CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN THE AGE OF COVID-19
I mentioned in an earlier post how the difference in official advice and popular attitude to wearing face masks between Western countries and those of East Asia in the current crisis is striking. South Koreans, like other East Asians, are more used to wearing them than Westerners. Their function is twofold: to protect the wearer (against pollution), and to protect others from the wearer (when, for example, the wearer may spread germs during a cold or flu bout).This second function means that Koreans are wearing their masks now not only to protect themselves but also to protect those with whom they come into contact. And insofar as up to 14 days can be the period when no symptoms are experienced even though one is infected, it does seem reasonable and socially responsible to wear a mask when one is in a public place. I also noted in a previous post how the social value of the face mask is in part symbolic, and that we should not underestimate the power of symbolism as a force of resistance to the virus on the level of collective cohesion.
The fact that even medical experts in the West initially seemed to refer to the role of the face mask primarily or wholly as a form of self-protection says much about the difference between an individualistic and collectivistic society. The former thinks primarily, perhaps excessively, about the interests of the atomized self, while the latter is more aware of how the wellbeing of the self is inextricably bound up with that of their community.
Recently, there has been considerably discussion in the Press about the different ways in which, say, South Korea and the United States have handled the pandemic. Here, for example, are two articles that try to address these difference in relation to South Korea.
Can we predict what social conventions will most effectively combat the spread of the Covid-19 virus? The apparent success of South Korea in rapidly responding to the present crisis and bringing the pandemic under control suggests a culture which, because of underlying cultural traits, is far more used to conformity and obedience than the West’s. The problem for us Westerners is going to be that such ‘Asiatic’ conformity and obedience have such negative connotations for the individualistic Westerners, who are unlikely to respond with the kind of inherent self-abnegation that is expected in Korea and other East Asian societies.
It’s always dangerous to talk in terms of rigid and general ‘cultural differences’, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some validity, as long as we bear in mind that they are neither unchanging, or binding in the same way to all members of the same society. So, with this caveat in mind, I want to consider some ways in which we can understand why Eastern and Western societies have responded to Covid-19 differently, and not simply as a consequence of specific decisions by politicians.
In the rest of this post, I try to dig deeper into cultural difference, and focus in particular on what the eminent sinologist and François Jullien’s ideas might contribute to the debate.
Jullien argues that on the deepest level, the divergence between what he calls ‘Chinese’ thought (which would include cultures like Korea and Japan influenced by Chinese culture) and that of what he terms ‘Greek’ thought (or “Western’) amounts to two fundamentally different approaches to humanity’s relationship to the world. He describes these two different cultures as being characterised on the one hand by an inclination towards ‘’transcendence’ (West), and on the other to ‘immanence’ (East).
These differences are a consequence os the fact that, traditionally, Chinese thinking was not based on the activity of gathering objective knowledge through the senses, because China was especially sensitive to “the regular, spontaneous fecundity stemming simply from the alternation of the seasons”. In fact, Jullien asserts,“[t]here are two ways in which my existence is continuously connected to something outside. I breathe and I perceive”.
By granting “priority to a conception of reality as an object of knowledge”, the Greeks, by contrast, laid the groundwork for Western thought., writes Jullien. ‘[T]he mind moves upward from visual sensation to the construction of essences, and vision is corrected, structured, and at the same time transcended by reason.” An equation of the eye with the mind was thereby established, and this meant an over-emphasis on the importance of rational argument and analysis, where a whole-as-parts paradigm or bipolarity was applied to thought. “One could say – metaphorically, at least – that Greek thought was marked by the idea, at once tragic and beautiful, of ‘measure’ attempting to impose itself on chaos,” Jullien writes.
As a consequence, Western culture came to value discrete, clear, abstract ‘building blocks’ for cognition. Because it projects order from outside, Western thinking focuses on the causal explanation “according to which an antecedent and a consequence, A and B, are extrinsically related to one another”. Mathematical structures - point, line, plane and ratio - are of the first importance in the history of Western philosophy. Thus, as Jullien notes, Descartes could influentially assert “that the distinct serves as the gauge of truth, ‘that the things we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true,’ in the oft quoted formula”.
On the one hand, writes Jullien, there is the Western philosophical tradition: “I can privilege the gaze and the activity of perception, the Greek choice, which led them to grant priority to a conception of reality as an object of knowledge: the mind moves upward from visual sensation to the construction of essences, and vision is corrected, structured, and at the same time transcended by reason.” Alternatively, there is the direction taken by Chinese philosophy, which “proceeded from the fact that I am alive, breathing in - breathing out.’ From this premise it was then possible to “deduce the principle of a regulating alternation from which the process of the world flows.” By prioritizing breath over perception the Chinese way was therefore grounded on a conception of the world founded “not on the activity of knowledge but on respiration.’. Jullien suggests that these differences can be summed up in ontological terms by saying that the West is preoccupied with ‘being’, while the East thinks in terms of ‘living.’
But how does this abstract level of understanding culture translate into day-to-day decision making and action? This will be the topic of my next post.
NOTE: I have quoted from Jullien’s The Propensity of Things, and The Great image has no shape, or, on the nonobjective in painting. Here is an Amazon link to these, and others of Jullien’s books:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=francois+jullien&ref=nb_sb_noss_1