“Welcome to the Wild West”
HAPPY NEW LUNAR YEAR! It’s the Year of the Tiger.
This is one of my Book-Paintings. You can see lots more on my artist’s website: www.simonmorley.com
I’ve been silent for a while on this blog after a period when I focused exclusively on a series of posts celebrating the publication of my book ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’ because over Christmas and New Year I went back to my homeland, the United Kingdom, and since then (I’m now back in Korea) I’ve been mulling over my rather disturbed and disturbing experience over there. I am referring to the impact of Covid-19, and especially to the culture-shock I felt when experiencing the different responses of people in the UK compared to here in Korea. My book, by the way, is doing well. It’s had some good reviews. The Times Literary Supplement said: “Fascinating material, surveyed with relish and acumen.”
But I want now to get back to more general blogging, and especially to think about the complexities and paradoxes of East-West cultural dialogue once again.
I said I wouldn’t write about face-masks again, but here I go again.
On my second or third night in London, while I lay awake with jetlag, a voice in my head seemed to say: “Welcome the Wild West!” Yes. That’s what it felt like being in the UK. Compared to Korea, things seemed very anarchic, especially in relation to Covid-19 and the threat posed by the new Omicron variant. I was amazed to find that people considered that their responses to the requests for compliance regarding the pandemic - to wear face-mask on public transport or to get vaccinated - were to see them as personal choices rather than social duties. Now, there are many ways of explaining this. One is related to specific political conditions. In the UK (and I think more broadly in the West in general) there seems to be a fundamental loss of trust in the state. This distrust means that people do not believe in what the institutions vested with authority say. They see them as, for example, a patriarchal plot or a way to make more money for the ‘one percent.’ This loss of trust is pervasive. It extends to all levels of social life, from personal relationship to political leadership. The causes are obviously complex, but I think have much to do with a basic flaw in individualistic conception of the self, or in what has been called ‘possessive individualism.’
Now, I know it’s risky making hard-and-fast distinctions between cultures, and I am aware that there is no such thing as fixed cultural identities. However, there is plentiful evidence provided by the responses to the pandemic that confirm that Western societies function very differently from East Asian. Let me try to suggest some ways to understand these differences – albeit differences proposed by Westerners.
The Canadian social psychologist Stephen Heine, for example, discusses how concepts of selfhood are determined by interactions with the cultural environment and ossify into recursive cultural orientations. He describes an East Asian cultural bias towards what he calls the ‘interdependent self’, where individuals are understood to be connected to each other via a network of relationships. This Heine contrasts to the Western model of the ‘autonomous self’, where selfhood is generated in contrast to others. As Heine notes: “In general, across a wide variety of paradigms, there is converging evidence that East Asians view ingroup members as an extension of their selves while maintaining distance from outgroup members. North Americans show a tendency to view themselves as distinct from all other selves, regardless of their relationships to the individual.” The individualistic West confronts the collectivist East. “The resultant self-concept that will emerge from participating in highly individualized North American culture will differ importantly from the self-concept that results from the participation in the Confucian interdependence of East Asian culture”, writes Heine.
The American social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett argues that in the West consciousness is construed as non-corporeal, detached and autonomous. ‘”For Westerners,” writes Nisbett, “it is the self who does the acting; for Easterners, action is something that is undertaken in concert with others or that is the consequence of the self operating in a field of forces.” As he continues: “to the Asian the world is a complex place composed of continuous substances, understood in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than to personal control.” In this world-view there is an intrinsic overlap between self and world.
Meanwhile, for the Westerner, writes Nesbitt, “the world is a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue attention to context, and highly subject to personal control”. The ‘analytic thought’ prioritized in the West follows patterns organized through visual segregation. It dissects the world “into a limited number of discrete objects having particular attributes that can be categorized in clear ways”. Nisbett details research that shows that Japanese participants in his experiments are more attentive to the whole perceptual field than Americans, who are more drawn to individual foci of attention.
This divergence is also paralleled in the structure of language. East Asian languages like Korean are highly contextual; words typically have multiple meanings. The absence of personal pronouns in Korean adds to its inherent ambiguity, and foregrounds the role played by context in determining meaning. Western languages, in contrast, are more context-free and preoccupied with focal objects as opposed to context. The ‘holistic thought’ characteristic of East Asia, “responds to a much wider array of objects and their relations, and [...] makes fewer sharp distinctions among attributes or categories, [and so] is less well suited to linguistic representation.” Awareness of process predominates over the search for essences or fixed and finite forms. It is therefore non-binary, promoting a ‘both/and’ approach to problem solving.
One way of observing these different world-views at work is to think about how ‘mind’ – the part of the self that thinks, reasons, feels and remembers – is conceptualized. Most Westerners will point to their cerebrum when asked to locate the physical location of this elusive entity, while most East Asians will point to the region of their heart. Etymologically, the meanings of the English word ‘mind’ cluster around the act of remembering and memory, while the French word ‘esprit’ suggests another etymology that brings meaning closer to spirit, energy or liveliness. But s the West developed a more thoroughgoing dualistic view of consciousness within modern rational thought, ‘mind’ has been opposed to ‘body’, which explains why Westerners point where they do. In contrast, the Chinese written character translated into English as ‘mind’ is composed from the ideogram for heart. Since ancient times the heart was understood to be ithe mind’s location, and so the two are interchangeable and inextricable.
Both concepts of ‘mind’ are congruent with the contrasting ‘analytic’ and ‘holistic’ world-views from which they arise. In the former, the self is detached from a world that is viewed as static and compartmentalized, while in the latter, the self is corporeally immersed in the flow of life.
The clear benefits to be gained from both paradigms explain their cultural recursiveness. The Western model has the following broad characteristics: it fosters an intellectual attitude preoccupied with mental activity and values, differentiating intellect and psychology from the somatic dimension. Emphasis is placed on analytic thought, which means experiences are processed by being abstracted, and divided into elemental parts or basic principles. The discursive mode of thinking is valued, in which thoughts proceed to a conclusion through deductive logic, reasoning and objective analysis rather than emotion and intuition, promoting a cognitive style uninfluenced by personal feelings or opinions when considering and representing facts. It thereby ensures grounds for publicly verifiable objective facts freed from affect. This world-view fosters self-consciousness and reflectiveness, and generates the idea of a transcendent realm of pure forms or non-material entities, of a God who is separated from the natural world.
The East Asian world-view, on the other hand, offers the self a greater sense of being united with a trans-personal whole. It fosters awareness of complementarity and intimate connectedness. Furthermore, it is somatically oriented, seeing the self as immersed in a living, bodily and participatory context. Ontologically, there is the notion that the self exists in the midst of things rather than externally. More attention is paid to affect – to pathos as well as logos – as a component of knowledge, and this leads to the acknowledgement of the value of non-verbal understanding. Some important knowledge is construed as essentially ‘esoteric’ or ‘dark’, rather than bright and clear. Epistemologically, this means non-duality or monism. Distinctions between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ therefore have little value. Metaphysically, it fosters the idea of an immanent spirituality, occurring in the here and now.
Because of the East Asian bias, the self within this cultural matrix tends to be uncomfortable with the analytically cognitive, and with abstractions. As a result, there is an absence of individual, reflective, affect-free critical thought. Because much cognition is understood to happen beyond the scope of language, within the discursive domain there is a tendency to depend on shared tacit knowledge that remains unchallenged and under-articulated subjectively. This means a proclivity towards reliance on the consensus view and shared viewpoint, rather than on individualized and potentially dissenting expression.
A detrimental consequence of the Western recursive paradigms is that the atomization of selfhood into individualistic ‘autonomous’ units isolates the self from the wider community, fostering potential antagonism between the interests of the self and the social realm. When thinking, Westerners tend over-value the medium of verbal language, believing that if they put thoughts and feelings into words, and then act upon them, they are in control. Failure to realize these criteria, which often appear to the self as a critical and antagonistic relationship to the status quo, signifies a lack and a loss of mastery.
One can see how these fundamental differences in the social construction of consciousness impact on the requirement to wear face-masks or to be vaccinated. Westerners are inherently more likely to consider these issues in terms of individual integrity rather than group intimacy, that is, they will consider the mandates coming from government and underwritten by scientific evidence, which is reinforced by social pressures, primarily in terms of a personal demand to comply, as a request to subordinate one’s preeminent goal of maintaining a zone of personal freedom to an essentially threatening outside. In Korea, by contrast, people on the whole do not see the mandates as impinging in any significant way upon their personal integrity, which is constructed more permeably in relation to others within society.
Which reaction is more efficacious in these worrying circumstances? Almost certainly the Korean. But I have to say that after my initial shock on first being back in the UK I ended up feeling relieved to be in a country where individualism is so stridently policed by individuals. Now I’m back in Korea I can see that the compliant conformity certainly brings a sense of security, but, at least to this individualistic Westerner, it can feel unbearably dispiriting.
References::
Steven J Heine, “Self as Cultural Product: An Examination of East Asian and North American Selves”, Journal of Personality, 69 (6), 2001, pp881–906. http://www 2.psych.ubc.ca/∼heine/ docs/2001asianself.pdf.
Thomas P. Kasulis, Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. 2002)
Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why (New York: Free Press. 2003)