‘Costly Signaling’ and North Korea
Why does an impoverished regime like North Korea expend so much time, energy and money on its mass spectacles like the Arirang Games, which features awe-inspiring levels of coordinated movement and synchronization, and its equally well synchronized and lavishly equipped military parades? Obviously they are meant to send a message, to signal something. But to who, exactly?
A theory coming from the study of evolution suggests one possible answer: Costly Signalling Theory (CST). This proposes that the best way to understand why a male peacock has such elaborate and redundant (from the point of view of natural selection) plumage is that its very ‘uselessness’ signals the birds superior fitness, its capacity to be in excess of the bare necessities of survival. When translated to human society, CST suggest that many aspects of culture, such as art, dance, music performance - all individual and collective activities with no apparent or obvious social pay-off - are actually vital dimensions of social cohesion.
In a previous post I suggested that a useful anthropological model through which to consider what, on the face of it, seems the wholly irrational behaviour of North Korea is Clifford Geertz’s concept of the ‘theatre state’. The rulers of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are dedicated not primarily to the usual goals of security and economic well-being for its citizens but rather to the maintenance and execution of power by organizing for its citizens performance and participation in ritual and spectacle.The role of such mass events within this ‘theatre state’ ensures a high level of social conformism, and therefore the survival of the regime..
But the dilemma facing North Korea’s leaders, as in any community, is how to distinguish those individuals who are genuinely cooperating within their social unit from those who are ‘free riders’, that is, individuals who are simply giving lip-service, that is, just the appearance of cooperation. One way to counter this potential deception is through organizing costly signaling activities. For a signal to be ‘costly’ it must incur some kind of personal risk or evident disadvantage, or carry no immediate or obvious individual benefit. Such signaling is therefore difficult to fake, and is quality-dependant behaviour that proves an individual’s commitment to their community or society.
Costly signalling is characterized broadly by three elements: synchrony, repetition and order. The first involves synchronizing the individual with others through collective behaviour, such as group musical performance, singing and dancing, or regimented marching movements. Repetition is central to all ritual, and involves acts of imitation, and actions are often repeated to the point of deliberate internal redundancy, that is, far beyond the level needed to simply get a message across. As a result of synchrony and repetition, a pronounced sense of order will emerge.
Let’s consider how a Pyongyang military parade functions as almost a paradigm of costly signaling. It is very far from just a demonstration aimed at the world stage, as it plays an absolutely vital role internally, in the maintenance of the regime. A fundamental aspect of a parade is the synchronizing of all participants, not only the soldiers doing the marching but also the audience watching. The individual is strictly subordinated to, even subsumed within, the group. Repetition is centra to a parade, and occurs on the level of visual signs like identical military uniform and khaki and camouflage colours, and the massing of huge numbers of individuals moving together in the same direction, coordinated around atypical movements like the ‘goose-step.’ The marshaling of common themes, styles and signs demonstrate a pronounced, even pathological, interest in communicating order. The material and physical provisioning required to prepare for the event, the time and effort expended in preparing and participating in it, entail both a huge individual and group cost. The deployment of multiple skills, the organization of the many elements and participants, all the while adhering to a rigid thematic and stylistic convention, signals a seemingly faultless level of social cohesion and conformism, and this functions in a feedback loop within which a demonstration of total control serves to activly consolidate such control..
A visit to the studio of Chung Sang-Hwa
I recently visited the Korean painter Chung Sang-Hwa (b. 1932) in his studio and home deep in the Yeoju countryside about an hour south-east of Seoul. Chung is to have a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul in May, and I have been asked to write one of the catalogue essays. Chung can be described as a ‘monochrome’ painter., and my essay explores the relationship of his style of painting and those made by Western monochrome artists, such as Kazimir Malevich, Yves Klein, Pietro Manzoni and Robert Ryman.These days, Chung is usually discussed in relation to Dansaekhwa, a stye fo painting that, broadly speaking, can be described as monochromatic, and which I discussed in an earlier post.
Visually, Chung’s paintings consist of a uniform, but also highly textured terrain, which is the result of a systematic method of applying and removing kaolin and acrylic paint. This involves preparing the front of the canvas with acrylic paint and kaolin, marking out the reverse side of an unstretched canvas with a grid of pencil lines, and then pleating the canvas by using a plasterer’s jointing knife to crack the front surface along the gridded lines. He then works on the front, removing further layers and adding acrylic paint. The result is a very complex surface, the result of a procedure that balances pre-meditated conscious action with the aleatory. The emphasis on creating an all-over physical terrain has the important result of flattening out the internal, relational, fictive or virtual space within painting, and as a result, the model of painting as something defined as a planar surface upon which a pictorial language organized around the imposition of a specific hierarchy of apprehension – of focusing on some parts and not on others - is replaced by a model based on a more uniform distribution of visual attention across the whole surface.
Chung physically interacts with his surface in a regimented, repetitive way. As a result, and as is generally the case with painters who adopt a monochrome style, Chung relinquishes most of the liberties associated with the modern, Western, idea of artistic freedom, creativity, and subjectivity, and turns instead to the ritualized reiteration of basic manual operations. His actions are emphatically insistent, repetitive and time-consuming. They seem to have more in common with artisanal activities such as weaving or platting, or agricultural practices such as tilling, harrowing and leveling, than with what we usually consider ‘fine art’ painting. Indeed, comparing the appearance of Chung’s paintings to austere woven surfaces such as rugs or baskets, or to a field cleared and prepared for planting, signals the fact that freedom of invention, the hallmark of Western art since Romanticism, has been willingly sacrificed.
When I talked with Chung he emphasized that the surface he creates is not flat in the sense of being a two-dimensional plane. For him, the surface is not important for what it potentially opens up and discloses, nor for what it hides. It does not separate or cover up, but rather is something that is inhabited, a space of interpenetration, where the solid meets the immaterial. He talked of the ‘rightness’ of the surface as dependent on the multitude of pleats, fissures, cracks and repainted areas. The surface is layered, but has no topside and underside. By emphasizing surface, Chung seeks a close link between the eye, the hand, and bodily animation, and encourages an intimate, immersive, kind of encounter. The surface is the ground for interactions and continuous transformations, for an exploration of creative processes through which human action is harmonized in order to achieve reciprocity with the nonhuman through what Chung refers to as ‘the tempo of our breath.’ In an interview with Bona Yoo from 2020 Chung said: “For me, the process of elimination and reapplying is a way to explore and construct flatness of the canvas. From there, I discover movement and also rhythm, like the rhythm and tempo of breath. You can feel the painting breathe, as we ourselves do. You have to feel this.”[i]
Chung’s indigenous cultural context offers him a way of understanding the surface of painting as the site for the arising of meaning from practiced and ritualized interaction. But what kind of analogies best describe Chung’s special kind of flatness? The archaeological metaphor which has been employed in English-language criticism in relation to Chung’s practice - his ‘quasi-archeological process’[ii] – seems potentially misleading. It implies that Chung is involved in excavation, unearthing or laying bare in order to reveal something hidden, that some extra-sensory content - spiritual, psychological, symbolic, historical, theoretical - is to be extracted from his surface. This supposition in its turn is premised on a metaphysical assumption that the surface is only external appearance that hides the real or true essence to be found deep inside or in the mind of the artist. In the Western tradition a surface tends to be either physical presence or is distrusted and judged superficial. As Robert Ryman wrote, for him the monochrome surface means there is ‘no illusion’, and a painting is reduced to the status of an artefact freed from inferential, metaphorical, significance. But Chung’s surface does not deliver only the experience of here-and-now presence. Then again, it is not something to be ‘excavated’ in the search for meaning below, and does not carrying us towards some hidden, essential, meaning. Chung’s manipulation and sustained attention to surface is significant because it produces valuable dimensions of experience, and generates meaningful changes inperceptions and relationships to the surrounding world. His work forcefully suggests that there is nothing underneath the surface, but that this surface is an intermediary and the real site of the generation of meaning. What is to be found lies before or eyes and fingers.
A better range of metaphors to describe Chung’s painting was suggested by Chung in our conversation, and are drawn from agriculture. He is ‘farming’ his surface. Indeed, even the look of his paintings’ surfaces sometimes brings to mind the straight rows of recently planted rice or the stubble intentionally left in a field after the harvest. By making this analogy, Chung is suggesting that he aims at harmonious regulation, in which the surface is a field that yields without exhausting its potential as part of a continuous cycle which is most obviously characterized by the changing seasons. The surface of a field is a zone between earth below and atmosphere above, and where the two intermingle as part of a process. Chung’s surface is also analogous to a field in the sense that it is a place of inscription, where traces of systematic movements are registered, but which is subject to two uncontrollable forces: ‘eruption’, or stresses and strains from below that cause creasing, fracturing, cracking, and forces of ‘erosion’ from above, characterized by scouring, wiping, subtracting and removing.[iii]
Another potential metaphor, this time psychological, also suggest itself, and draws attention to the fact, which was also emphasised by Chung in our conversation, that the performative dimension of his activity has overtly therapeutic and ritualistic value. His surface is the site for a dual process: doing damage and making reparation. Chung mentioned the specifically Korean emotional trait known as ‘han’ (한) which seems to afflict especially his generation’s as a result of collective trauma and memory of suffering and is usually characterized as a deep-seated anger, resentment, and unrequited sorrow regarding the fundamental injustice of the world. When seen in this context, Chung’s surface is one upon which he vents his anger and frustration, but also where he seeks to make amends. It carries the signs of violence perpetrated and of attempts to restore wholeness. Chung’s surface is one upon which personal and collective loss and damage is confronted and worked through, and his practise provides a way out of anger, estrangement, alienation and guilt through engaging in a virtuous cycle. But another way to imagine this ritual process, now seen from within a wider context, is to consider Chung’s surface as analogous to the perfect, undivided totality of reality (the tao, or way or path) which is loved and respected but inevitably riven and sundered by action in the world, and is then patiently and lovingly repaired and restored, although never successfully, hence the perpetual need to repeat the process.
I was deeply impressed by Chung Sang-Hwa’s total commitment to his artistic vision. These days, his paintings are much sought after internationally. He is a wealthy man. All his life he had to struggle, overcoming great personal, political, and cultural difficulties. Within his lifetime he has seen Korea be a colony of Japan, become divided and suffer a terrible civil war, then endure military dictatorship before transiting to democracy, and the Korea of Samsung and BTS. Throughout this turbulent period, he honed his art, following his own straight and narrow path.
A work from the 1970s.
Another from the 1970s. Below, more recent works.
[i] Bona Yoo. ‘How to Become Free: A Conversation with Chung sang-Hwa’. Chung Sang-Hwa. 1964-78. Exh. cat. (New York and London: Lévy Gorvy/Seoul: Hyundai Gallery, 2020), p.72
[ii] Lóránd Hegyi. ‘Chung Sang-Hwa’s Pictorial Messages. Perspectives of Internalization – Metaphors of Appropriation’. Chung Sang-Hwa. Exh. Cat. (Seoul: Gallery Hyundai, 2014), p.22
[iii] I am drawing here on the ideas of anthropologist Tim Ingold in his Correspondences (London: Polity, 2021) pp. 85-93.
Landscape Painting, East and West.
This photograph is of of concrete gun emplacement near my house, part of the extensive fortifications that have been constructed around the DMZ. It seems someone had the bright idea of painting a view of what can be seen through the gun port, I suppose in order to aid the gunners during night-time actions. This painting is crude, but it follows the conventions of Western landscape rather the traditional Korean, in that it is based on fixed-point perspective, that is, it imitates the view as seen from a static single position - in this case, what can be seen when you stand looking out of the rectangular aperture. This got me thinking about the differences between Eastern and Western conventions of depicting landscape, as I was struck by how useless a traditional Korean landscape painting would be if the purpose was to represent a place in order to bombard it accurately with high explosive.
From the Renaissance until the advent of modernism, Western painting was dominated by the conventions of fixed-point perspective, a system which enhanced the ‘objective’ experience of visual mastery. The horizon is usually located low down, as if the landscape is seen from the ground and from a single, standing, position. A landscape painting by, say, John Constable therefore mimics a view seen through a window frame, suggesting that we are looking onto a real or imagined view which is graspable and controllable from the position it is being viewed..
‘The Hay-wain’ by John Constable (1821)
Traditionally, Korean landscape painting – like all painting produced under Chinese cultural influence - depicted very broad views of the scenes they represented, tending to put the horizon high, as if the landscape was perceived from the point of view of a flying bird or of someone perched high on a mountain. Korean artist Ahn Gyeon’s painting, Dream Journey to the Peach-Blossom Paradise (c1447), for example, which was inspired by Chinese Northern Song models, incorporates three kinds of viewpoints into one painting: the left side is drawn with ‘Level distance’, the rugged mountains with ‘High distance’, and the dream-land on the right with a ‘Bird's-eye view’, to which a ‘Deep distance’ viewpoint is also applied.
‘Dream Journey to the Peach-Blossom Paradise’ by Ahn Gyeon (c.1447).
A work by a later Korean artist, Jeong Seon, like his view of the Geumgang mountains, painted in the mid-eighteenth century, is also an amalgam of different viewpoints, but unlike the Ahn Gyeong it depicts an actual location (a range of mountains that are now within North Korea). However, one would have to be a bird to see it from this elevation, and like the Ahn Gyeonggi-do, it actually incorporates several viewing positions. As a result, the topographical features are not located as they would be if we were viewing the mountains from one fixed location.
‘General View of Inner Geumgang’ by Jeong Seon (c.1740s)
The phenomenal aspect of nature was described in Korean culture by the Chinese characters meaning “mountains-waters” (shanshui), which is usually translated by the English word ‘landscape’. But this coupling of environmental attributes implies a fundamentally different relationship to the depiction of nature to that of the West. In fact, rather than understanding it as an object of perception, the East Asian idea expresses a sense of immersion. For shanshui painting was as space within which ch’i-yun- ‘vital breath’, ‘breath-resonance’ or ‘breath-energy’ - could circulate. For everything was understood to realize both itself and its relationship with everything else within the unity of ch’i - composed of the non-dualistic intertwining of yinyang – the two defining principles of the East Asian world-view. While it is misleading to set these terms in opposition to each other, broadly speaking we can say that yin is negative, dark, and feminine, while yang is positive, bright, and masculine. The sky is yang and the earth as yin. Water in yang and mountains are yin. Yang is active and yin is restful. Their interaction influences all creatures and things. Ch’i is therefore an inherent animating energy that continuously circulates and concentrates itself, and by circulating it connects and brings consistency to reality. “Not only my own being, as I experience it intuitively,” writes the French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien, “but the entire landscape that surrounds me as well, is continuously flooded by this subterranean circulating energy.”
In painting this ‘vital breath’ was also signaled by the energy of the brush, ink, and colours. As a result, what to Western eyes registers as lack of finish or refinement, sketchiness, or a sense of incompletion, was highly valued because ‘breath-energy’ was associated with spontaneity and open-endedness. Sketchiness was meant to put potentiality at the centre of representation. “When you paint”, advised the Chinese scholar-artist Tang Zhiqi (c.1620), “there is no need to paint all the way; if with each brushstroke you paint all the way, it becomes common.” The aim was not to fix essences but to make a record of a play of energy. Catching the flow of ch’i required that a painting conveyed a stage “when plenitude has not yet broken up and dispersed”, writes Jullien. As the T’ang Dynasty painter and writer Chang Yen-yüan wrote in his Origin and Development of Painting (c.845AD): “If the spirit-resonance [ch’i-yun] is sought for, the outward likeness will be obtained at the same time.”
Because of this emphasis, in contrast to the West landscape painting in East Asia held for hundreds of years the preeminent place as the most esteemed subject for artists. But it wasn’t directed at mimesis, or imitation, in the Western sense of replicating nature and achieving a convincing three-dimensional illusion. Instead, the principal goal for a painter was to enhance awareness of a reality within which the viewer actively participated. But if the goal is to use a picture to help accurately aim at a target within a landscape, then obviously shanshui is of little help. The Western model, however, seems perfectly suited to the task. The Korean soldier who painted the view on the gun emplacement was also taking a ‘bird’s eye view’, one granted courtesy of the siting of the emplacement, which overlooks the valley below. But because it adopts the Western conception of pictorial space, the image can dominate what it overlooks by setting the viewer clearly apart from what is viewed. In fact, one could even suggest that the origins of the whole Western classical ideal of art as dedicated to the imitation of the visible is fundamentally about capture and control. It implies the goal of mastery over nature in order to dominate and exploit it, and thereby reduces the environment to a space for predator and prey. The East Asian model is more benign by comparison, as it mixes the viewer up with the viewed, uniting them within the general flow of ch’i, rather than separating them into an active and dominating viewer and a passively viewed. It is no surprise that photography, which simulates very effectively the static viewpoint pioneered in painting, is so very appealing. Here too we have a technology for grasping and controlling. It is no coincidence that we say – or used to – that we ‘shoot’ a camera and ‘capture’ an image. In this context, however, digital photography, which is infinitely manipulable and can incorporate multiple viewpoints, can be seen to offer the possibility of another kind of picturing, one that is closer to the shanshui model.
Both the Eastern and Western models are fundamentally technological, in the sense of functioning as the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. But they construe their goals very differently. The distinction is also evident in the physical practice of making a painting. As the art historian John Onians has pointed out, the posture adopted by Western painters mimics that of the warrior holding a shield (palette)and sword (brush or palette knife). Here, for example, is a self-portrait by William Hogarth from the same period that Jeong Seon was working in Korea:
By contrast, the ideal of the Eastern painter is more analogous to that of a farmer sowing a field, in that he works on a horizontally sited surface rather than a vertical one, crouching over the work in progress, and as a result is more closely, more physically, in solved in what he does as an extension of himself.
What does this tell us about the enduring differences between Western and Eastern culture? Obviously, today the conventions of Western painting are deeply entrenched in East Asia, and anyway it is misleading to talk in terms of hard-and-fast differences. Cultures evolve and inter-blend. But while the idea that a painting should depict a three-dimensional space using fixed-point perspective no longer dominates the West, perhaps we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that as a result underlying assumptions have changed. Isn’t the Western model of the artist (which has been exported globally) still about ‘dominating’ the canvas? About ‘colonizing’ it with our subjectivity? Aren’t we still wedded to the idea of the artist as the exemplary individual whose will triumphs over adversity? Dont we still think in terms of adversaries, competitors, ‘hard-one images’, a whole rhetoric of ‘doing battle’?
Visualizing the Invisible. Or, how to beat the pandemic.
An English friend who lives in London recently sent me a picture of an orange pomander she made over Christmas, and I immediately realized she had fabricated a Coronavirus. I told her so. But this possibility apparently hadn’t occurred to her!
See what you think:
This illustration of the virus was created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and shows its ultrastructural morphology. When viewed using electron microscopically, one sees spikes covering the outer surface, which is why it is called a ‘corona’ virus.
Now here is my friend’s orange pomander:
I rest my case.
My friend’s wholly unconscious fabrication of the virus got me thinking about the role played by the activity of visualizing the invisible in our lives in general. We can’t see – or smell, taste, touch – so much of what is important to us, but at some point in our evolution we came up with the idea of using metaphors and analogies, which give form and substance to abstractions, or what is sensed but remains invisible.
In such books as ‘Philosophy in the Flesh’ (1999) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have developed what they call Conceptual Metaphor Theory. They discuss how we use ‘primitive image schemas’, as they call them, to make ‘imagistic cross-domain mappings.’ A ‘target domain’, such as something invisible like an emotion, or time, or the nature of human relationships, is mapped onto a ‘source domain’ - an image drawn from our memory, our experience of interacting with the environment, and from a shared cultural stock of already existing metaphors. The ‘target’ concept is inherently abstract, and so lacks clear demarcation, making it difficult to grasp or ‘see’, and it is in order to render it comprehensible and communicable that we have recourse to the concrete things accessible to the senses. Because the physiological conditions of human corporeality have remained more or less constant for millennia, such metaphorical or analogical schema function within a context that manifests a limited range of variables, and they have remarkable durability through time and space. As Lakoff and Johnson show, in the world’s languages a relatively small number of ‘primitive image schemas’ exist which are based on familiar spatial relations arising from the experience of being a body occupying and moving in space. These schemas serve as the ‘source-domains’ for abstractions such as ideas, concepts, qualities, and feelings and emotions. They refer to core experiences, such as those of “part-whole, center–periphery, link, cycle, iteration, contact, adjacency, force motion (eg., pushing, pulling, propelling), support balance, straight-curved, and near-far.”. Orientational metaphors are especially pervasive ‘source-domains,’ and have do with space-occupancy - with the fact that we inhabit spaces. For example, we imagine being happy as being spatially ‘up.’ “The fact that the concept HAPPY is oriented UP leads to English expressions like “I’m feeling up today.”,
A universally pervasive conceptual metaphor makes a correlation between knowing something and the act of seeing, so that we believe that ‘Knowing is Seeing’. If we can’t ‘see’ an idea, a concept, or a feeling clearly in the ‘mind’s yes’, then we don’t believe we ‘know’ it. So, as Mark Johnson writes in ‘The Meaning of the Body’ (2007):
‘If there is insufficient light, I will not be able to see the object clearly. If I cannot discern the object clearly, I won’t perceive the details of its shape and structure [……..] if an idea is obscure or an explanation is not clear, it follows that one cannot understand the idea. Murky arguments are hard to understand. Shedding more light on a subject makes it easier to understand, and so we value any account that is illuminating. ‘
This correlation between seeing and knowing become especially problematic when something is invisible. We are at a loss, and are likely to feel threatened and fearful. That is, unless we can give it a visible form. Before scientific instruments, it was visionary images that mostly performed this task, often unconsciously finding visual correlatives for the invisible forces that dominate our lives, or transforming them into the visible, so that they can thereby be grasped and, tamed. Carl Jung terms them ‘archetypes.’ This, in a sense, is what the shaman’s role was for traditional societies: he or she made visible what was invisible. Before science provided us with a vastly extended capacity to know through seeing, thanks to the invention of the microscope and telescope, we came up with other ways to grasp the invisible, which were mostly through various forms of anthropomorphism. In this regard, images are much more effective than the word based metaphors that are Lakoff and Johnson’s main focus. Images can produce much closer - isomorphic- correspondences in actual or illusionistic three-dimensions between things visible and invisible.
We freeze things, holding them still in order to better control them. But this can also have profoundly negative implication, as William Wordsworth lamented in his poem ‘The tables Turned’:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
‘We may indeed ‘murder to dissect’, and it is certain that a ‘heart / That watches and receives’ is to be nurtured. But in the case of a deadly virus, the capacity to ‘dissect’ is useful, and will save millions of lives. The microscope, aided by digital imaging, has made the virus visible to us, and thereby made it more controllable.
But there is also an important place for more ‘primitive’ forms of visualization, motivated by deep anxieties, which, as in this case, led to the making of an image that is parasitic on microscopic scientific imagery in order to visualize the invisible. This activity is very therapeutic. I think my friend, who is naturally very anxious about the dangers of the virus, found a way to unconsciously control and work through her fear through making a tasty, edible, image of the ‘enemy’. If she does indeed eat her orange pomander, she will also add an important performative dimension to the therapeutic process, literally dismembering and consuming what she fears. Perhaps the fact that she went about making her fetish unconsciously is also important. I hope I haven’t destroyed the good voodoo it offers by bringing it to attention.
Come to think of it, this process is also what the face mask enacts to some extent. It functions as a metonym or synecdoche for the virus. In other words, the mask makes visible the virus through being a visible attribute representing the invisible whole. Quite apart from the practical medical benefits, this is, as I noted in a previous post, a very valuable symbolic role of the face mask, one that we should credit with more than just mere ‘symbolic’ value, because it also has a directly practical benefit that accrues on the level of affect and emotion - the psychological rather than the somatic, which is what the doctors talk about.
New Year’s Eve at the DMZ
Here’s what the view looked like across the Han estuary, looking towards North Korea, as the sun set on New Year’s eve, 2020. Over the other side they claim there is no Covid-19. It seems it takes the most authoritarian regime on the planet to beat this damned virus, and the most individualistic to succumb most abjectly to it.
Weird, eh?
Anyway. Happy New Year!
The End of a Buddhist Temple
The Gwan-eun statue at Mutongsa near my house, photographed last year.
Near our house there is, or there was, a small Buddhist temple called Mutongsa (‘sa’ means ‘temple) Only one monk lived there. I say ‘was’ because over the past month it has quietly stopped being a temple. The first thing I noticed was the absence of the imposing statue of Gwan-eun, the boddhisatva of compassion (named Avalokiteśvara in Indian Buddhism, Guanyin in Chinese, and Kannon in Japanese). Gwan-eun is usually shown sitting or standing holding a water bottle, which is how I recognised him the first time i visited the temple.[1] As you can see, the one at Mutongsa was standing, about twenty feet tall, and was sited to overlook the rice fields in the small valley on whose northern side it nestled against a wooded hill. About three weeks ago, when I went and looked closer, I saw that the two other statues of the Buddha within the temple grounds had also gone. Then, a week later, the swastika sign and name in Chinese for the temple disappeared from above the entrance, and soon after that, the two road signs indicating the temple’s presence. Only the huge temple bell remains, when I looked earlier today. This, and the humble prayer hall, the residence of the monk, and a couple of out-buildings.
I have no idea why they closed the temple. But it certainly wasn’t a very popular one. I never saw anyone visiting it. However, when I arrived in our village seven years ago, Mutongsa was a rather weird place. Unfortunately, I never took photos at the time, so you will have to imagine how it was from my description. A large area of the temple grounds was covered in brightly painted shrines made of large pebbles (this region is rich in such smooth rocks, deposited here millions of years ago as the glaciers melted and rivers shrank) piled up into cains and pagodas and painted crudely with traditional floral motifs and Buddhist symbols in bright green, red, yellow, blue, and golds. In fact, everything was brightly painted.
But a few years ago a new monk took up residence, and he obviously didn’t like the garishness of the temple, and so he systematically set about removing all the colourful shrines, using some of the stones from them as ballast under the construction of a new road traversing the rice fields and leading to the temple. Eventually, about six months ago, the monk had the paint removed from the statues. So, for a while Gwan-eun was a dull grey concrete colour. The sudden austerity was rather saddening, and I didn’t think to take a photograph. But I had no idea this was just the prelude to the demise of the temple as a whole – and perhaps nor did the monk, for, if he did know, why did he bother to have the statues stripped?
But you can see what Gwan-eun once looked like in the photograph at the beginning of this blog and below:
And this is what remains today:
And here are some more images of the temple as it is today. Note the bell remains. And there are still vestiges of its former technicolor character.
I’m not sure that Mutongsa’s closure can be read as representative of the decline of Buddhism in Korea as a whole. However, it is clear that Christianity is the main beneficiary of the Republic of Korea’s rapid modernization and urbanization. It’s a cliché to equate Protestantism with capitalism, but this does seem a relevant way of understanding religion here. In fact, only 44% of South Korean espouse religion of any kind, but of these, 45% are Protestant (mostly American-style Pentecostalism, Methodism and Presbyterianism), 35% Buddhist, 18% Roman Catholic, and 2% ‘other.’ The largest mega-church in the world is the Pentecostal Yoido Full Gospel Church in Yoi Island, where there are seats for 15,000 worshippers, and the congregation numbers more than 250,000! Two more of the largest churches in the world are in Seoul. Crosses marking the location of churches are everywhere, and are especially evident at night because they are illuminated – usually in pink. Within a two-mile radius of me, there must be a least six churches – including Jehovah Witnesses and Roman Catholic’s. The nearby Catholic church, which is dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima, merits a future post all to itself.
But it would be wrong to assume that Korea is traditionally a Buddhist country, which is what I thought before I moved here. Buddhism came to Korea from China in the fourth century, and was officially adopted by the ruling elite as a way of strengthening royal authority. But over the five centuries of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1912), Buddhism lost much of its official patronage, and monks were forbidden to build temples in the capital. Joseon was a Neo-Confucian state, and its scholar elite looked down on Buddhism and Buddhists. But monks continued to practice and preach in temples and monasteries located in isolated mountain regions.
Gradually, the dominant form of Buddhism in Korea became Seon. Essentially, this is Ch’an Buddhism, which is better known in the West as Zen, the Japanese pronunciation of Cha’n, just as Seon is the Korean pronunciation. Ch’an means ‘meditation’. Ch’an was transmitted to Unified Silla (668-935) and became dominant in the eleventh century under the Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392). It was during this period that the Jogye Order became the predominant form of Korean Buddhism, a status it still holds today.
Seon, while possessing uniquely Korean characteristics, is, like Ch’an, a fusion of indigenous Chinese Taoism and Indian Mahayana Buddhism. An important teaching of Seon which is also central to Mahayana Buddhism as whole is that all humankind is already in possession of an ‘original self’, ‘Buddha-nature’ or ‘Buddha-mind’ – that is to say, everyone has innate knowledge of ultimate reality. Buddhism teaches that as long as one clings to the limited perspective provided by the identity-ego, achieving the absolute state of freedom that is ‘Buddha-mind’ is impossible. But Ch’an is unique in specifically teaching that release from the attachments that mask access to ‘Buddha-mind’ can only come through a moment of sudden insight. Brain-centred thinking involving, for example, the study of the Buddhist canon, is of little use.
One of the most important interpreters of Ch’an from the 1930s onwards in the West was the Japanese philosopher D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966). In An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934) Suzuki declared that Zen catches ‘life as it flows’. It promotes a fundamentally illogical, non-cognitive and irrational methodology, and is ‘primarily and ultimately a discipline and an experience, which is dependent on no explanation.’ Zen therefore gives great value to non-verbal understanding, feeling, emotion, intuition, sensation, affect, intimacy and immediate experience.
Here are some quotations from one of the most important modern-day Seon monks, SongChol (1912-1993), taken from the wonderful collection translated by Brian Barry entitled Opening the Eye (Gimm-Young International, 2020).
The common goals of all religions is to bring people from the world of the relative and finite into the realm of the absolute and infinite. This is because the world of the relative and finite is filled with suffering and anguish. Happiness in this world can be nothing more than fleeting; and in fact we spend more time being unhappy and dissatisfied than we do being happy. So the world of the absolute and infinite promises us eternal happiness and relief from earthly suffering. In this sense, Buddhism is not different from other religions. Eternal happiness is one of the basic desires of the human species. The eternal happiness can be achieved only by crossing over to the world of liberation, the absolute, the infinite; and each religion teaches its own methods for achieving this goal.
In Buddhism we often use the mirror as a metaphor for mind. A mirror in its natural state is perfectly clear. But it loses its ability to reflect as more and more dust gathers on it until finally it can no longer reflect a single thing properly. Our delusions are like dust on a mirror – our vision becomes blurred and we lose our ability to reflect that which is. But being free of delusions is like being the mirror itself without a speck of dust,. This original nature of the mirror is like the buddha nature, which we also call our original face.
If there as a clump of gold buried in a yard, people would dig and dig until they found it, regardless of how deep it was. The original, infinite, absolute jewel buried within us is incomparably more magnificent than the clump of gold in the yard. So we should try to find this incredible jewel within.
People usually say that the goal of Buddhism is to become enlightened, and to become awakened, to become a buddha. But that is in fact a misinterpretation, since all sentient beings are originally buddha. To ‘become enlightened’ really means to become enlightened to the fact that you’re already buddha.
Buddhism is the process of cleansing the heart and Zen (Seon) meditation with a koan is the best method to achieve this, “Who am I?” is one of the best known koans, and if you continue to work with this koan, you will come to see your original self and become enlightened. So whatever you do – listen to Dharma talks, read books, chant, prostrate – just continue to ask your self, “Who am I?”
If you can concentrate your mind and reach the state of total absorption, you can see all truths including the true nature of the world in which we live. Usually, because we can’t see present reality as it is, we refer to this world as samsara. But once you make the breakthrough, you will see that this world and this reality are in fact paradise. So Buddhism is not a process of becoming a buddha and turning samsara into paradise. What we call ‘samsara’ is originally the world of paradise.
[1] Or is Gwan-eun actually female? One of the striking features of Gwan-eun’s iconography is that he/she is depicted as transgender. Neither fully recognizable as male or female. Apparently, the Jesuits have something to do with this. When they encountered Guanyin in China during the Jesuit Mission they associated the bodhisattva of compassion with Our Lady. This, in its turn, had an impact of Buddhist perceptions of their bodhisattva, which gradually took on more female characteristics. I too, at first assimilated the Buddhist figure to the Virgin Mary, and then, anthropologically, to the Mother Goddess of paganism. But now I realize this is a fundamental Western bias. I don’t mean simply towards Christianising Gwan-eun, but something much deeper - the bias of binary thinking in which the statue must be male or female. Actually, I have come to see that the real value of the bodhisattva of compassion’s iconography is precisely its gender ambiguity which transcends the binary choice, placing us in a more fluid in-between. The Chinese Ch’an Buddhist learnt from the Jesuits, but the Jesuits did not learn to overcome their dualism from the Chinese, no doubt because the Christian God is so inherently patriarchal - God the Father. But at least Catholicism has some infusion of the feminine in the form of the Virgin Mary. Protestantism, by contrast, is wholly patriarchal.
Beauty
As I recently finished my new book ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’, to be published by Oneworld in October 2021, I’ve had occasion to ponder beauty. So, here are some of my thoughts.
When we experience something as beautiful it is as if the chasm that usually lies between the ideal and the real, between the world of the imagination and the earthly burden of our body, is temporarily bridged. So, to limit the idea of beauty to ‘beautifying’, to decoration and adornment, fails to do justice to the profound significance beauty can have for us. Beauty seems intimately linked to the conviction that despite plentiful evidence to the contrary all is well with the world, which is why the French novelist Stendhal wrote: "beauty is only a promise of happiness." In other words, beauty is a principal affective medium through which to channel and direct hope.
To sense something as ‘beautiful’ means consciously carving it out and detaching it from a ground of general stimuli and holding it there for rapt attention. This experience is more than simply an instinctual response involving pleasure, as it also involves definition and distinction, and designation, replication, and promotion - the sharing of the experience. But when we are confronted by something beautiful we won’t be much concerned with use or symbolic meaning, and unlike in other circumstances where we desire something and feel pleasure, will have adopted a contemplative rather than active state of mind, and are being relatively disinterested. Beauty, so it seems, is its own sufficient cause and effect. Despite the absence of any perceived practical use value, we will also probably want to take longer over savoring this experience, and actively seek to repeat it. But no one can tell us to have it, and we must be in the presence of the thing of beauty in order to be affected, although at the same time we sense that beauty is in a sense unattached, it seems to be a memory of some kind of perfection triggered by the stimulus. We are also subliminally aware that our experience is shared with others, and while finding something beautiful is a personal experience, it also connects us to our community. A consensus over what is considered beautiful reconciles people with their community in the present, but also with the ancestral past.
The ‘heart’ will tell us that the eyes and nose that sense something to be beautiful are responding spontaneously to an alluring force. But the ‘head’ will judge beauty to be a product of history and education. We have learned to find something beautiful. We experience beauty in a social context which is bounded and organized in terms specific human interests. Our eyes furnish representations rather than an objective record of reality, and this means beauty cannot simply be an objective property of a rose upon which we gaze. What we are aware of seeing as ‘beautiful’ within the rose is the result of social conditioning, a manifestation of ‘visuality’ rather than straight physiological ‘vision.’ Visuality is socially coded, and largely depends on associative learning. Even our sense of smell, the most chemical and ‘animal’ of our senses, is culturally structured. In one recent scientific experiment, researchers took 15 odours which ranged from ‘pleasant’ via ‘natural’ to ‘disgusting’, and presented them to subjects with names attached to the odours that were intended to communicate positive, neutral and negative associations. They found that regardless of the objective status of the odour as ‘unpleasant’, ‘neutral’ or ‘pleasant’, an odour was rated more pleasant if it was given a positive name, and rated less so when it had an unpleasant name. Remarkably, this was even registered on a somatic level in terms of changes in skin conductance and heart rate.[i]
Children learn to make discriminative responses to what they see and smell as a result of imitating the preferences and behaviour of adults. Their preferences are not hard-wired. What we will find beautiful is closely tied to who we have imitated in order to develop a stable set of values and beliefs. The concept of beauty can also be mobilized to conceal and embellish the nefarious social world by aiding in the construction of an ideal and illusory dimension. Beauty is socially manipulative, even deceptive, and is inevitably connected to power. Through organizing and policing judgments of taste in relation to beauty, a ruling elite creates a favourable hierarchy through which to distinguished insiders from outsiders – the ‘them’ from ‘us’. Even apparently ‘frivolous’ kinds of beauty can become weapons of seduction, exploitation, and oppression, as the changing cycles of fashion within cultures show. When seen from the point of view of the paramount need for social cohesion, the function of beauty, and its embodiment like a rose, is to aid conformity and guarantee social cohesion. The beauty code influences the sense and sensibility of society. Sharing in the same sources of beauty unites a society behind the same values, enhancing chances of survival through creating a sense of community. But it often does this at the expense of other members of the society. As Naomi Wolf wrote in her book The Beauty Myth (1990):
‘Beauty’ is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning value to woman in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.’
Edward Steichen, ‘Heavy Roses. Voulangis, France, 1914’
But to limit beauty just social conditioning is obviously only to tell part of the story. If we consider the dynamics of beauty from the point of view of natural selection - that is, as linked to human sexual choices and competition, to compulsions of reproductive success - a more complex picture emerges. Evolutionary psychologist have shown that over millennia the human brain has constructed a motivational system in which the complex natural and humanly-made order are unconsciously being exploited to wire the brain and calibrate our senses. These processes are vital, because both our awareness of being an individual self and the physical survival of the species depend on it. Specific patterns or structures in the world seem to be especially salient, because in perceiving them humans acquire inherent advantages in terms of natural selection. At birth, selective pressures equip babies, for example, in ways that predispose them to think and behave in particular ways. The universal preference for symmetry, say, may be related to the need to find a healthy mate, because as disease and physical deformity tend to make people look less symmetrical, this provides a clear visual signal indicating the biological advantage of the symmetry.
Humans have also learned to organize experience though the systematic categorization of phenomena and concepts into regulative patterns, which are then culturally inscribed, thereby increasing chances of survival. Humans seem to have an instinctual tendency to want to fit things into predetermined categories, and especially gain pleasure from identifying and perceiving ‘perfect’ examples of the categories that are habitually recognized - what psychologists term ‘preference-for-prototypes’. [ii] In this context, the factors that mark something out as ‘beautiful’ can be understood as linked to what seems most representative of its kind, or what makes something closest to the prototype. This tendency supplies a non-metaphysical basis for the belief that when we find a rose beautiful we are moving beyond the sensible experience and grasping a construct which, while it is based on sensory experience, is mentally autonomous.
A sense of beauty is also important in relation to the brain-based chemical rewards that are essential for cognition and action, because human encounters with the world are evaluative. We engage with the world in terms of its positive or negative implications for us, but these assessments must also be dynamic, because rewards of value are unstable.[iii] Our response to something beautiful triggers chemicals in our brain associated with the positive experience of happiness, and this benign emotional state in its turn increases my survival potential. The sight of something beautiful can trigger dopamine, a chemical that is emitted when there is expectation of a reward. The role of beauty within deeply entrenched rituals and actions also help to stimulate the release of oxytocin, the so-called ‘bonding hormone’. Something beautiful can also release serotonin, which is linked to a sense of social status which bolsters good feelings associated with the positive values they embody for those who grow, give, or receive them.[iv]
In this sense, beauty is much more than simply a pleasurable experience. It is closely related to optimizing brain-body coordination. Our embodied mind is responding on physiological and mental levels to a harmonious experience that involves our senses in unison. We experiencing a complex sensory stimulus emerging in an orderly way that is suggestive of some underlying generative process. What all this evidence suggests is that we are unconsciously aligning our senses and brain with the beautiful thing’s dynamically patterned order of growth.
But if this is all true, then why didn’t all humans in the past, and humans in the present, share the exact same aesthetic preferences? Because humans live in ecological habitats in which a wide variety of different stimuli are constantly being encountered, and so from the point of view of natural selection it would make no sense for them all to have the same emotional and cognitive responses to stimuli wherever they are. Information from the environment is often ambiguous, making interpretation difficult, and so we call on past experiences, stored knowledge, and social norms to help us make rapid inferences about what we perceive, and how to respond. Rather than having a predetermined set of responses, we have learned how to respond ‘appropriately’ to a particular stimulus when encountered.
In other words, instead of being constrained by instinctual patterns we are capable of learning the lessons taught to us by our culture. So, alongside the hard-wired perceptual or sensory responses registered by our body there are acculturated and specific contexts that help determine our aesthetic preference. In terms of evolutionary advantage, the dual sources of the experience of beauty - the biological and the cultural - have provided humanity with its most important characteristic: socially coordinated adaptability. This allows for greater openness to changing circumstances, based on shared social knowledge and not just on direct responses to stimuli, employing our neural architecture, involving emotion, perception, imagery, memory and language. This means that when we say something is ‘beautiful’ our judgment isn’t determined by either purely biological or purely cultural influences. The aesthetic experience emerges from the networked interactions within our brain and body, and in relation to the world around us. In the end, it seems the best way to explain why we can have the experience of beauty when we look at or smell a rose is that it is a benefit of having a uniquely flexible relationship to the world.
Names of Muhammad written around a Damask Rose. Persia. 18th Century.
[i] Djordjevic, J.; Lundstrom, J. N.; Clément, F., et al, ‘A Rose by Any Other Name: Would it Smell as Sweet?’, Journal of Neurophysiology, Vol. 99, No.1, 2008, 386-393. Available on-line at:https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00896.2007[ii] See: Scharfstein, B.-A., Art Without Border. A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 48[iii] Starr, G. G., Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Boston: The MIT Press, 2013)[iv] Breuning, L. G., ‘Why Flowers Make Us Happy’, Psychology Today, Posted June 21, 2017. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-neurochemical-self/201706/why-flowers-make-us-happySee also: Breuning, L. G. , Habits of a Happy Brain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).
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.
Hope (Part II)
As I waited with baited breathe for the outcome of the American election, I thought of Thomas Kincade. This is a painting by the man who is probably the most well-known artist in the United States today (he died in 2012). It is entitled ‘Garden of Hope’. Here is what the artist himself says about it on his Thomas Kincade Studios website:
‘Hope is the great gift of a loving God. In ‘The Garden of Hope’, second in my Gardens of Light collection, I celebrate the bountiful blessing that is a hopeful spirit. Radiance bathes a garden in the woods, pouring down in a flood of light upon an ancient stone urn that is a vessel of hope.
The deeply mysterious relationship between hope and sacrifice is expressed in the symbolism of the urn. Central is the Roman cross, bearing the visages of Mary and Jesus. A magnificent spray of flowers bursts forth from the urn. Surely, ‘The Garden of Hope’ is a garden lavish with new beginnings.’[1]
Why am I thinking about a mediocre American artist when the fate of not just the United States but the whole world hangs in the balance? Because his paintings open a window onto the subjectivity (or lack of it) of the millions who voted Republican.
I don’t think it’s enough to focus on the anger and resentment factors when seeking to understand how so many people can behave in what to me – and to you - seem incomprehensibly stupid ways. No. We need to look to other dimensions of the human psyche, especially, I think, to the nature of the hope these people nurture. Trump and the Republicans mirror these hopes just as much as they give substance to their supporters’ fear, anger, and resentment. As I said in the last post, hope is two-edged. It can be a real catalyst for action and change, but it can also delude and foster false beliefs and aspirations, impossible or irrational goals. But one way or another, we all harbor hopes for the future. Looking at a Kincade painting is like looking at the soul of a Republican. And what we see is the visual image of their hopefulness.
In the 1990s the dissident Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid set out to learn what a real "people's" art looked like. In other words, informed by their experience of the Socialist Realist propaganda art of the Soviet Union, they were interested to know what people everywhere really wanted to see in a picture. They began with the United States, their adopted country, and conducted a survey through a professional marketing firm in order to paint America's ‘Most Wanted’ and also America’s ‘Least Wanted’ paintings. They didn’t ask a question like: ‘What does a hopeful picture look like?’ Instead, their questions were more straightforwardly visual, such as ‘What’s your favorite colour?’, ‘Do you prefer paintings with sharp angles or soft curves?’, and content-based, like, ‘Would you rather look at a painting with figures that are nude or fully clothed? Should the people in the painting be at leisure or working? Should they be indoors or outside, and if the latter, in what kind of landscape? This painting is the one they painted as a result of the questionnaire – America’s ‘Most Wanted’:
Yes. That’s George Washington in the middle foreground (I suppose we can up-date it to an image of Trump). In the end, Komar and Melamid polled 14 countries, and discovered, for example, that Russia’s most-wanted painting was remarkably similar to the United States’ - minus Washington, but still with children playing beside a lake, and a predominantly blue colouration. In fact, they discovered that in every country they polled— from China and Kenya to Iceland and Ukraine, but with the curious exception of Holland— people seemed to want more or less the same picture.And what was the various people’s “Least Wanted’ picture? You have probably already guessed. Modern art. Especially, abstract art of the monochromatic, geometric and textured variety.
Komar and Melamid’s project shows that a secure, that is to say, socially uncontroversial, message of hope is what most people want to have communicated through pictures. But this is simply because that image expresses the kind of hope they nurture within themselves. In this sense, art’s has a practical function , which is essentially therapeutic, preventative and prophylactic. But we would be wrong to blame ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ culture for this phenomenon. A look at art history confirms that this kind of picture has always been what is ‘most wanted’. Most images have been made to communicate unproblematically optimistic or hopeful states of mind or messages based on the presentation of familiarly affirmative content and the use of an aesthetically pleasing style that serve to consolidate people’s need for a positive outcome, personal and collective. So, it should come as no surprise that Komar and Melamid’s painting looks remarkably similar to Thomas Kincade’s oeuvre.
So the Russian artists’ project tells us a good deal about the troubled and troubling relationship not only between hope and art, but also between hope that is truly empowering and hope that is emasculating. It certainly helps to explain why so many people find modern art to be very far from being images of hope, even when the artists themselves and their apologists expressly declared that it was. But it also goes a long way towards explaining Trumpism and the way the Republican Party has evolved.
America’s ‘Most Wanted’ painting and Kincade’s ‘Garden of Hope’ are both facile and banal images of hope. They serve the purpose of saving people the trouble of truly imagining hope for themselves. The genuine expression of feeling, the communication of complex values and ideas, is evidently not what the majority of people want from looking at pictures. They prefer images that reduce experience to amenable clichés, to the conventional and manageable. Once an image is so familiar and lacking in originality it is indeed ‘evil’, in a sense, because it acts as an obstacle to the communication of authentic thoughts and feelings.
In the 1940s, George Orwell referred to what he termed a ‘huge dump of worn-out metaphors’. These are verbal images ‘which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ When an image is so totally familiar, it is possible to be almost unconscious when employing them, and as a result, we will be lulled into a ‘reduced state of consciousness’ which, wrote Orwell, ‘if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.’
Kincade is pandering to a very large audience, and as Komar and Melamid affirmed, he is only giving people what they want. This is what an image of ‘hope’ looks like to millions of people, and it is, therefore, what ‘hope’ is for them. If we are going to take the political ramifications of hope seriously it is definitely necessary to acknowledge the trivializing sentimentality so often associated with its ostensible expression within images, most especially in popular culture.
[1] https://thomaskinkade.com/shop/limited-edition-art/gardens/garden-of-hope-the-limited-edition-art/
Hope (Part 1)
I’m sitting here near the DMZ thinking of Europe in lockdown. Today, the British prime minster, Boris Johnson, announces a second lockdown throughout the UK. In South Korea, by contrast, there is the feeling that things are under control. For now….
Not surprisingly, I’ve been thinking about hope (and hopelessness).
‘WHERE SHALL WE PLACE OUR HOPE?’ The poignant, timeless, question is written across the bottom of a work on paper by the contemporary South African artist William Kentridge under a drawing of a tree (the Tree of Life?) from which hang other texts such as, ‘FINDING YOUR FATE’, ‘SNARED IN AN EVIL TIME’, and ‘The SILENCE ROARS’. ‘WHERE SHALL WE PLACE OUR HOPE?’ Where, indeed? Of late, it’s a question we have probably been asking more frequently than usual, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, economic slump, Islamic terrorism, and ecological melt-down.
Hope has probably accompanied Homo sapiens from the very beginning, or at least since we developed a mode of consciousness enabling the making of connections between the past, present, and future, and between different experiences and phenomena. For, as soon as we were able to remember good and bad experiences and imagine them happening again we were also made aware of the unpredictability and uncertainty of life. We discovered death. We became anxious. But as a result, we also developed practical ways to relieve or assuage our newfound anxiety. One of the most effective was to hope.
Hope is what lets us believe that no matter how dark the world seems today there will be a better tomorrow.It is about creating a state of mind in which we believe we will successfully achieve our consciously pursued goals. Hope allows us to believe in a positive outcome, preferably involving emotions like happiness or joy. These are motivational emotions, or positive-outcome emotions, through which we set goals. Something in the future that indicates our efforts will succeed arouses hope, while something that suggests our efforts are futile will foster despair. Hope is therefore also closely linked to morality, in that what we hope for is also judged to be ‘good’, ‘just’, ‘righteous’. But is hope a thought or an emotion? The answer is that it is both, and before hope becomes an emotion it is a cognitive state of mind. The brain has been shaped by natural selection to process information so as to control behaviour and physical condition in order to optimize fitness. Emotions also play their part in this process. They bring benefits, and are patterns of response shaped by natural selection to deal with the challenges posed by the need to adapt to changing circumstances. Hope, in this context, arises from the expectation that a goal will be reached, and positive feelings are the reward. Such conviction about the future provides enormous benefits from the point of view of survival, as it establishes the grounds upon which sacrifice and suffering in the present becomes a necessary preliminary stage on the way towards beneficial, pleasurable, or happy outcomes.
The goal-directed thinking central to the dynamics of hope responds to feedback at various points, which also serves to locate hope within a wider social and cultural context. Hope is linked to the deep values of ourculture, and attitudes toward it are organized around norms that specify the correctness of these attitudes. A society has a vested interest in optimizing feelings of hope. Individuals want it for themselves but also for others, especially for their family, friends, and employers. People will always prefer to live in a society which is hopeful rather than one that is in despair. In this sense, hope is closely connected to social unity. Affiliative interactions bring rewards and are the basis for the formation of social groups which range from the nuclear family to whole nations. Those who wield power find it beneficial to encourage and channel hope, as they know that a lack of it threatens social order. Alongside faith and charity-love the Roman Catholic Church sees hope as one of the three cardinal virtues. A Nazi Party poster for the presidential election in Germany in 1932 declared: ‘Our Last Hope – Hitler.’ Joe Biden, on the campaign trial for the Presidential elections in 2020, told Americans, “I’m going to give you hope.”
Is there a universal core of hoped for goals? We can probably all agree that humans at all times and in all places eat, sleep, defecate, and procreate. They share an inborn desire for a long and happy life, to succeed in the struggle against ‘evil spirits’, or in a secular terms, all the malign agents that threaten us. Ultimately, what all people have always hoped for boils down to this: happiness. But what brings happiness? A good life protected from evil. Longevity and good fortune. We all have an inborn desire for a long and meaningful life, and this in its turn depends on five basic ingredients: health, peace, wealth, status, and fertility.
But even a small degree of reflection on earthly existence means we become aware of the pervasiveness of suffering and hardship. A sense of the tragedy of life comes not only from the recognition of the extent and depth of suffering but also from the realization that it will continue. How are we to respond to this sobering recognition? We certainly prefer to ignore it for as long as possible.
Hope is closely related to meaning. Through a process of self-reflection, we make a specific choice of goals, and the perceived progress in the journey toward these goals is how we constructs meaning in our life. “What is the nature of meaning?” asked the neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl in ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, and he answered by first arguing that we all experience an “existential vacuum” in which we sense that thereis no inherent meaning or purpose in the universe. But this awareness is remedied by the actualizing of“values.” Frankl argued that the resulting investment of meaning is the result of a decision to bring three major classes of values into our lives: the creative, experiential, and attitudinal. The latter is the stance wetake toward our suffering plights, and it is within this context, one in which we actively need and search for meaning, that hope is central. Frankl wrote: “Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man, his courage and hope, or lack of them and the state of immunity of his body will understand that sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect”. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor, and he referred to the high death rate in Auschwitz over the period of Christmas 1944 to New Year 1945, observing that so many prisoners died because they hoped to be home before Christmas, and when they realized this wouldn’t happen, they lost hope.
Humans have always had to confront the tragic nature of life, and they have found themselves making essentially three choices: they resign themselves to the failure of humanity to affect change and adopt a fatalistic worldview that squeezes drops of meaning out of hard facts; they look for solutions that lie beyond normal human capacities and adopt some variety of supernaturalism, most likely in the form of religious belief; The first option – fatalism - undervalues and underestimates the capacity of humanity to affect ameliorative change, while supernaturalism holds up false hopes while also undermining the actual attitudes and processes by which transformations, however piecemeal, can actually occur. Furthermore, as the American philosopher John Dewey writes: “a world that is finished, ended, would have no traits of suspense and crisis, and would offer no opportunity for resolution. Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment. We envisage with pleasure Nirvana and a uniform heavenly bliss only because they are projected upon the background of our present world of stress and conflict”. Fatalism rejects hope as a viable tool in the struggle to make life meaningful in the face of awareness of life’s tragedy, while supernaturalism places too much value on hope. But there is a third way to confront life’s uncertainties: we can navigate a middle way between fatalism and supernaturalism through forging an ‘art of living’ involving responding to our existential condition, and taking on the burden of making meaning using critical inquiry and moral imagination, a task in which it is recognized that people transform themselves and their world by cumulative action grounded in an awareness of the interconnection of individuals, human communities, and the natural environment.
Bird on a Stick: Is it the oldest surviving symbol in the world?
A waterbird perched on a pole.
The first picture above is about 15,000 years old, painted on the cave wall in Lascaux, France. The other photographs are of what the Koreans call ‘sotdae’, and I took some of them a few days ago in the Onyang Folk Museum in Asan.
In my last post, I shared photos of wild geese arriving here, and it’s possible that the sotdae bird is based on such geese, although more likely, it’s meant to be a duck. Sotdae were traditionally erected at the entrances of villages alongside wooden anthropomorphic totem poles called janseung. They were the protective spirt guardians who watched over the village, keeping it secure.
A special side interest of mine is Upper Palaeolithic cave art, and for some time I’ve been wondering about the similarity between the Upper Palaeolithic image and these Korean sotdae. I’ve also wondered about the humanoid or ‘theriomorphic’ or ‘therioanthropic’ figure near the bird on a pole, which, compared to the bison nearby that seems to have its innards falling out as a result of a spear wound, is so un-naturalistically rendered. It is indeed a fact that human figures are rare in paintings of the Upper Paleolithic, and when they do appear they are surprisingly abstracted when compared to the amazingly life-like depictions of animals.
Several theories have been advanced concerning this ensemble, ranging from the possibility that it is a straight narrative record of an encounter in which the human figure was killed by the bison and buried below, to shamanic vision-quest imagery, and cosmological diagrams. At the Onyang Museum it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the humanoid figure on the cave wall at Lascaux isn’t meant to be a human at all but rather is a very ancient image of a ‘janseung’, a totem figure. That would explain its curiously rigid torso, its prominent phallus, and strange bird-like head.
Is it really possible that the Korean sotdae and jamseung are derived from symbolic figures that first were invented tens of thousands of years, and that have travelled across vast geographical distances, sustaining a broadly similar meaning? An obvious difference between the people who painted the images at Lascaux and those of the Bronze Age, like those of much later, the Koreans who set up the sotdae and jamseung, is that the former were hunter-gatherers while the latter were agriculturalists. That means that there were no villages for the Upper Palaeolithic people to protect with totems and birds on sticks, set in the ground. Those humans were nomadic. But it may be possible that these symbols were portable for them, and that they set them in a location temporarily, wherever they made their home. That would mean that their function was basically the same: to protect the tribe.
But why a bird on a stick and a fierce theriomorphic totem? Perhaps because humans have always needed is to be reassured that when they establish a habitation that the environment in which they find themselves will provide optimum conditions. And what are these? In an influential book the British geographer Jay Appleton asked what is it humans prefer most about a landscape, and why. A primary consideration, he concluded, and one that is firmly grounded in evolutionary necessity, is security. He summed this up by saying that they want ‘to see without being seen’. [1]
It seems to me that this could be the origin of these two very ancient symbols. The waterbird represents the ‘prospect’, and the totem figure represents the ‘refuge’. The bird, by its ability to see so far through a capacity to be airborne and move on water, is almost the paradigm of the maximum prospect – certainly a prospect denied humans, but one which they could imaginatively colonise as a possibility, an ideal. The totem figure, meanwhile, was intended to instil fear, to act as a deterring guardian. In this sense,, it guaranteed that the tribe’s location was also a secure refuge.
It seems plausible to me that this dual necessity – to be seen without being seen, or to have a prosect and a refuge – means that a naturalistic, biological basis for what otherwise might seem to be magical or metaphysical symbolism can go some way to explaining the amazing cultural longevity of the duo that the Korean call the sotdae and jamseung.
What the disembowelled bison in the Lascaux painting means, is anybody’s guess……
[1] Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (1975)
The geese are arriving again!
A year ago, I celebrated the arrival of Siberian geese to our neck of the woods. Here are some of them arriving and settling in this year, which I’ve photographed over the past fews days.
That’s North Korea in the distance.
‘If you want peace, prepare for war?’
Last week, North Korea did something outrageous….again. Its border guards shot a South Korean civilian and burned his body. It seems the man was trying to defect, and was apprehended while floating in the water. Fearful of Coronavirus contagion, the soldiers took no chances. A few days later, bizarrely, Kin Jong-un sent an apology to the president of South Korea. Such antics are a now familiar part of the still officially un-ended Korean War, a suspension that, as I live near the DMZ, I am often reminded of.
On the website ‘Lima Charlie’, which, as it states, ‘provides global news, featuring insight & analysis by military veterans and intelligence professionals Worldwide’, the author of an essay, John Sjoholm, summarizes the conventional ‘hawkish’ wisdom concerning war by quoting the famous maxim ‘Si vis pacem, parabellum.’ If you want peace, prepare for war. He writes:
This age-old adage formulated some 1,600 years ago by the famed Roman General Flavius Vegetius Renatus has not only withstood the winds of time, but its prescience has been continually reaffirmed by Western history
The axiom’s meaning, that a strong defense is required to ensure lasting peace, is a simple but true insight that has been oft reflected upon since Flavius first uttered it. It has, however, represented yet another chasm between the mindset of military strategists, their political masters, the needs of the defender and the potential victim. In the civilian political world the axiom is frequently denounced as an excuse for needless aggression. Warmongering by frightful military leaders.[1]
On the face of it, the current situation on the Korean peninsula seems to be excellent proof of this principal: ‘a strong defense is required to ensure lasting peace’. The DMZ, which is just 40 kilometers from Seoul along one stretch, and near to which I live, is surely an exemplary manifestation of a successful ‘strong defense’. Isn’t it largely thanks to the DMZ’s forbidding existence, cutting the peninsula decisively into two regions, that has ensured that no war has broken out here since 1953?
True, war has been avoided. But the current state of so-called ‘peace’ on the Korean peninsula has come at a high price. There may have been no armed conflict since 1953, but the result of a situation in which ‘peace’ is guaranteed by the perpetual preparation for ‘war’ has been the creation of militarized surveillance societies on both sides of the DMZ. This is obviously the case in North Korea, but who can deny that South Korea is also constrained in far-reaching ways - social, economic, political, cultural - by the necessity of its perpetual preparedness for war?
The deep insinuation of the values of war into civil society is something that the author of the article on ‘Lima Charlie’ fails to consider, and this omission throws into question the true wisdom of Flavius’ maxim in the context of contemporary society. From the vantage point of today, in fact, it looks as if the maxim is an error in reasoning based on the rigidly binary thinking into which words lure us. The binary ‘war/peace’ is posited as if it marks mutually exclusive opposites states that exist in the real world. Closer to the truth, however, is that the social conditions described by the words ‘war’ and ‘peace’ lie on a continuum along which at some point they blend imperceptibly one into the other. The words are abstractions which do not reflect the true complexities of lived reality.
In a current exhibition about the Korean War and contemporary war in general at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul called ‘Unflattening’ (June 25 - September 20), a wall text corrects Flavius’ maxim by scoring through the word ‘bellum/war’ and writing instead ‘Si vis pacem. Para pacem’ – ‘If you want peace, prepare for peace.’ The implicit argument behind this new vantage point is that war, as the writer on the website ‘Lima Charlie’ put it, is always ‘needless aggression’ and inherently ’warmongering’. How, indeed, can there ever be real ‘peace’ when a society is preparing for ‘war’?
But it is also evident that different societies will never understand the word ‘peace’ in the same way. This is very obviously the case in relation to North and South Korea. Furthermore, the meaning of the word ‘peace’ derives from its status as the obverse of the word ‘war’. ‘Peace’ is not a social condition that can be realized apart from ‘war’. War and peace exist on a continuum. In fact, in the end the only kind of ‘peace’ that is spoken of here must be the ‘eternal peace’ of the grave.
Who can deny that violence lies at the very foundations of social behaviour? The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus famously declared: “War is the father of all things.” Several centuries later, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:
War essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war. For the time being, we know of no other means to imbue exhausted peoples, as strongly and surely as every great war does, with that raw energy of the battleground, that deep impersonal hatred, that murderous coldbloodedness with a good conscience, that communal, organized ardor in destroying the enemy, that proud indifference to great losses, to one’s own existence and to that of one’s friends, that muted, earthquakelike convulsion of the soul.[2]
But today, the whole nature of warfare has been radically transformed, and is very different from war as envisaged by Heraclitus and Nietzsche. Paul Virilio outlines the transition from the old-style war fought in Korea between 1950 and 1953, to the wars of today and tomorrow.[3] Over the centuries, war has evolved from obstruction, to destruction, to communication. From castles (obstructive war), to artillery (destructive war), to technologies of information control (the war of the ‘information bomb’ and of weapon-systems of elusive interactivity). In 1983, Virilio termed contemporary war ‘Pure War’, which is characterised above all by speed, but when he published a new edition of his book by 2007 he argued that war had morphed into ‘Impure War’ or ‘Infowar’. Contemporary warfare is asymmetric and transpolitical. It inaugurates a dangerous new era of belligerent ‘metropolitics’ in which the focus of aggression is the city, and the camouflage of choice a sweatshirt, jeans and backpack.
The Korean War was a war of bad old-fashioned ‘destruction’, which then froze into a war of ‘obstruction’. The current situation on the Korean peninsula seemingly perpetuates war in this sense – as ‘obstruction’. The DMZ anachronistically reinstates the first, primitive, stage of warfare. “Pure War is still around,” Virilio wrote: “it’s still possible to press the button and send out missiles – Korea can do it, Iran can do it, and so can others; but in reality the real displacement of strategy is in this fusion between hyper-terrorist civil war and international war, to the point that they’re indistinguishable.” [4] Less obvious is the fact that it is actually the third stage of warfare as described by Virilio – communication - which now prevails on the Korean peninsula.North Korea manufactures a steady stream of hot belligerent rhetoric concerning combat readiness, while actual, real, destructive, war has not occurred since 1953. It can be argued that the third stage of war is therefore the dominant one, and that the Korean War, which never ended with a peace treaty, is a pioneer in the waging of war as communication. This is perhaps something that the artists in the MMCA exhibition help to make evident.
Today, as the great American historian and activist Howard Zinn wrote, as a matter of survival we must somehow learn to ‘achieve justice, with struggle, but without war.’[5] But how is this possible now that there has been a ‘fusion of hyper-terrorist war and international war’? We are living in an era when war has become all pervasive and unprecedentedly dangerous, and yet continues to escalate to extremes.
REFERENCES
[1] John Sjoholm, ‘Europa – Si vis pacem, para bellum (If you want peace, prepare for war)’, https://limacharlienews.com/europe/europa-si-vis-pacem-para-bellum/
2] Friedrich Nietzsche. Human, All Too Human, Section Eight: A Look At The State - Aphorism # 477
[3] Paul Virilio. Pure War. Translated by Mark Polizzotti and Brian O’Keeffe. New York: Semiotext(e). New Edition, 2007. P. 199
[4] Paul Virilio, Pure War. New Edition. P. 12-13.
[5] Howard Zinn, ‘Just and Unjust War’, in The Zin Reader. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009. P. 279
Ignorance is Bliss
A couple of especially depressing news items caught my attention yesterday (September 17, 2020). Apparently , a new survey has found almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews actually caused the Holocaust.
The next news item I read reported on a ‘town hall’ held by Donald Trump in which he spoke, in relation of the Covid-10 pandemic, of ‘herd mentality’. What Trump actually meant, of course, was ‘herd immunity’. But he hadn’t just made a slip of the tongue, because he used the same phrase three times.
Ignorance is lack of knowledge, information, education, or awareness. Today, the problem is not so much access to information, but discrimination, or what we do with all the information at our fingertips. In fact, paradoxically, there seems to be a direct relationship between high levels of accessible information and high levels of ignorance.
Research shows that lack of knowledge often does not motivate an increased, unbiased search for information.[1] This is because the brain's reward circuitry selectively treats an opportunity to gain knowledge about future favorable outcomes, but not unfavorable outcomes. In a nutshell, people seek information that will create positive beliefs, and avoid information that creates negative beliefs. People who feel uninformed or unable to understand important social issues do not therefore seek more information. Instead, they depend on what the government says, which is usually positive. This obviously increases their faith in the government. Consequently, this increases the desire to avoid learning about a relevant issue, when the information is likely to be negative.
Ignorance breed more ignorance.
But ignorance, conviction, and power are a powerful trio, and so I’m afraid Donald Trump will win in November…..
[1] Stephen Shepherd and Aaron C. Kay ‘On the Perpetuation of Ignorance: System Dependence, SystemJustification, and the Motivated Avoidance of Sociopolitical Information’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012, Vol. 102, No. 2, 264-280.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-102-2-264.pdf
The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art.
The cover of my new book.
My new book is about to be published by Reaktion Books, after a few months delay due to the pandemic.
Monochrome painting is a genre that began life as the minimal or the most extreme possibility, the beginning and the end, the point towards which to converge, depart, or fly free. Monochromes were the outcome of the spiritual and contemplative mind, but equally of a mind dedicated to the empirical and literal.
Monochromes were made in pursuit of the most ethereal, extra-sensory experiences, and also the most concrete and sensory. In its heyday between 1915 and the mid-1960s artists who made monochrome art claimed to be concerned with the seemingly vastly different but actually closely linked experiences of emptiness, nothingness, absence, silence, spiritual and intellectual transcendence, immateriality, infinity, purity, origins, essence, autonomy, absoluteness, specificity, materiality, repetition, seriality, rigour, recklessness, and boredom. Through the faculty of visual perception artists explored the dialectics of the limit and limitlessness, the bounded and boundless, form and formlessness, being and nothingness.
For all their apparent simplicity, monochromes turns out to be very complicated. They may be visually simple, but they are usually conceptually complex. For some artists, a monochrome will be an object, but for others it is a spiritual icon. A monochrome is flat but also, potentially, infinitely deep. It is empty of imagery, but full of paint. It is composed of the most ubiquitous of elements – colour – but often addresses the most esoteric of meanings. It can be made by anyone, and yet is usually the province of the most intellectually questioning and challenging of artists. But in one way or another, artists who make monochromes are involved in what one of its most important exponents, Yves Klein, called the ‘monochrome adventure.’
Korean Shamanism
A mudang at work.
In a previous post I mentioned shamanism in South Korea. It will probably come as a surprise to learn that shamanism is alive and well in this country, where it is practised alongside other religions.
So, just what is shamanism? The term is used by anthropologists, rather than any actual believers, and derives from a word in the Tungus language of Siberia, which is where the first anthropological studies were conducted. Shamanism, one can say, is the first of humanity’s spiritual belief systems, and is a form of animism. A person acknowledged by their community to be a shaman is believed to have mastered the world of the ‘spirits.’ The shaman ascends to the sky to commune with the spirits of the human dead and those that inhabit all of nature, or experience possession, the descent of spirits into their own bodies. In the first case, the anthropologists say the shaman becomes the equal of the celestial forces, while in the second they are the means of its incarnation. Shamans are considered experts at channeling and riding the often dangerous energies that pervade the world. In Korea, shamanism is an ancient, deep-rooted and still enduring tradition, though one that is largely unpublicised because it is considered a ‘primitive’ cultural residue that runs contrary to Korea’s modernising project.
Importantly, almost all Korean shaman are women, called mudang, and one ceremony they are especially called upon to perform is called a gut. This is undertaken for different purposes, such as after a death, or for exorcisms. The mudang sets up an altar, and going through multiple costume changes, and using props including, masks, paintings, fruit, and paper flowers, becomes ‘possessed’ by the psyolsang – the spirits. These spirit avatars can be traditional animist gods, which are often animals, or Buddhist bodhisattvas. But nowadays, the spirits can also take the form of Jesus and the angels, or even people like General Douglas MacArthur. He is an important man for Koreans, said Hazel. The costumes represent the various spirits the mudang is channeling, and during the ceremony she will interpret the spirits’ message to her.
Shamanism in Korea is also very secretive. Though many Koreans consult mudang, they are usually embarrassed to admit it, because shamanism smacks of superstition and is deemed culturally backward. But Korean people continued to arrange visits in secret. This was not so much in fear of breaking the law, however, but because of the shame they’d feel if it became known in their own community. They continue to go for many reason: because they are sick or mourning the death of a loved one, because they want something or someone, or want to curse them, or more generally, because they are anxious about what the future holds for them or their loved ones.
Many older Korean people believe they are afflicted by an debilitating emotion called han, a feeling of animosity, bitterness, malignancy, and a profound sense of being ill at ease with what seem to be the obvious injustice of the world. Han has greatly occupied Korean culture, and many ways have been developed for purging souls of the malaise. It seemed that one of the principal roles of the mudang is to satisfy this han, the grudges, of the dead, and to pray for their peace. Through connecting with the spirit world, they cleanse the world of the living of the bitterness of the dead.
Dreaming of Blue Roses
The wild flower called ‘Orangkaegot’
Recently on my daily walks near my house, I’ve been delighted by a lovely little blue flower that seems to grow all along the borders of the pathways and tracks around here. It’s just a weed, called ‘Orangkaegot’ in Korean, but what struck me is just how blue it is – or at least, how blue some of the specimens are, as its flowers vary from royal blue to purplish-blue.
Blue is not a common colour in flowers. The petunia, for example, synthesizes blue pigment and produces pure blue petals. The higher the pH in the cellular vacuoles - the closed sacs, made of membranes with organic molecules inside - in which blue pigment is accumulated, the more pure blue the colour will be. So the petunia and ‘Orangkaegot’ must have a pretty high pH in their cellular vacuoles.
I’ve just finished my book or the cultural history of the rose, and the next big thing in the world of commercial roses will be the first truly blue rose. This is the Holy Grail of rose breeding. The association of the colour blue with dreaming, melancholy, the impossible, transcendence, infinity, and the soul itself, suggests that a blue coloured rose would certainly evoke some interesting reactions. For the German Romantic poet Novalis the ‘blue flower’ became a metaphor for the unobtainable and impossible heights towards which the true poet must reach, even at the risk of self-destruction.
Meilland’s rose ‘Charles de Gaulle’ and Tantau’s ‘Mainzer Fastnacht’ ( known in Britain as ‘Blue Moon’) both claim to be blue, but they are not. Nor by any objective estimation is a more recent Japanese effort called "Suntory Blue Rose Applause’, marketed in 2005 after twenty years of research, to be described as ‘blue’. All these roses are lilac.
‘Suntory Blue Rose Applause’. Blue? I don’t think so!
Nevertheless, the Arab agriculturalist Ibn-el- ‘Awwam in his 12th century treatise on agriculture and gardening declares that ‘the colours of Roses are very many, red, white, yellow, the colour of zulite (celestial blue) and another which is blue outside and yellow within.’ But it is probable that the roses he describes were hand dyed to look blue.
it is not simply a case of inserting a blue gene from a petunia or an ‘Orangkaegot’ into the rose’s DNA to create a blue rose. If this was attempted, it would, apparently, form a pink pigment. In fact, if we try to change the genes that determine cell pH there is the risk of changing a whole range of other cell functions as well. But at least in theory, a very small interior change can cause a revolutionary outward one. Recently, an Indian-Chinese team of biochemists attempted to manipulate bacterial enzymes in the petals of white rose to convert L-glutamine in the blue pigment indogoidine. The bacteria transferred the pigment-producing genes to the rose genome, and as a result, a blue colour spread from the injection site. But there was one big problem: the colour (which certainly looks blue in the photographs I have seen), is short-lived and patchy, and requires each time the injection of the enzyme.
It seems Mother Nature cannot be sufficiently coerced, and so the blue rose remains as impossible today as it was for the German Romantics, although by the time my book is published, science may have finally triumphed. One thing for sure, whoever succeeds in producing a truly blue rose will become very rich. In our novelty-obsessed culture, such a rose is bound to be a sure-fire hit.
But a final thought. While the ingredients necessary to form blue pigmentation have almost certainly not been part of the rose’s chemistry for the past few thousand years, it is certainly possible that there used to exist a blue rose that went extinct. So perhaps, as the ice melts due to global warming, the seeds of a long extinct blue rose will be revealed and coaxed into life, and we shall have blue roses once again, courtesy of Mother Nature herself, inadvertently aided, to be sure, by human ecological malpractice.
Korean Protestantism and the Virus
Disinfecting a Protestant Church, Seoul.
The news from South Korea concerning the new spike in Covid-19 cases, which can be traced to a Protestant church in Seoul, called Sarang Jeil, comes just five months after another church, Shincheonji, in Daegu, propelled South Korea to unenviable pole position in the pandemic. This coincidence compels me to write something about Christianity in South Korea.
It is probably surprising to most people to learn that South Korea is fast becoming a majority Christian country. When I arrived here for the first time in 2008, I thought Koreans were mostly Buddhist. Some are, but not many. Here are the current statistics: the majority of the population, 51%, claim to be irreligious. Buddhists amount to only 15.5%. Of the Christian denominations, 19.7% are Protestant (mostly Presbyterians, Like Sarang Jeil, or Methodists), and 7.9% are Roman Catholics (like my wife, though lapsed). Shincheonji, although derived in part from Christian beliefs, is considered a cult, or more fairly, a ‘new religion’. There are many in Korea. The most well-known is the Unification Church, or the Moonies, which was founded in South Korea and is now a worldwide movement, with followers especially in the United States. Also, the category ‘irreligious’ doesn’t mean the same thing as it does in the UK, where in fact, only 29.7% claims to be irreligious. Behind the smoke screen of irreligion a good deal of religious activity is going on in South Korea.
Two other important religious infleunces need to be considered. The first is shamanism. This predates all the other religions currently characterizing the syncretistic mix of modern South Korea, and although officially frowned upon, and not an official religious creed, shamanism is still a very significant part of Korea’s deep spiritual consciousness (more on shamanism in a future blog). The other important ‘religion’ is Confucianism’, although for many, Confucianism isn’t so much a religion as an ethical code because it gives no place to a supernatural dimension – which is why so many claim to be ‘irreligious’. However, Confucianism is definitely a religion in the broader sense, as binding the secular dimension to a sacred one, and the sooner we Westerners recognize this fact the sooner we will grasp what it is that underlies much of what happens in East Asian societies, not just Korea – North and South – but also China. I will discuss Shamanism and Confucianism in later posts.
A church like Sarang Jeil is inspired by American-style evangelical Protestantism. I was baptized a Presbyterian – the Church of Scotland – by Sarang Jeil-style Presbyterianism has very little in common with that austere and staid denomination. First of all, it’s far more evangelical and fundamentalist. But a little historical context is first necessary in order to better understand Korean Protestantism.
Koreans identify Protestantism with the heroic struggle for independence from Japanese colonialism, because many of their leaders were Christian, and so they also identify it with proud South Korean nationalism, especially in the face of the anti-religious fevrour of North Korea.. Another key aspect of Korean Protestantism is its relative rejection of the acutely patriarchal system that underlies traditional Korean culture largely as a result of the influence of Confucianism. Women find Protestantism more attractive than both Confucianism and Korean-style Buddhism – which is similar to Zen (more on this, too, in later post).
Koreans also identify evangelical Protestantism with something else that chimes with their cultural background – a powerfully emotional, irrational faith based tied to the infallibility of a charismatic leader. This chimes with an instinctual suspicion Koreans have for the official leadership, who they see has inevitably corrupt and will betray them. During the Joseon Dynasty, it was commonly believed by the peasantry that the ruling elite inevitably abandoned them to fend for themselves when enemies invaded. But while suspicion of the ruler is deep, the desire for leadership is even deeper, and inclines Koreans to ally themselves with anyone who claims to speak for their special interests.
Korean Protestantism it also charismatic. This links Sarang Jeil to Koreans’ subterranean bond with shamanism. The ecstatic ‘trance’ like dimensions central to shamanism, which are deeply ingrained in Korean culture, seem to have found a new and more acceptable outlet within this kind of Protestantism. Koreans associate shamanism with the past, with the failed Korea of ‘Oriental’ culture, and Protestantism is allied with the positive future. Above all, Koreans identify Protestantism with a preferable affirmative model of the future, which is closely allied with the embrace of neoliberal capitalism, adoration and emulation of the United States, and of Westernization in general.
Some of the Korean Protestant churches are huge. Sarang jeil is a mega-church. Its congregation numbers 4,000. There are several of a similar size in South Korea. Each one owes allegiance not so much to a general governing body but to a charismatic pastor. In this case, the leader is the now widely vilified Pastor Jeon Kwang-hoon, who is also the incumbent president of the conservative Christian Council of Korea. Jeon is a vocal critic of the present liberal President of South Korea, Moon Jae In. So this crisis also has a political dimension.
Pastor Jeon Kwang-hoon after he was diagnosed with Covid-19. As you can imagine, when this photo was published in the Press, Jeon became an instant pariah.
Jeon’s defiant, non-conformist, behaviour is a reminder of the roots of Protestantism in protest, in the refusal to adhere to the laws of a society where the believers see the hand of Satan at work. Jeon encouraged his congregation to defy the government ban on church services due to Covid-19, and organized rallies in Seoul to protest against the current government despite their ban too. But he had been organizing rallies for months before the pandemic began. So the current Korean spike is linked to Korean politics, another instant of the more general corruption of the struggle against the pandemic by sectarianism worldwide.
In the mental universe of these Korean Protestants, the world is coloured in stark black and white – evil against good, with them, obviously, on the side of the good. Jeon also assured his followers that God would protect them from Covid-19. Now hundred have the virus, including Jeon himself. But we can be very certain that there will be no mea culpa, or not one in which Jeon or his followers admit that God didn’t protect them, after all. Rather, they will come up with some other explanation – however rationally absurd. Remember the claim made by the woman of the Shincheonji church, who said that Satan was jealous of her church’s success, and this is why the virus struck them. It is commonly known among psychologists who study cults and other closely knit groups whose bond is strengthened by a sense of righteous opposition and perceived persecution, that cognitive dissonance leads to a re-affirmation of belief in the face of overwhelming challenges.
So why did Covid-19 profit from Protestants? I suppose the broadest answer is to say that this kind of Protestantism is a faith that is overwhelming based on the ‘heart’ rather than the ‘head’. On the role of intuition, instinct, emotion, impulse, subjective experience, loss of individual ontological boundaries through immersion in the collective, joined with a concomitantly child-like belief in the infallibility of the chosen leader. This belief system excessively relies on fast and easy cognitive processes which are very susceptible to bias, what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his classic Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) dubs System 1 thinking. This kind of cognition is notoriously prone to poor decision-making and excessive reliance on top down group influences. What Kahneman dubs System 2 thinking, by contrast, is slow and requires conscious effort. But as a result, it is much more resistant to cognitive biases.
When a religion massively over-emphasises System 1 it is likely, sooner or later, to cause major societal problems, especially during something like a pandemic. The fact that the evangelical churches in the United States have not also been hotbeds of the virus is interesting, however. Perhaps the reason is political. While in the US the evangelicals have the president they want, in South Korea they do not. As a result, their willingness to follow orders differs. Although, what exactly President Trump’s ‘orders’ have been is rather difficult to ascertain. But it does seem that American evangelical mega-churches, are not, so far, major Covid-19 hotbeds.
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.
More on Roses
A Dog Rose as painted by Redouté
In late April 2020, while I was writing my current book, By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose, to be published by Oneworld, it was announced that a local municipal authority in Japan were snipping off thousands of rosebuds in a popular public park in a desperate attempt to stop people congregating there to admire the blossoms when they arrived in early May, thereby encouraging the spread of Covid-19. Thoughts of a team of grim Japanese gardeners frantically decapitating rosebuds, brought to mind Morticia (played by Angelica Huston) in the movie The Addams Family (1991) who is shown snipping off all the blood-red flowers of a climbing rose with gleeful diligence.
One of the sad implications of this news story for me was how it vividly exposed humanity’s cruelty, unleashed against nature but also against itself, and enacted, apparently, for the collective or greater good - in order to protect people. But one has to ask what kind of life is it we are protecting that demands such a bizarre act? Fortunately, however, these panic measures were newsworthy mainly because of their extreme and perverse nature. But nevertheless, we should not see them as wholly exceptional, but as the exaggerated expression of the pervasive crisis whose end is far from in sight.
Why a book about roses? In a past post I explained how I first became fascinated by the rose as a plant and a symbol. In this one, I’ll talk a bit more about the theme, as it now presents itself to me.
The iconic American ‘Hippy’ band, Grateful Dead had a thing about roses. The cover of their second album, released in 1971, shows a drawing of a skull garlanded with red roses. Here it is:
The image was lifted and adapted from an illustration in an edition of the Sufi classic, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The Sufi’s also had a thing about roses. As Grateful Dead band member Robert Hunter puts it: ' I've got this one spirit that's laying roses on me. Roses, roses, can't get enough of those bloody roses. The rose is the most prominent image in the human brain, as to delicacy, beauty, short-livedness, thorniness. It's a whole. There is no better allegory for, dare I say it, life, than roses."
So there’s the reason for a book on the rose. It gives me a chance to talks about ‘dare I say it, life’. This is from the beginning of the Introduction to my book (as it stands now):
Man hands on misery to man’, writes the English poet Philip Larkin with his characteristically stoic resignation. But man also hands on pleasure, love, passion, beauty, compassion, enchantment and hope, and, to these propitious ends, flowers have proven very useful and ubiquitous allies for thousands of years. We manipulate them without fear to construct pleasing, consoling and rejuvenating material environments and mental pictures. But of all the flowers, it is the rose that has been most often coopted to ‘whisper of peace, and truth, and friendliness unquell’d’, as another English poet, John Keats, puts it. The rose has helped to generate atmospheres conducive to the intimacies of the heart. It has provided a beautiful material form for the tenor, the meaning, sense, and content of the tenderer dimensions of our lives. As a gift, an offering, a resonant symbol, a focus of aesthetic attention, a medicine, a distilled oil, a perfume, a culinary ingredient, and as a plant lovingly cared for and cultivated, the rose has participated in social transactions that help establish, nurture, and sometimes end relationships between the living, the living and the dead, the divine and the everyday, the human and the non-human. Above all, the rose has served as one of the most enduring and pervasive images of a benign human future: a promise of happiness.
Today, the rose is probably the world’s favourite flower, and it is effectively binding together people of very different social backgrounds and positions, and historically and geographically distant cultures. It is no exaggeration to say that in the Western world, roses may even be one of the very first things a new born baby sees, as a bouquet of roses is such a common gift for new mothers. Subsequently, roses will enter this human’s life in many physical guises - organic, painted, sartorial, aromatic, imaginary. In fact, when you come to think of it, roses are likely to be present at all the most important moments in your life: births, birthdays, courtships, intimate dinners, marriages, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, funerals.
The United States of America adopted the rose as its national flower quite recently, in 1986 during the Reagan era, when a powerful pro-rose lobby won out against the botanical competition, which included the marigold, dogwood, carnation, and sunflower. The statement supporting the advocacy, says much about the ubiquity of the rose within Western (and Westernized) culture:
‘They grow in every state, including Alaska and Hawaii.
Fossils show they have been native of America for millions years.
The only flower recognized by virtually every American is the Rose.
The name is easy to say and recognizable in all western languages.
It is one of the few flowers in bloom from spring until frost.
It has exquisite colours, aesthetic form, and a delightful fragrance.
Growth is versatile, from miniatures a few inches high to extensive climbers.
Roses mature quickly and live long.
They add value to property at minimal expense.
The range of varieties is such that there are roses to suit everyone.
As no other flower, the rose carries its own message symbolizing love, respect, and courage.’
Writing about the ‘queen of flowers’ hasn’t been easy while the world as we know it convulses in collective pain and uncertainty. And hopefully, the rose will remain for our children and their children, and their children’s children, a promise of happiness.