when they think they don’t belong to any groups, so they push themselves to be involved so they can belong somewhere. They like to feel the sense of community from being with others in the same group, and feel relief when they feel they are not alone.’   

Then there is the fact that Covid-19 pandemic accentuated people’s sense of isolation, making young Koreans even more desirous of connecting with others through explicit shared criteria concerning identity.  Social media made this possible, but also required radical simplification.  It’s much, much easier to say ‘I’m ESFJ’ than to struggle with the vague and shifting reality of one’s personality. But only, of course, if one is confident whoever is reading knows what you mean. MBTI therefore also serves to establish clear in-group/out-group boundaries not just within the 16 different personality types but in relation to assessing people in terms of those who have adopted the MBTI vision as a whole and those who have not.

This desire to share one’s personality with others is surely motivated by the need to feel less alone, but also by the fact that we now live in a culture in which self-realization is highly valued. The era we are now living through has radically altered how we think about ourselves, making the private self a ‘bankable’ commodity. But as the philosopher Han Byung-Chul notes, the deepest problem for people in the developed world is excessively positive attitudes  which lead to a pervasive failure to manage negative experiences. This is surely another reason why MBTI is appealing. It allows us to gesture towards the interiority required of the fully contemporary identity while seeing ourselves only in relation to positive personality traits.

If we look at MBTI historically, we can recognize that it was born during a period in the United States when there was a drive towards the instrumentalization and rationalization of society in the service of the bureaucratic thinking central to a managerial capitalism, and tied to the immediate need to optimize efficiency for the war effort.  As noted by the Frankfurt School thinkers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer  – who when Myers and Briggs-Myers devised MBTI were living in the United States in exile from Nazi Germany – instrumental reason privileges the objective at the expense of the subjective, and obscures the fact that so-called ‘reason’ is always a mix of the rational and the irrational, the subjective and the objective. As a result, the objective is viewed as unchanging, eternal, and universal.

This is precisely what MBTI does in relation to personality and identity. Which means Koreans are placing the need for ‘efficiency ‘ in relation to achieving their ends above all other possible motives and desires. They are coping with the hyper-novelty, stresses and strains of accelerated modernization and westernization in their country by resorting to a blatant example of objective, instrumental reason, deployed in relation to the intimate and vulnerable region of their inner experiences - their personalities where, in reality, subjective experience reigns. This will surely inhibit any genuine exploration of identity. As Jung wrote: ‘The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams.’

By channeling the desire to present one’s private self in public without risk, through sanitized publicly accessible categories, MBTI is certainly a useful tool of social conformity. It is a million miles away from the profound crisis of identity evident in the West’s preoccupation with gender dysphoria. So, perhaps I am being too negative. In this cultural light, perhaps MBTI is a valid means of ensuring social stability.

Or perhaps most young Koreans think of MBTI as just a fun way of referring to each other, a game, and take it all with a big pinch of salt.

SOURCES:

The MBTI tables are from: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/22/asia/south-korea-mbti-personality-test-dating-briggs-myers-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

Truity quote: https://www.truity.com/personality-type/ENTJ

Korea JoongAng Daily quote: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2022/04/16/why/korea-mbti-blood-types/20220416070206510.html

Han Byung-Chul’s views can be found, for example, in The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2013)

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s ideas concerning ‘instrumental reason’ can be found in Critique of Instrumental Reason (Verso, 2013)

Carl Jung’s writings are voluminous. A good place to start is Modern Man in Search of A Soul (1936) which is available in a new edition from Routledge. The Amazon blurb is telling: ‘One of his most famous books, it perfectly captures the feelings of confusion that many sense today. Generation X might be a recent concept, but Jung spotted its forerunner over half a century ago. For anyone seeking meaning in today's world, Modern Man in Search of a Soul is a must.’

The Bully (Part 2)

Three bullies from the same Korean family.

There are two versions of ‘modern Korea’. One is ruled by the most autocratic dictatorship today - which makes Putinism look very amateurish - while the other has just elected a new President coming from the political party that had previously been in opposition. Two radically different systems developed, starting with the same circumstances and the same people.  One Korea seems to have used Nineteen Eighty-Four as its guidebook, while the other started out with an authoritarian regime but evolved into an American-style liberal democracy. This situation has nothing to do with intrinsic ‘Korean’ proclivities. How can it? The same ethnic and historically extremely homogeneous people have gone very separate ways, like identical twins separated at birth. 

One explanation of this bizarre and tragic siutuation is to see Korea not in isolation but as holistically connected to everything else going on in the world, and so to more or less random factors. Specifically, in 1945 Korea had the misfortune of being a colony of the defeated Japanese, and so was carved up by the two victorious forces: the Soviets and the Americans and allies. As a result of the Cold War  an Iron Curtain descended across the 38 Parallel. Two nations were created. War ensued. No definitive conclusion to the war was achieved – neither side was wholly vanquished - and so the two rivals Koreas remain to this day. And so here I am, writing my blog near to where the Iron Curtain still remains drawn and looks like staying into the foreseeable future. 

But chance factors also extend down from the macro to the micro level. Yes. Korea became a pawn in the Great Power’s struggle for world hegemony. But what happened was also due to individual players on the ground. Specifically, Korean leaders and their entourages. The first President of the Republic of Korea, Sygman Rhee,  the American choice, was no friend to liberal democracy. Ostensibly in order to protect the Republic from North Korean aggression (In 1968, for example, North Korean commandos almost succeeded in assassination Park, making their incursion to within a few hundred meters of the presidential Blue House in central Seoul), the South Korean leader, the former army General Park Chung-hee (who had taken control of the state in 1960),   suspended the constitution in 1972 declared martial law, and wrote a new constitution that gave him much increased executive power for life. The new constitution would remain in force until Park’s assassination (by his own bodyguard, not the North Koreans) during a military coup 1979, whereupon the military extended its powers of repression even further. In 1980, there was a popular uprising in the south-eastern city of Gwangju which was brutally put down, and most of the 1980s passed under authoritarian rule. However, finally, after the amendment to the constitution in 1987, a democratic presidential election was held for the first time, and since then, elections have been peacefully held every five years. 

Why was this possible? Critics will say the United States engineered the semblance of liberal democracy, making South Korea into a compliant a vassal state. But this can’t be true. The level of genuine democracy here cannot be imposed either from outside or above, by fiat. That much we know from history. It must grow from within and below. Which isn’t to say, like some apologist for democracy, that democracy is somehow inevitable. Is certainly is not. Which is one very good reason why democracy needs to be well defended. North of the DMZ, a very different political situation occurred. Things froze into totalitarian place, and this was largely due to the odious bully Josef Stalin and the equally odious bully Kim Il sung and his two progeny.  The bullies are certainly there  in the Republic of Korea. But the Republic of Korea, like other liberal democracies, devised ways to hem them in, limit the damage they can do. 

Steven Pinker marshals plenty of compelling evidence in books such as  the better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018) to show that history can be read as a narrative in which societies have become increasingly buttressed against the inevitably of zero-sum thinking by creating checks and balances to diminish the chances of a bully getting so much power that he or she can enslave us.  This has happened at all levels of society, especially over the past fifty years.

At my grammar school for example, which i mentioned in my previous post on bullies. In the mid-1970s the headmaster of Eastbourne Grammar School changed, and the new headmaster arrived with an updated education philosophy in which the aim was no longer to instil the necessary body of learning through intimidating, and, more profoundly, did not see life as a zero-sum game. There was now enough for everyone. Admittedly, by this time I was sixteen, so I was no longer at the bottom of the bullying pecking-order. But I’m sure what I perceived was generally felt  - even by the even-year-old squirts who made up the First Year. The ethos at my school went very quickly from the terroristic to the consensual. You could say it went from totalitarian state to liberal democracy in  less than five years. That is no trivial change, and was largely down to the revolution is how people thought about society that happened in the sixties. Obviously, bullying did not disappear. But it was no longer institutionalized, and so could do less harm. 

This same process has occurred on the level of nation-states. Look at Donald Trump. He’s almost a caricature of the bully. When he was a reality tv star doing The Apprentice, that was basically his role. And, yes, the show as a hit, because, yes, we enjoy watching bullies at work – as long as they’re bullying someone else. The zero-sum psychology is something like this: if I’m watching someone else getting bullies, then it’s not me. But when he was President of the United States, Trump the Bully - who was largely elected because he was a bully -  found he was unable to do what he needs to do as a bully, which is intimidate the vulnerable and keep all the pie for himself. The United States Constitution got in his way. What does this tell us? Yes. I know. The United States is very far from perfect, but it has a political system that is obviously more able to stop bullies than, say, Russia’s. Indeed, all liberal democracies have this in-built capacity. This is real progress, and we should be able to celebrate.  

Which leads me back to the point I’ve been making in previous posts:  in our eagerness to show how far our liberal democracies are from perfection, we progressives spend a lot of energy exposing their imperfections. In fact, this is precisely one of the main reasons why liberal democracy is the least bad political system: it makes room for criticism and opposition. It knows that if you don’t have freedom of speech and diversity of opinion, you don’t have the ability to stop the bullies. We can’t get rid of them entirely, because they are an aspect of being human. But we can make them less able to freely bully, to bully without consequences. The deeper problem is how to ween us of our primitive admiration for bullies. 

To do that, we would have to address a very deep predisposition. 

A few years back I was disgusted to discover that my Korean wife’s sister-in-law, who lives in the USA, had voted for Trump. When I asked her why, she replied it was because he was “strong.”

If we want to get rid of the cult of the bully, our acceptance of being bullied, and our collusion with bullies, we will have to change the whole idea of what human ‘strength’ is. 

Not easy!

Credits:

Kim photos: https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/kim-jong-un-kim-jong-il-kim-il-sung-why-are-all-north-korean-leaders-named-ki

From ‘developing’ to ‘developed’

Development, South Korean style.

Recently (July 2nd), the Republic of Korea was elevated from the status of ‘developing’ to ‘developed’ nation by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD),  which reclassified it from Group A (Asian and African countries) to Group B (developed economies). This is quite an upgrade. It’s the first since the agency’s formation in 1964.  As the website KOREA.net explains: ‘UNCTAD is an intergovernmental agency with the purpose of industrializing developing economies and boosting their participation in international trade. Group A of the organization comprises mostly developing economies in Asia and Africa; Group B developed economies; Group C Latin American and Caribbean States; and Group D Russia and Eastern European nations.’ 

The South Koreans are understandably very proud of themselves. This is an unparalleled achievement. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953 the Republic’s gross domestic product  - the total value of goods produced and services provided in a country during one year - has leapt 31,000 fold!  One could say that the concept of ‘development’ is the nation’s mantra, which is enshrined in the commonly used phrase ‘dynamic Korea’.   

So what does development look like on the ground, so to speak? Everywhere you go in South Korea (except the remote mountainous regions) you see construction work going on – for massive elevated superhighways and high-speed rail links, or whole new cities comprised of clusters of giant apartment towers. Even here where I live, near the DMZ, where, because of proximity  to the frontier, infrastructural, commercial  and residential transformations are restricted, some kind of building work is constantly going on. For example, recently a construction company began slicing into a wooded hillside near us, first uprooting the silver birch trees growing there and then carting away tons of soil in  convoys of heavy-load trucks (mostly made by Volvo, so it seems) in order to create a terraced slope upon which, apparently, they will be building hanok-style housing. Hanoks are the traditional one-storey wooden houses of Korea, almost none of which have survived from  more than one hundred years ago, not just because of  accidental fires or the destruction of warfare but because of the nation’s commitment to a specific model of development. For the past seventy years the hanok has symbolized the ‘undeveloped’. In fact, one could not imagine a greater contrast in housing than between a hanok and an apartment tower, between old-style Korean living accommodation and the contemporary. This alone indicates that for South Koreans development is also Westernization.

a traditional Korean hanok.

But wait. The UNCTAD is concerned  only with development in terms of the economy and trade, but obviously the term has other resonances, that go well beyond the economic.  So before we start hailing the South’s triumph, here is another recent statistic: The Korea Development Institute announced just two months before the UNCTAD elevated the country to ‘developed nation’ status that South Korea scored 5.85 on a scale of 1 to 10 for the period of 2018 to 2020 on the U.N. World Happiness Index. This score is the third-lowest in the OECD (the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). 

Oh dear.  The South Koreans are economically ‘developed’ but not very joyful ,satisfied, content or fulfilled.  But it might seem disingenuous of me to mention failure when the Republic of Korea has clearly achieved so much for its citizens, most especially when compared to what the North Korean leadership has done for its people. In 2019 South Korea’s GDP was 2 percent while North Korea’s was 0.4 percent, and the gap has widened even more since then thanks to sanctions and the pandemic. But I wonder what North Koreans would say if they were canvased about happiness. But of course, the rulers of North Korea would never allow any such survey to be made, and if they did it themselves the answer is a forgone conclusion, and anyone stupid enough to report that they were unhappy would almost certainly be bundled off to a labour camp, or worse.  But if such a survey did take place, done by external assessors, I suspect the North Koreans would still turn out to be at the very top of the happiness league. Why? Firstly, because of the indoctrination I discussed in my last blog entry. In fact, if you think about it, the entire North Korean propaganda machine is directed towards fabricating an aura of universal (I mean within North Korea) happiness. Take a look at these two North Korean posters. The text in the first translates as ‘Wear traditional Korean clothing, beautiful and gracious’, the second; “Working on Friday is patriotic’ (1): 

The worrying thought is that the North Koreans really are ‘happy’, in the sense that the word is forced to have within the ruling ideology.  But there is another reason. The Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen notes that people can internalize the deprivations of their circumstances so they don’t desire what they never expect to have. Such an ‘adaptive preference’ would be another  way of understanding a North Korean person’s subjective judgment concerning their well-being, and explains how it would be very different from a neutral observer’s perceptions.

But this is also an indication that we should in general be cautious about using subjective  opinions of well-being as valid criteria for assessing happiness.  Because just what is it? The indicators used for gauging national happiness levels in the UN World Happiness Index are these: GDP per capita, household income, healthy life expectancy, social support, generosity (in the sense of willingness to donate), institutional trust, corruption perception, positive affect/negative affect, freedom to make life choices. These criteria are partly based on the tiny but very wealthy  (thanks to oil reserves) nation of Bhutan, which pioneered its own Gross Happiness Index which subsequently become another transcultural indicator. It highlights the following: health, education, use of time, psychological well-being, good governance, cultural diversity and resilience, ecological diversity and resilience, community vitality, and living standards.

Obviously, as the disjunction between South Korea’s development status and happiness status shows, development cannot be reduced to mere economic terms. The trouble is that all to readily it is, and this is because development is the key driving concept behind modernization, and is closely linked to another key concept: ‘progress’. This is what the philosopher John Gray says in Enlightenment’s Wake (1995): ‘The idea of progress….is  the modern conception of human social development as occurring in successive discrete stages, not everywhere the same, but having in common the property of converging on a single form of life, a universal civilization, rational and cosmopolitan.’  Gray is a prominent critic from within the West (he is British) of what he sees as the calamitous consequences of this universalizing ‘Enlightenment project’, which has been foisted on the rest of the world by the West. Gray writes: ‘My starting-point is the failures of the Enlightenment project in our time, and their implications for liberal thought. The failures to which I refer are in part historical and political rather than theoretical or philosophical: I mean the confounding of  Enlightenment expectations of the evanescence of particularistic allegiances, national and religious, and of the progressive levelling down, or marginalization, of cultural difference in human affairs.  

A fundamental error of the ‘Enlightenment project’ was to assume that the progress it celebrated would be limitless, and also to link it excessively to economic growth. Now we know that this could be a fatal error for which the generations to come will pay the price. Development must be sustainable and based on much more than purely upward economic growth. Sen offers one way forward in his Capability Approach to development,  which stresses the relationship between development and ethics by focusing on the individual’s capability for achieving the kind of life they have reason to value.  This is different from  thinking in terms of subjective well-being or having access to the means for pursuing the good life. As the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy puts it,  in Sen’s theory, ‘[a] person’s capability to live a good life is defined in terms of the set of valuable ‘beings and doings’ like being in good health or having loving relationships with others to which they have real access.’ In other words, the idea is to place development within a tangible and specific context based on the pre-eminence of sustainability. It thereby counters the slash-and-burn development concept behind the ‘Enlightenment projects ideal of progress.  

North Korea hitched itself up to an especially disastrous legacy of this Enlightenment project - communism. It got shipwrecked precisely due to the forces of Gray indicates. In fact, one could argue that North Korea is an exemplary example of ‘particularistic allegiances’. It is also the mirror image of South Korea’s version of development., and one could fruitfully analyze the two Koreas in terms of how they chose antithetical criteria for defining the idea of development.  For example, while the South adopted an essentially economic model of development founded on global commerce, which was borrowed from Western capitalism, the North chose first the communist alternative, and then what it calls ‘juche’, the ideal of self-reliance, in the sense of   development understood as autonomy and independence. Development for the North Korean state is therefore defined as remaining separate and distinct from the rest of the world, and  on being dependent solely on its own strength under the guidance of a godlike leader. But I wonder how many more South Korean hillsides will be carted away in trucks to construct more housing as part of the relentless drive to develop?  I imagine a speeded-up movie of South Korean’s development over the past seventy years would look like an earthquake of truly terrible proportions. 

(1) For more North Korean posters see: https://library.ucsd.edu/news-events/north-korean-poster-collection/

Picasso and Kim Il-sung in South Korea

 Pablo Picasso, Massacre in Korea, 1951, oil on plywood, 110 x 210cm. Musée Picasso, Paris

The contrasting fates in contemporary South Korea of a painting by Pablo Picasso and  works written by Kim Il-sung, the first leader of North Korea, throw an interesting light on how meaning and value intersects with form.  The Picasso in question is ‘Massacre in Korea’ a work from 1951 which is for the first time on exhibition in Korea at the Hangaram Museum in Seoul. The publication is Kim’s multi-volume ‘Reminiscences: With the Century’, his autobiography, which was first published in 1992.  

Until recently, both were banned in Korea. The furore over the publication of Kim’s book by a South Korean publisher without the necessary  approval from the government, followed by the ban on its sale and a police investigation, and yesterday (May 4th), the comments of a North Korean propaganda website (in English that even Google translate could have improved), that declares: ‘It is dumbfounded to see such impure forces’ reckless act to make a fuss as if a huge disaster happened and try to block their publication and distribution in a wicked way’,  indicates that Kim’s book is still just too ideologically controversial.  Not so the Picasso, apparently, which was also banned in South Korea once upon a time.

The National Security Act, which dates from 1948 was intended, as it declares, ‘to secure the security of the State and the subsistence and freedom of nationals, by regulating any anticipated activities compromising the safety of the State.’ While attempts have been made to annul the Act (for instance in 2004 by the Uri Party), it is still actively enforced. But the controversy over Kim’s memoirs has led to renewed calls for is repeal because of the obvious restriction it places on freedom of speech and information. Picasso’s painting also used to fall foul of the National Security Act. Its inspiration, which Picasso claimed was a massacre by US and ROK forces of civilians, made it too contentious for several decades in South Korea, and illustrations of it in books were censored.  But now, all and sundry can pay to see ‘Massacre in Korea’, and the media can reproduce it and make no attempt to hide its inspiration. 

What do the contrasting fates of these two works tell us? Obviously, they are not comparable on many levels. Kim Il-sung’s autobiography is written by the Eternal Leader Generalissimo of the DPRK, sworn enemy of  the ROK, and is therefore still a very loudly ticking time-bomb. Picasso was a Spaniard who joined the French Communist Party at the end of World War II, and he made this painting partly in order to show he agreed with the Party’s line on events unfolding on the Korean peninsula.

The Picasso is allowed to hang on the wall of a museum in Seoul, and a Seoul-based publisher is not permitted to print Kim’s book because the heat around the Picasso has cooled, while Kim’s autobiography remains too hot to handle. But  the point  I would like to consider here is not so much about the limits of freedom of speech and information. What strikes me as particularly interesting is what these two cases tell us about how information adheres to a medium – in this case to a painting and work of literature.  

We can say that the historical content that Picasso’s painting claims to embody is not ‘baked in’ to the work. It is added to it as a discursive level carried in a text. We cannot ‘read’ off the painting itself the fact that it is about the Korean War from just looking at it. Nothing about the look of the painting links it inherently to that historical event, let alone to a specific massacre by Americans and South Korean forces.  Indeed, Picasso seems to have deliberately fudged things so we cannot tell which army (or even which century) the soldiers belong to, or that the civilians are Korean. The relationship of the painting to the Korean War is an add-on, a verbal supplement provided by the title, and by other pieces of verbal information which serve to give it specific sources.  By contrast, Kim’s book inevitably has its relationship to the War and to the general crisis on the Korean peninsula  thoroughly baked into every page. It is inherent in the medium. We cannot separate the specific history from the way in which that history is referred to. In both cases the code in which the relationship to Korea is communicated is verbal language. But only Kim’s book actually carries this code within the medium itself. Picasso’s painting – like all visual art – has this level of coded meaning added. It is not part of the code of the painting as a painting. 

In fact, this is precisely why the communists didn’t like it. Their propaganda-concept of art demanded we see American uniforms and clearly depicted Korean civilian victims. But as a modernist, Picasso believed the meaning of his work should be communicated  visually -  through line, color, shape, form, texture, composition – through a language unique to the visual rather than one that borrowed from the language of words. The problem with the language of the visual is that it is less precise and more fluid than words. It isn’t easily pinned down. Ideologues see this as a fundamental weakness of the image. But isn’t it actually its fundamental strength?  No wonder the powerful are always trying to tag images to words, tying down the balloon of the imagination so it won’t float dangerously away.  

Picasso’s painting ‘Massacre in Korea’ is an artistic failure. This is obvious when we compare it to ’Guernica’ (1937).  But actually, ‘Guernica’ also suffers from the same basic problem I noted in relation to ‘Massacre in Korea’. If you take away the title and the surrounding historical information provided verbally, what do you see? A town in northern Spain bombed by German airplanes? Hardly. Nothing whatsoever in the painting directly links what we see on its surface to this specific event, or even to the twentieth century - apart from the lightbulb. 

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, 349.3 x 776.6cm Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid.

But somehow it doesn’t matter. The inspiration of the painting in a specific historical event - what induced Picasso to paint it, and then made it useful propaganda for the Spanish Republic - cannot prevent  the painting from transcending such contingency to become a ‘timeless’ indictment of violence. ‘Guernica’ is quite simply a far more powerful work. Its style communicate on several levels the essential message which is the honor of war. ‘Massacre in Korea’ by comparison is lifeless, and the fact that Picasso drew on Goya’s great anti-war painting ‘The Third of May, 1808’ (1814) for the composition only goes to show how imaginatively bankrupt Picasso was.

But why was this the case, apart from the fact that even geniuses have off days? Actually ,it seems clear that the reason why ‘Guernica’ succeeds and ‘Massacre in Korea’ doesn’t is very much the result of the pressures exerted on Picasso by very contingent circumstances. With ‘Massacre in Korea’ he struggled to find  a way to fulfil his role as an advocate of communism through art while simultaneously remaining loyal to the fundamentally antithetical principles of modernist art, which stressed individualism and authenticity against the forces of ideological  conformity. Picasso found himself in an impossible situation in which he was obliged to artistically square the circle. The result? A weak compromise that at the time satisfied neither his fellow communists (not explicit enough) nor the supporters of modern art in the ‘free world’ (not abstract and difficult enough), and that has only gotten less convincing over time.

Which is maybe why it can be shown in South Korea today.  

I think these issues are worth considering because in a period when art is dominated by ‘identity politics’, we are seeing the revenge of ideology over the visual. We are advised, even coerced, into seeing images as ‘about’ something that can be conveyed clearly in words. We prioritize the clear and distinct properties of a verbal tag-on rather than give credit to the richly ambiguous potential of images. 

Panmunjom Declaration, three years later.

Today (Tuesday, April 27th, 2021) marks the third anniversary of the inter-Korean summit between President Moon Jae-In of the Republic of Korea (aka South Korea) and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea), which led to the Panmunjom Declaration. In all, the Korean leaders met three times. Two more times in 2018 - in May on the North side of the border village, and then in Pyongyang in September.

The Declaration was signed just ten miles away from where I write this blog now. The photograph above was taken a couple of days ago from the roof of my house, and shows in the distance the mountains of North Korea. Over to the far left somewhere lies Panmunjom, the only place where the DMZ shrinks to just the MDL - the Military Demarcation Line - which at Panmunjom is indicated by the raised line of bricks over which the leaders stepped back and forth on that momentous occasion. Whenever I gaze at these mountains I feel I’m getting a glimpse of a parallel universe.

I remember feeling really exuberant three years ago.The April summit was the first such meeting between the leaders of the two Koreas in 11 years, and in the Panmunjom Declaration they pledged to commit to the ‘complete denuclearization’ of the peninsula, to improve inter-Korean relations, and to officially end the 1950-1953 War (there is only a ceasefire, not an official peace treaty). It seemed this might be the start of a serious reconciliation. President Trump’s meetings with Kim, also at Panmunjom, and later in Singapore and Hanoi, were obviously just bluster and hype. But I thought the meeting with President Moon did seem to augur well for the peninsula.

Dream on!

The whole damn episode seems to have been bluster and hype. Today, we’re back to ‘business as usual’ which means no diplomatic business. Meanwhile, North Korea seems to be firing off missiles again, edging closer to dangerous nuclear capacity, and slumping further and further into poverty and isolation.

The emphasis of late from the leadership beyond the blue mountains I can see from my roof-top is on ‘self-reliance’. This builds on the single contribution of North Korea to communist ideology: juche. This officially means that North Korea must proudly shake off all lingering subservience, and the concept derives from a blending of communism and Confucianism mostly. North Korea must follow its own unique path, relying solely on its own strength under the guidance of the leader.

So, while we might think ‘self-reliance’ means ‘every man for himself’, or at least, that it is the community networks that will help people survive, in the absence off any possibility of the state being a source of material support, this isn’t really what the term means. The people of North Korea have been programmed to see the entire world through the eyes of the Party, to rely on it not so much for the kinds of things we in the ‘free’ world expect a state to provide, but more in the way a religious cult provides a water-tight reality within which to exist safely quarantined from the unpredictability and otherness of the world. This is what juche, self-reliance, means.

One of the saddest things about Suki Kims’ charming memoir of teaching elite boys in a school in Pyongyang, ‘Without You, There is No Us’ (2014), is how it reveals that even the mental universe of the privileged sons she teaches (and comes to love) is pathetically impoverished by the fact that they are wholly reliant on the web of lies spun by the Party in order to control all levels of society.

But what is even sadder is the fact that these boys seem to genuinely believe the nonsense.

This is especially clear evidence that we humans live through the coherent stories we believe in, not through facts, and that even a seemingly from the outside absurd story, like the one that has turned the Kim family into demi-Gods, can have a compelling hold. But we’ve also seen this truth in the ‘free’ world too recently, with the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory. What QAnon shares with North Korea is precisely the capacity to produce a plausible narrative - ‘plausible’ not in relation to objectively verifiable facts but rather in relation to its internally coherent plausibility. What is especially odd about such narratives is the extent to which for those outside their spell, they seem patently absorbed. But this, surely, is part of what makes them compelling to this under their spell.

As a result of de-briefing  American  POW’s after the Korean War an American psychologist named Robert J. Lifton developed the theory of ‘totalism’.  He argued that, on the evidence of what the Chinese attempted to do to the GI’s, any ideology - any set of emotionally charged convictions about humanity and its relationship to the natural or supernatural world - can be taken by adherents in a direction that Lifton termed  ‘totalistic’.  This tendency, he argued, is most likely to occur  in relation to ideologies that are most sweeping in their contents, and most ambitious or messianic in their claims -   like believing in a virgin birth, a classless society, or QAnon. And when ‘totalism' happens, you get  an exclusive cult. The important point, Lifton wrote in his book ‘Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. A Study of “Brainwashing” in China’ (1961) is that for ‘totalism’ to prevail a believer must have made a deep investment in their belief. They must have committed themselves to it heart and soul. Furthermore, they must exist within a shared community of the same beliefs, a community of intense social and psychological support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer can withstand the force of all the disconfirming evidence, but when this believer is a member of a group of similarly convinced people who give support  to one another, then their belief will very often be maintained. Indeed, against all the good evidence that may be amassed to contradict their beliefs,  the community of believers often responds not by giving up on their beliefs but by actively attempting to proselytize.

Lifton’s ‘totalism’ addresses the nature of the more extreme stories we live by. But surely we can’t exempt ourselves. We may not be ‘totalistic’, but we certainly live our lives in relation to the coherent narratives we adopt or weave, and not in relation to the kinds of objective facts science reveals to us.

Urban Mind

Apartments in Pyongyang (above) compared to apartments in Seoul.

A recent report in the Korean Herald announced that 62.4% of the North Korean population now live in urban areas. In South Korea it’s 81.4%. I was surprised that North Korea is catching up so fast. But I suppose for a totalitarian state one advantage of having people live in urban conglomerations is that by being corralled together they are easier to keep an eye on, and in a pre-Internet culture, to indoctrinate with the same analogue information. Urbanization is, of course, part of a global trend. The world average is 56.2%, and is predicted to rise to 60.4% in 2030, and 70% by 2050. Most is occurring in less developed country.  

I’m one of the 18.6% who don’t live in a conurbation in South Korea.  But we’re not isolated halfway up a mountain. We’re conveniently close to a small town with a subway station, and a highway that takes us direct to Seoul in an hour.  The uniqueness of where I live is that the existence of unurbanized land so near to Seoul is a consequence of the division of the Korean peninsula. Development has not been encouraged so close to the DMZ. This is why we can enjoy ‘country’ life while also being near enough to the urban conveniences. South, east, and west of Seoul it is a horror show of concrete and steel sprawl, of  ever-widening characterless infrastructure.  Alas, the same is happening around us now. A new highway has just opened nearby. A highspeed train station arrives soon.  We are being engulfed. But as long as the two Koreas remain enemies, this relentless urbanization has to stop a few kilometres north of us. The Demilitarized Zone is also a De-urbanized Zone.

 The pandemic has given the fundamental  societal distinction between urban and non-urban locations heightened resonance, because the virus spreads much more freely in densely populated places. At the moment, we can almost forget about Covid-19 where we live. We don’t wear masks when we go out walking, and its only when we head into town that suddenly the virus is quite literally in our face. Masks are now mandatory. EVERYONE in urban areas wears them.

*

In 1600 only two cities in the whole world had a population of over one million – London and Beijing. By 1900 the population of London was  already  six and a half million, and almost 14 %  of the world’s humanity were urbanites, with 12 cities massing one million or more inhabitants. In 1950, 30% of the world's population was residing in urban centres and the number of cities with over 1 million people had grown to 83. By 2008 the world's population was evenly split between urban and rural areas for the first time, and there were more than 400 cities with over 1 million people, while 19 had over 10 million. The more developed nations were now about 74% urban, and 44% of  the residents of less developed countries lived in urban areas.

Historically, as cities and towns increased in size and number attitudes towards them evolve. For the ancient Greeks and Romans the city  was largely seen as a great pearl of civilization. Eulogies to the city abound in classical texts. Before the modern era the city  was regarded as the  prerequisite and fruit of progress; the Renaissance is inconceivable without the  stability and focus provided by the city-states of Italy -  Florence, Venice, Rome, Sienna. They provided the security and prosperity necessary for the blossoming of the arts and sciences, and for  the establishment of the principles of good government,  conditions that were  largely absent elsewhere in Europe.  Even so,  urban life  was also  seen  to create obvious problems. In the writings of Virgil, for example, a characteristically urbanised yearning for the simple country life can already be discerned.  In the fourteenth century, the characters in Boccaccio’s famous work, the The Decameron, are obliged to flee the festering alleyways of Florence for the countryside because the plague spread so virulently in densely populated places – an aspect of city life we have become uncomfortably familiar with once again, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.  

Gustave Doré’s bleak vision of Victorian London.

‘Nature’, cast  as the antithesis to the ‘urban’ and humanly-made took on a distinct character as the cities grew.  The Romantics decisively turned their backs on urban life. William Wordsworth, for example, chose to settle in what he called the ‘terrestrial Paradise’ of the English Lake District, a place  as yet untouched by the poisoning breath of industrialisation.  In America, Thoreau retired to Walden Pond (which only seems to have been a little less isolated from the rest of humanity than we are here in Korea) and had his epiphanies. The rejection of urban life  was part-and-parcel of a broader reaction in which  modern people sought to re-connect with what they felt was a lost sense of  belonging. Often, their rejection of urban culture was shadowed by reactionary disgust for the ‘urban type’.  The city was a den of  decadent Jewish cosmopolitanism, for example, where the time-honoured ties to the past were swept-away to be replaced by meaningless rituals and transient pleasures. Fear of the mob is a recurring theme in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and  authoritarian leaders sought to harness its anarchic energy, while urban planners, such as Baron Haussmann in Paris,  aimed to  re-plan the city to minimise its potential for  social revolt.

As cities expand, engulfing more and more countryside and absorbing more and more people,  complex attitudes developed. Charles Baudelaire’s vision of Paris in his poetry collection  Les Fleurs de Mal  was so controversial  because he envisaged Paris  as a thoroughly ambiguous place -  certainly no Paradise, but nor the kind of Hell one should necessarily avoid and fear, either. Indeed,  for Baudelaire’s flaneur – the man of the boulevards -   Paris was endlessly fascinating precisely because within it’s clammy embrace the old values and ways of being  no longer prevailed. New modes of life were emerging, forged on the anvil of  this vibrant centre of modernity, and the spleen Baudelaire vents in his city was the well-spring of his creativity, even as it was premised on a far more intimate awareness of  the potential meaninglessness and emptiness that comes when the old certainties and continuities are destroyed.  Avant-garde artists  in the first half of the twentieth century celebrated a bold ‘machine-aesthetic’, which was meant to be the epitome of  modernity in art, and was synonymous with urban life. Only the city represented the Modern, the New, the Now. The English Vorticists jeered at their city-loving Italian Futurist compatriots in the avant-garde for being insufficiently urbanised and industrialised, and so less authentically ‘modern’.  Marxists and Marxist-inspired artists, such as the  Constructivists,  followed the Bolshevik Party in viewing the city as the only home of the  truly revolutionary class. In the countryside the peasantry still wallowed in the passivity characteristic of  pre-industrial society. The fact that in the Soviet Union urbanisation was at a much lower level than in Britain of Germany was an awkward fact they preferred to ignore.  For the Surrealists in Paris, the city was  a fantasticdreamscape, an ever-changing setting for reverie and amour fou, essentially unreal and therefore open to  endless imaginative transformations.  The city, as the Situationist Guy Debord  wrote in the 1950’s was the home of the derive -  seemingly aimless but  wonderfully fruitful wanderings. The  truly avant-gardist was thus a Baudelairian flaneur,  exploring the streets. 

It would be too simplistic to say that the metropolitan city equals open-mindedness and tolerance while those living elsewhere inevitably nurture closed-mindedness. But clearly there is some truth in this assertion. Cosmopolitanism is inextricably bound to urbanization.  My sister lives in north Devon, a beautiful part of England, but she often moans about the fact that she is surrounded by people who voted for Brexit.  The demographics of that farrago are stark: city NO, country YES. So is the gerontography: old people NO, young people YES. There is, of course, a correlation, as the city is where young people choose to live. But it’s not so clear cut.  In fact, the social divide today in the developed world  is not so much between town and country as between city and urban, with  countryside featuring only marginally. So we need to make a basic distinction between two kinds of urban geography: the metropolitan city on the one hand,  and the suburban and small town on the other.  A significant development since the 1950s is not just in the growth of megacities but the expansion of  vast areas of suburbanity.  These urban people are non-metropolitan but not necessarily living in the countryside. It was the inhabitants of such urban places who voted Brexit, not the people who live in the countryside.. These people mimic the city-mind  but without any of the benefits that accrue from the cosmopolitanism that is central to such life.  Hence their envy and resentment. But the most important divide today, the one that is generating so much social conflict,  isn’t city versus countryside. It’s city versus small-scale urban.  On a basic level the big city dweller and the small towner or suburbanite share the same mindset.  

Suburbia!

The urban life – city or small town and suburbia - is premised not just on humanity’s separation from the rest of the ecological environment but also on its subjugation. This brings immediate advantages. A Master of Fine Art  student of mine  here in Korea recounted how she grew up in the countryside, and how her work was about the cleanness and glamour of the city life she now experienced thanks to the fact that her family had moved to greater Seoul. For her  life outside the urban environment  was smelly, unpredictable, and boring. The  squeaky-clean new and convenient tower-block in which she lived, like the vast majority of Koreans, was by comparison a kind of paradise, a paradise in  which everything is humanly made, and designed to further our dream of emancipation from nature.

I’m not just talking about  the green stuff. Planting greenspaces in the city is therefore no solution. The urban mindset is not just an anti-ecological mindset, or a mindset that is ignorant of ecology.  Urban existence seems increasingly designed to facilitate the subordination or even the docking of the biological body. In fact, thanks to the pandemic, we are much more aware of the problematic status of our ‘wetware’. The virus is nature at loose in the city, a stark reminder that nature is an enemy. The urban mindset is now being even more entrenched, and we withdraw ever further into the entirely human domain of digital media. 

Urban life nurtures an abstract relationship to the world. It encourages  the idea and experience of transcendence at the price of the denial of the here and now, separating us from the immediacies of our experience. The  big confrontation today is between the vision of the human as disembodied mind the vision of the human as embodied mind. Traditionally, we Westerners think the ‘Orientals’ have a better sense of this corporeal embeddedness. But if North and South Korea is anything to go on, I don’t think this is the case today. Perhaps it never was, and it was just Western fantasy, something we were struggling to recognize in ourselves, and located elsewhere in order to see it more clearly.  

My last blog entry mentioning face-masks

The face-mask makes what is already de-humanized behaviour a step more explicit.

What we are going through now may be a temporary expedient, or it may be the new shape of daily life. We shouldn’t be too surprised if it proves to be the latter, because we have already accepted as ‘normal’ much of what we, and the official commentators on the pandemic, are pretending are anomalies: De-humanization.

Responses to the Covid-19  threat require the temporary loss of many of the things which still make life bearable, makes it human  – physical contact, the arts and entertainment,  social mobility. But the responses to the virus are,  in this sense,   caricatures of what is already happening, and like all caricatures, they  help  us see salient aspects of our society  that we overlook  or ignore. The pandemic has caused a gestalt shift, and what was the unnoticed background has become the focal ‘figure.’  

The face-mask is an especially explicit signifier of dehumanization, making manifest what has been latent (I promise this is my last post to mention face-masks!). A mask de-personalizes, and robs us of  a basic locus of expressiveness  -  the mouth -  in such an obvious fashion. So perhaps now we will recognize that it is only the new tip of the iceberg of de-humanization.

A supermarket or shopping mall  is already a horribly de-humanizing place, but now that everyone is by law obliged to wear masks (in Korea, anyway, but I guarantee, also very soon in a supermarket or shopping-mall near you) it becomes much more obvious. Or at least for as long as the face-mask is novel. But soon, it will have become as unremarkable as all the other de-humanizing aspects of modern shopping which we now accept as just part-and-parcel of ‘normal’, ‘convenient’ daily life.

Another example. The way in which the pandemic has forced more and more social interactions on-line. This form of communication was already de-humanized, in that it largely subtracts the body from social interaction. But now that a meeting between friends, a meeting of work colleagues, or a school or university class, must take place via Zoom or some such platform we can more readily recognize the blatant way in which the digital media impoverish human communication.

What I have said assumes, of course, that there is a prior concept of what it means to be healthily ‘human.’ Where does this concept come from? Some would say it is an ideological construct.  But I am increasingly convinced  that this is nonsense. We all instinctively know what it means to be ‘human’.   The problem is we live in a society that, for reasons much too complicated to consider here, seems hell-bent on an agenda of de-humanization.

But I don’t think we can cast this process in terms of conflict theory - of the oppressor and oppressed. Bizarre as it may seem, everyone get de-humanized in their own way. Perhaps the best way to describe the dynamics of de-humanization is to say that they are semi-autonomous. De-humanization has taken on a life of its own independent of any particular human agent. Maybe it’s a dehumanization ‘memeplex’, to use the terms of Richard Dawkins. If so, then Covid-19 is now part of its survival strategy.