Axe Murder at the DMZ!

My growing interest in trees, especially in oak trees, reminded me of something I read a few years back concerning a very dangerous moment at the DMZ.

On August 18, 1976, about a mile from where I live, near the Bridge of No Return – a ruined bridge that became famous during the Korean War because it was a key route south -  the infamous ‘axe murder incident’ occurred. The reason it’s come to mind recently is because it involved a poplar tree.

This tree limited visibility for the United Nations Command checkpoints, and so on that fateful day in mid-August five South Korean civilian workers accompanied by UNC guards were dispatched to prune it.   As they were at work, two North Korean officers and a dozen soldiers suddenly appeared demanding the workers stop. When they ignored the request and continued working, more North Korean soldiers arrived in a truck and set upon the workers and their military escort with clubs and axes.  The JSA Company Commander, an American, Captain Arthur Bonifas, and his First Platoon Leader, First Lieutenant Mark Barrett, were killed. Here’a a photograph:

Immediately after the incident, the United States and South Korea announced ‘DEFCON 3 ’ and the United States dispatched F-4 and F-111 fighter-bomber to South Korea and sent the aircraft carrier ‘Midway’ to the west sea. The act of tree prunning pushed the Korean Peninsula to the brink of war. But the crisis was defused when Kim Il-sung expressed his regret, sending a letter of apology to the UNC. Later, the UNC carried out Operation ‘Paul Bunyan’ – named after the giant lumberjack and folk hero in American and Canadian folklore - and cut the offending  tree down to an ugly stump. That’s what’s happening in the photograph at the top of this post. Here’s what it looked a couple of decades after the Operation:

Later, this stump was cut down and replaced by a plaque where the tree once stood, which is what you can see today:

What was going on in the minds of the North Koreans that day? What made them over-react so violently? Were they especially fond of this particular tree? Perhaps they saw the dismemberment of a tree as subliminally mirroring the dismemberment of Korea, of the Korean people. It’s sad that the UNC decided to take it out on the poor tree. It was of course entirely blameless. It just had the terrible misfortune to be growing in a very dangerous place – well, dangerous for humans. From the look of the photographs, the tree was in its fifties, or thereabouts. It definitely predated the division of the Korean peninsula and the Korean War.

I was at school doing ‘A’ levels in 1976,  and we studied the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as part of the course. By coincidence, he wrote a moving poem about some beloved poplar trees being cut down next to the River Thames. Here’s the Hopkin’s poem. I suppose it could also serve as a memorial for the DMZ poplar, too:

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, 

  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, 

  All felled, felled, are all felled; 

    Of a fresh and following folded rank 

                Not spared, not one 

                That dandled a sandalled 

         Shadow that swam or sank 

On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. 

  O if we but knew what we do 

         When we delve or hew — 

     Hack and rack the growing green! 

          Since country is so tender 

     To touch, her being só slender, 

     That, like this sleek and seeing ball 

     But a prick will make no eye at all, 

     Where we, even where we mean 

                 To mend her we end her, 

            When we hew or delve: 

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. 

  Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve 

     Strokes of havoc unselve 

           The sweet especial scene, 

     Rural scene, a rural scene, 

     Sweet especial rural scene.

But when I was 17-18 years old it never even  occurred to me to find out what a poplar tree actually looks like!  They are indeed lovely-looking trees. They grow very tall and straight, and the leaves are oval to heart shaped. There’s a fine mature specimen standing next to the lake beside the university where I teach, and as I’m just getting started as a tree-lover, it took me a while to identify it.

On re-reading Hopkins’ poem, I’m struck by how it seems to have taken on a renewed poignancy in the light of the potential planetary catastrophe that is looming. Especially the lines: ‘even where we mean / To mend her we end her/ When we hew or delve’.

Image sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_axe_murder_incident

https://twitter.com/korean_dmz_vets/status/1364922717707845635

Some thoughts after the Itaewon Halloween’s Day tragedy

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

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

I was eight years old.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

Image and Text Sources:

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

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

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

Acorn for Dinner!

In a previous post I mentioned that here in Korea, eating acorns is still popular. They usually use powdered acorn to make a jelly called Dotori-muk. This weekend, my partner, Eungbok, made some Dotori-muk with flour she purchased from a chef colleague who gathers the acorns herself around where she lives in south Seoul.  Here’s what the flour looks like:

And here’s the jelly, which looks a bit like brown tofu:

Eungok mixed the flour with water, and with sesame oil to give it consistency.  The flavour? I have to admit Dotori-muk doesn’t really have any.  But the jelly-like texture is very pleasant. Anyway, Dotori-muk is usually served with a seasoning sauce or in a soup flavoured with radish and seaweed, which is how we ate it. It’s packed with goodness.  Acorns are very nutritious and filling, while not containing fat, cholesterol,  or sodium. Its health benefits include being an antioxidant, and it’s good for stomach ailments, helping in the promotion of healthy gut bacteria.

The species of oak that are preferred here to make flour are Quercus dentata and Quercus mongolica, whose acorns have less tannin than other oaks. The acorn of Quercus mongolica, aka the Mongolian oak, has a cup somewhat like those of the familiar European oaks but is more bumpy - more rugged, one could say. Quercus dentata, aka Korean oak, Japanese emperor oak, daimyo oak, or sweet oak, has a hugely hairy cup, so this one is very unlike those I’m familiar with from Europe. Like this:

Once upon a time, wherever there were oaks and human beings acorns were a stapple of the latter’s diet. As  David A. Bainbridge writes in a fascinating essay entitled ‘Acorns as Food’ which I found on the Internet :

They occur in the archaeological record of the early town sites in the Zagros Mountains, at Catal Hüyük (6000 BC), and oak trees were carefully inventoried by the Assyrians during the reign of Sargon II. They have been used as food for thousands of years virtually everywhere oak trees are found. In Europe, Asia, North Africa, the Mid-East, and North America, acorns were once a staple food.

They were a staple food for people in many areas of the world until recently and are still a commercial food crop in several countries. The Ch'i Min Yao Shu, a Chinese agricultural text from the sixth century recommends Quercus mongolica as a nut tree. ……..

While it is often thought that oaks were a "wild crop" it is now clear that the oaks were planted, transplanted, and intensively managed. Informants and traditional songs tell of the selection and planting of oak trees. The early travelers often remarked on the “orchard like" settings encountered. How surprised they would be to find they were indeed orchards.

But as agriculture supplanted hunting-and-gathering, grains such as wheat, oats and rice became central to the human diet, and the acorn was relegated to being fodder for animals, such as swine. In medieval Europe in the autumn, swine would be released to forage for acorns in the forests, but their human owners would only recourse to  the nut of the oak in times of want and famine. In other regions of the world, however,  such as in what became California,  Europeans arriving in  the nineteenth century found that native American tribes treated acorns as a vital part of their diet. Of the situation today, Bainbridge writes:

A large commercial harvest still occurs in China, and acorns are sold on the streets by acorn vendors. The commercial harvest in Korea (where 1-2.5 million liters are harvested each year) provides prepared acorn starch and flour that reaches the American markets. Some acorns are collected in Japan. Acorns are still harvested and used in several areas of the United States, most notably Southern Arizona and California. There is still some harvesting in Mexico. Historically acorns were particularly important in California. For many of the native Californians, acorns made up half of the diet and the annual harvest probably exceeded the current sweet corn harvest in the state.

Why did the acorn get demoted in many places?  It’s true that it takes time and effort to make an oak nut edible. An acorn is full of tannin, and so needs to be leached with water. But as Bainbridge writes:

Studies at Dong-guk University in Seoul, South Korea showed the tannin level in one species of bitter acorns was reduced from 9% to 0.18% by leaching, without losing essential amino acids. Virtually all of the acorns the native Californians used were bitter and they were leached or soaked in water to remove the bitterness. They apparently based their preference on oil content, storability, and flavor rather than sweetness. 

Perhaps after the agricultural ‘revolution’, acorns, like all the other nuts that were once foraged by hunter-gatherers,  were on an unconscious level too deeply associated with more ‘primitive’ stages of  social development, and so had to be relegated, lest they remind humanity of the price they had paid for becoming sedentary and toilers of the soil. After all, Jared Diamond calls the agricultural revolution “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”  Hunter-gatherers had a more varied diet, including fats, proteins and vitamins…..and acorns.  Farmers’ diet were simpler and less diverse, and they were constantly at risk of crop failure……when they would revert to the time-honoured convention of eating acorns. Add to this the fact that sedentism vastly increased  the likelihood of contracting communicable diseases, and the agricultural revolution does start to seem less than magnificent evidence of humanity’s ability to perpetually develop towards greater general prosperity and well-being.

And now that the next  ‘revolution’ -  the industrial -  is proving far from an unalloyed success, too, there are sound reasons for re-adopting the acorn as part of our diet. As Bainbridge writes:

There is a growing recognition that tree crops can play an important role in sustainable food production. Trees can be grown with less annual disturbance of the agricultural ecosystem and their deep roots allow the trees to reach nutrients and moisture in the deep soil. Acorns are an excellent example of a grain that grows on trees. We must begin to consider these traditional crops that fit temperate and semi-arid climates rather than trying to change the environment to fit crops that require extensive inputs of fertilizer and water.

I also noted  in my previous post a great TED Talk by Marcie Mayer the founder of Oakmeal, who certainly concurs with Bainbridge’s view on the future of the acorn as food. Here’s a link to the company’s website: https://www.oakmeal.com/

References:

David A. Bainbridge, ‘Acorns as Food. History, use, recipes, and bibliography’, Sierra Nature Prints, 2001.

https://www.academia.edu/3829415/Acorns_as_Food_Text_and_Bibliography

Authority v Liberty. The curious case of South Korea

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

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

I taught them the word ‘censorship’.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s going on in China?

China’s been in the news because of the 20th Party Conference in Beijing at which Premier Xi Jinping guaranteed himself a third term in office. Like me, you must have been confused by the footage of the previous Premier, Hu Jintao being escorted rather forcibly away:

What’s going on? It reminded me of a similar moment in North Korea in 2013 when Jang Song-thaek was similarly very publicly removed from a meeting of the WPK Political Bureau:

Later it was announced that Jang had been executed. Will the same thing happen to Hu? Probably not. The Chinese Communist Party is more subtle. He’ll simply disappear from public view.

This is the way they do it in dictatorships, apparently! It’s important to show who’s boss.

As I noted in a previous post, the philosopher Karl Popper wisely observed that the benefit of democracy is not so much that people get to vote but that leaders get to be removed from power without risk of violence. The contrast to the UK at the moment is striking. We are certainly way more genuinely democratic in this sense than China and North Korea, and our leaders very evidently get removed from power. But our democracy is still obviously very flawed as we are obliged to watch charlatans taking it in turns to become Prime Minister in a risible game of musical chairs.

***

China is especially on my mind because a couple of my books are now in Chinese translations. Seven Keys to Modern Art, and The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art. Here they are:

The mainland Chinese version.

The Taiwan Chinese version.

The Taiwan Chinese version of The Simple Truth.

Seven Keys was published by Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House in Beijing, while Seven Keys and The Simple Truth was published by Diancan Art and Collection Ltd. in Taipei, Taiwan. But I have only received copies (and recently) of the mainland Chinese version of Seven Keys, and can find almost nothing about the Taipei edition on English language Google. The Taipei publisher did a couple of weeks ago send me three copies of the recently published Chinese translation of The Simple Truth. But still no sign of their Seven Keys.

The fact that Seven Keys has been published in Chinese in both Taiwan and mainland China may seem a bit odd, and also surprising, because the English edition, published by Thames & Hudson, couldn’t be printed in China because one of the artists I discuss is Xu Bing, whose work is related to the Tienanmen Square protests in 1989. This is a taboo subject in the People’s Republic! So, I assumed at first that Party censorship has become relaxed enough to allow the unexpurgated publication of my book. But of course not! When I looked at the mainland Chinese version more closely I realize that there is now no chapter on Xu Bing!

This is ironic for me, because I am currently teaching (in English) a PHD class here in Korea made up of almost entirely of mainland Chinese students - about ten of them - plus one solitary Korean. I am using Seven Keys as a text book, so the students can choose between using English, two Chinese, or Korean translations. But I hadn't realized until very recently that the mainland Chinese version, which is the one for sale on Amazon (no sign there of the Taiwan version…) and the one several of the Chinese students have opted to purchase, that Xu Bing has been excised.

Image Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/23/xi-jinping-chooses-yes-men-over-economic-growth-politburo-purge-china

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/23/xi-follows-maos-footsteps-puts-himself-at-core-of-chinas-government

https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_northkorea/614727.html

Acorns

This morning we woke up to the first frost of the season. But the temperature quickly rose, and as I write this at around 10.30am it’s already quite warm outside in the bright autumn sunshine.

I’ve been getting to know the oak tree. Turns out there are many more kinds than I expected. Over 500, in fact.  But in the UK and France there are basically just two indigenous species: the Pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) and the Sessile oak (Quercus petraea), and they are almost identical – the difference lies most obviously in the fact that the former grows its acorns on stalks while the latter does not.  

Here in Korea, there are six indigenous species, and they are very different one from the other. Within just half a mile of our house we’ve identified five. Here are their acorns:

This is how I’ve identified them: Top left: Korean oak (Quercus dentata). Top right: Mongolian oak (Quercus mongolica). Bottom left: Sawtooth oak (Quercus acutissima). Bottom right:  Oriental white oak (Quercus aliena). Bottom centre: Oriental white oak (Quercus aliena var. acutiserrata)…. Maybe.

The most common around here is the Oriental white oak, which also has acorns that are most like the ones I’m familiar with from England and France. But the most common nationwide are the Sawtooth and Mongolian oak.

Here’s a map showing distribution ratio within South Korea. Looks like we live in an area that’s more than 40% oak trees :

The Korean oak is my favourite, and it has really huge leaves. I took a photo with my hand superimposed to give some idea of just how big:

Over the past couple of weeks locals have been out collecting acorns because they are used to make a nutritious jelly – Dortori-muk.  When I did a bit of research about acorns as a food, I came across this fascinating TED Talk by an American woman Marcia Meyer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vi-1s1Bjs4

The Geese have arrived (earlier)!

I have noted the arrival of the geese in a couple of previous posts (Oct.1 2019 and Oct.7 2020). This year, they arrived about a week earlier than last year – in the last week of September.  Eventually, thousands of  bean geese (Anser fabalis) winter around here, having come from their breeding grounds in Mongolia and thereabouts. Apparently, the FAD (First arrival dates), as it is technically called, has been getting earlier and earlier due to global warming.  The authors of an article in the Journal of Ecology and Environment wrote back in 2018:  ‘Average temperature of September in wintering grounds has increased, and the FADs of the geese have advanced over the 22 years. Even when the influence of autumn temperature was statistically controlled for, the FADs of the geese have significantly advanced. This suggests that warming has hastened the completion of breeding, which speeded up the arrival of the geese at the wintering grounds.’ (1)

I always find it reassuringly ironic that the geese have to fly over North Korea and the DMZ to get to us. In other words, for them, there is no divided Korea. There is no Korea, North or South, just breeding grounds and wintering grounds. Adopting a ‘bird’s eye view’ in this context helps to put human history in tragic and absurd perspective. But it also drives a deep wedge between the natural history that addresses the lives of the geese and the human history about the lives of North and South Koreans.

This year, the geese’s arrival coincided with my reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s excellent The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021). His book added an additional significance to the event. The  annual rhythm of bird migration serves to reinforce the assumption that nature as a whole is permanently cyclical.  But now that we’re in the Anthropocene we are becoming aware that while nature has clear repetitive cycles based on the changing seasons, these are far from eternal. They just seem that way because of our very limited sense of historical time. Geological time, which deals in millions of years, reveal that massive changes occur in nature, sometimes absolutely devastating changes.

But humanly-caused global warming is now happening at such an alarming rate that, as the geese’s migratory pattern demonstrate, nature’s rythmns are changing within our timescale, and are easy to recognize. As a result, Chakrabarty writes that it is now essential that we find ways to conjoin the facts of Natural History with those of Human History. Climate scientists are showing that we can no longer treat them as distinct domains: “In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honoured distinction between natural and human histories, climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now wield a geological force……. A fundamental assumption of Western (and now universal) political thought has come undone in this crisis.”

References:

https://jecoenv.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41610-018-0091-2

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is published by Chicago University Press.

North Korea’s Victory over Covid-19

So, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea did not collapse due to the Covid-19 pandemic.  This is what the excellent website 38 North said on August 15 :

‘Despite widespread concern that a COVID-19 outbreak in North Korea would be devastating, given the country’s weak health care system, limited access to medical equipment, supplies and medicines, and widespread malnutrition, Pyongyang appears to have stabilized the recent outbreak in record time with minimal deaths, at least according to the official government narrative. While North Korea seems to have avoided drastic outcomes this time around, its anti-epidemic efforts came at high economic and social costs, and the largely unvaccinated population remains a concern to global efforts to combat this virus. Building the country’s capacity to deal with epidemics and health crises should be part of a global health strategy to prepare for future pandemics.’ (1)

Of course, we are used to not taking anything North Korea says at face value. Officially, they say that on July 29, 2022, the number of what are called euphemistically ‘fever cases’ reached zero. Almost 20 percent of the population fell ill, but the number of deaths was only 74, a case-fatality rate of 0.0016 percent. As all the experts point out, this is impossible. The lowest country for case-fatalities is Bhutan at 0.035 percent. Other countries with vaccination rates above 80 percent, such as Singapore, South Korea and New Zealand, reported 0.1 percent.  

But whatever the actual numbers, even the most hawkish critics of North Korea accept that the crisis was handled. The regime did not topple. Life (such as it is) goes on.

 So, why? 38 North offers some answers:

‘North Korea’s health care system is founded primarily on preventative medicine, making disease monitoring and prevention the priority. As such, during the COVID-19 outbreak, local doctors and medical students were tasked with visiting 200-300 homes per day to facilitate disease surveillance.

Based on state media reporting about the pandemic responses, it appears that the North Korean government’s stewardship of the response to the outbreak has been effective and efficient. They declared a national emergency immediately after the first confirmed COVID-19 case, ordered a nationwide lockdown, and delivered medicine and food to houses while promoting the production of domestic medicine. State media has also reported the case numbers and provided medical information about COVID-19 daily.

With limited geographic mobility and domestic migration even before the pandemic, North Korean society is set up in a way that makes controlling the transmission of this airborne virus easier than in most countries. In short, North Korea was able to quickly stop community spread through aggressive public health measures, and as such, has not experienced a catastrophic situation. Furthermore, the first reported COVID-19 case was said to have been of the Omicron variant, which while more contagious, is less severe than the original virus or other variants.’

What this prognosis boils down is an interesting fact: the least ‘open’ society in the world proved to be one of the best at dealing with the pandemic, while the most ‘open’ societies proved the worst. 

In his book Open. The Story of Human Progress (2020), Johan Norberg writes that ‘openness’ is inextricably tied to globalization: ‘Present day globalization is nothing but the extension of…. cooperation   across borders, all over the world, making it possible for far more people than ever to make use o the ideas and work for others, no matter where they are on the planet. This has made the modern global economy possible, which has liberated almost 130,000 people from poverty every day for the last twenty-five years.’ Norberg also notes that ‘when China was most open it led the world in wealth, science and technology, but by shutting its ports and minds to the world five hundred years ago, the planet’s richest country soon became one of the poorest.’ Nowadays, however, China has sufficiently opened up to globalization to become prosperous again.

North Korea is an obvious example of what happens when a country is ‘closed.’ Interestingly, on this level it follows the policy of the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897) whose isolation earned Korea the named ‘The Hermit Kingdom’, and also made it a ripe pickings for Japanese colonial ambition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. Japan, of course, did ‘open’ up – it was the first of the East Asian nations to do so, and the first to colonize another East Asian country (Korea in 1910) and to defeat a western power (in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05) . In this sense then, North Korea is a reversion to a former societal model, whereas South Korea, who has aggressively joined the ‘open’ global market, is following themodel first pioneered by its neighbor and former colonial master, Japan. It is obvious in pretty much all terms which of the Koreas chose the better path.

*

But the ‘openness’ of globalization is precisely what allowed the pandemic to happen. This is a fact that North Korea’s success highlights.  The downside of ‘openness’ is porosity of borders. As Jared Diamond points out in his classic Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Fates of Human Societies (1997): ‘The rapid spread of microbes, and the rapid course of symptoms, mean that everybody in a local human population  is quickly infected and soon thereafter is either dead or else recovered and immune. No one is left alive who could still be infected. But since the microbe can’t survive except in the bodies of living people the disease dies out, until a new crop of babies reaches the susceptible age – and until an infectious person arrives from the outside to start a new epidemic.’ (Emphasis added) The classic historical case of this viral invasion is the virtual annihilation of the indigenous peoples of north, central and south America by ‘white’ settlers who brought their infectious diseases with them – diseases for whom they had developed immunity but the indigenous people , having never been exposed to them, had not. Diamond gives several examples. Here’s one that is harrowing in its definitiveness: ‘In the winter of 1902 a dysentery epidemic brought by a sailor on the whaling ship Active killed 51 out of the 56 Sadlermiut Eskimos, a very isolated band of people living on Southampton Island in the Canadian Arctic.’

An ‘open’ society is bound to be prone to epidemics, while a ‘closed’ one is more likely to be able to control them. But it is also much more dangerously vulnerable if (indeed, when) the closed gate is breached.  This vulnerability explains why a ‘closed’ society will desperately fight to keep the gate closed. But it also explains why they are doomed to fail.

Living in societies that value ‘openness’ is not just about markets, however. It’s also about ‘openness’ to worldviews,  beliefs and behaviour, and this means a society will also be vulnerable to cultural ‘infection’. An ‘open’ society is perpetually being ‘infected’ by alien worldviews, and this inevitably causes tensions, and possibly conflicts. But as time goes by, the people of an ‘open’ society develop ‘immunity’ to these novel cultural pathogens. This is clearly what has happened as western societies have become more tolerantly multicultural. But the onslaught is continuous, and inevitably unsettling. Meanwhile, in a ’closed’ society like North Korea – in fact North Korea could be described as the archetype of a ‘closed’ society – cultural pathogens are not an immediate danger. They lie safely beyond the closed gate – in South Korea, America, Japan - but the dangers they potentially pose can be used to install fear in the populace.

Interestingly, the North Koreans claim that the Covid-19 virus entered their land via ‘alien objects’ found on a hillside. They elaborated by saying that these ‘objects’ came via balloons from Korea (the South Koreans have banned the sending of propaganda via balloons across the DMZ, but it still happens).  Much more likely is that the disease entered via illegal trading with China.

In other words, total closure of a society is impossible. It always has been, as humans are hard-wired to trade. Where societies are concerned, there’s no such thing as totally water-tight barrel. They will always be leaky.   Which is why an ‘open’ society is an inevitable advance on a ‘closed’ one. But this is especially true in an era of technologies that allow for ease and speed of travel.  In earlier times, when people could only travel by foot, horse, horse and cart, or by sail across the oceans, being ’closed’ seemed a viable option. Today it obviously is not.

So, even though North Korea stamped put Covid-19 with remarkable success, it is surely still doomed.

(1) https://www.38north.org/2022/08/north-korea-appears-to-have-managed-its-covid-19-outbreak-what-comes-next/

Image source: https://www.ft.com/content/4f82c57b-fb10-4945-b6ab-df9445c57715

Masks….Yet Again.

James Ensor, Death and the Masks (1897). Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/previews/201007/james-ensor-26245

I apologize for once again writing about damn face-masks. But as I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I spent the summer in France, and it was quite a shock to suddenly be somewhere in which wearing face-masks was no longer mandatory in public places - as they still very much are in Korea.  I am also back in the classroom teaching students face-to-face, or rather, mask-to-mask, and I’m finding it a terribly demoralizing experience. The mask makes it difficult to recognize my students, but even more awful, completely erases one of the most important markers  through which I receive signals of their active engagement with  my teaching: their mouths.

Inevitably, this has got me thinking about the face-mask again as a sign of cultural difference, and why it is that Korean society finds it so much less onerous to wear them than do westerners. Why are the latter willing to take more risks with their own and others’ well-being than Koreans? Why is the calculus of relative pros and cons so different? In particular, I have got thinking about the trade-off between public health safety assessed in terms of viral infectiousness and social solidarity, as exemplified by Korea, and public health safety assessed more (and mostly unconsciously, I think) in terms of psychological well-being, humaneness, and the values associated with sociality and freedom, as exemplified by the west. 

By now,  I’ve read several psychological and medical reports about face-masks. I’ve found that while the physical health benefits are pretty much agreed on there is less consensus concerning their potential psychological toll. Are children being permanently or even temporarily mentally affected in negative ways by having to wear masks?  To what extent is people’s capacity for empathy being temporarily or permanently obstructed? Are we being turned into abnormal or even sociopathologically solipsistic automatons? 

My classroom of masked students is bad enough, but it is hard to conjure up a more visually graphic image of psychological social alienation than a subway carriage of Koreans bent over their smartphones and wearing masks (see my post from May 24th, 2022 for another take on the effect of smartphones in such situations). It also seems an especially powerful image of baleful subjugation and conformity.  I can’t help but see the combination of face-mask and smartphone as constituting a socially and politically useful way of  pacifying people, and also without any obvious coercion, as they are ‘self-medicating’ by apparent choice. The passengers are tranquilizing themselves by drastically narrowing their potential interactions with the immediate environment.

This is, to be sure, an environment that possesses a great number of visual, aural, olfactory and tactile stimuli that are likely to make any half-normal person feel uncomfortable,  bored, or downright threatened, and that are not in any stretch of the imagination attractive, pleasant or benign. The mask aids and abets the healthy quest for secure environmental  buffering. It is an excellent means of  hiding oneself from the gaze of a disagreeable world. I don’t just mean the gaze of other people, but more metaphorically, the ‘gaze’ of one’s surroundings - the call to us made by these surroundings. of spaces with which we are actively connected and with which we instinctively expect to be able to respond resonantly.

The face-mask is a way of ensuring that one remains distant, detached, and disengaged. But in the subway the masking of the face is combined with the lowering of the head and the directing of the gaze towards a small illuminated rectangular  screen. As I have discussed in a previous past, this dramatically limits access to the expansiveness of the visual field which the human eye has evolved to see.  It produces a kind of tunnel vision, and, as the term in popular usage implies, involves a narrowing and impoverishing of vision.  But the smartphone makes this seemingly detrimental action alluring because it substitutes the unpredictable, threatening, ugly, actual surroundings for surroundings over which one has complete control, that via the magic of the Internet offer potentially resonant relationships to the world rather than alienating ones. This  is a very attractive trade-off, and no wonder everyone is eager to make it.  We transports ourselves from  the disagreeable place where our bodies are located in real time and space to another space replete with much more appealing stimuli.

A subway system anywhere in the world is never going to be a very appealing and enlivening  environment, especially in the rush-hour. It’s inherently awful, really.  No one in their right mind would choose to be there. But of course, we all ride the subway because we need to get to work or want  to meet our friends. Like so much of modern city life, the environment through which we habitually move is an inherently alienating one. Not so much a concrete jungle as a concrete desert. The casting down of the gaze and the focusing  of attention on a small illuminated screen, plus the concealing of the nose and mouth behind a mask are therefore highly efficient ways of blocking or buffering contact with one’s immediate surroundings and achieving a relatively robust form of autonomy and control. But obviously, these benefits come at a dreadfully high price.

*

I used the word ‘buffering’  above in knowing reference to the writings of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who juxtaposes the terms ‘buffered’ self with ‘porous’ self  in order to make a basic distinction between the modern and pre-modern conceptions of identity within European society. The ‘porous’ self is an earlier model of human relationship to the world that characterized  Europe prior to the seventeenth century. What Taylor describes as the  uniquely modern ‘secular’ world is precisely  a world in which relationship are no longer founded on ‘porosity’ of self but on the benefits accrued from the bounded of ‘buffered’ relationship of the self to the world.

Here is what Taylor says about the latter in A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007) : “As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that things beyond don’t need to ‘get to me’, to use the contemporary expression….This self can see itself as invulnerable, as a matter of the meaning of things for it.’ (p.38) A ‘buffered’ mode of existence “can form the ambition of disengaging from whatever is beyond the boundary, and of giving its own autonomous order to its life. The absence of fear can not just be enjoyed,  but seen as an opportunity for self-control or self-direction.” (38-9) Thus, the ‘buffered’ self is characterized by a stance of disengagement from the world which is adopted because it accrues a “sense of freedom, control, invulnerability, and hence dignity”(285). Taylor notes that much of the value associated with this ‘buffered’ disengagement from the world  has  derived from the way in which it mirrors on the level of personal existence “the most prestigious and impressive epistemic activity of modern civilization, vz., natural science” (p.285), that is to say, the rational or objective point of view. 

By contrast, there is the pre-modern ‘porous’ self. Here, “the boundary between agents and forces is fuzzy……[T]he boundary between mind and world is porous” (39). The relationship to the world  is also what Taylor calls “enchanted”, by which he means that because there is no firm boundary between self and world, one feels intimately affected by the world in ways that continuously open one up to uncontrollable an mysterious forces.  There is no clear distinction between the subjective and the objective, the interior world and the exterior.

In his study, Taylor is limiting his analysis to the western world, but it seems to me that his concept of ‘porous’ and ‘buffered’ selves can be extended to global proportions (with obvious caveats). It seems especially interesting in relation to cultures that have experiences rapid modernization under the aegis of western ways of thinking, and therefore have evolved rapidly from societies based on the ‘porous’ self to ones based on the ‘buffered’ self.

So, back to the Seoul subway carriage. Is it too much to suggest that the uniform behaviour of the Korean passengers of all ages (except the very old, who are not accustomed to smartphones!)  can at least in part be understood by recognizing that they are living in a culture that has metamorphosized from one dominated  by the pre-modern ‘porous’ self to one increasingly dominated by the benefits accrued by being a bounded, disengaged ‘buffered’ self - a self that makes one a fully-fledged ‘modern’ person?  But the speed of change means that the characteristics of the ‘porous’ and the ‘buffered’ self co-exist in unique ways in Korea. For example, the  high level of conformity manifest in Korean society is a clear reflection of a core characteristic or the pre-modern ‘porous’ self. As Taylor writes of European culture: “Living in the enchanted, porous world of our ancestors was inherently living socially. It was not just that the spiritual forces which impinged on me often emanated from people around me……Much more fundamental, these forces impinged on us as a society, and were defended against by us as a society……So we’re all in this together.” (42) Taylor’s words made me think of the collective reaction within Korea to Covid-19, and how they contrast to the western response, which was far more based on a ‘buffered’ sense of self in which individual autonomy has priority of the social sense of  all being “in this together.”  As Taylor adds, as a result of the pressure to subordinate self to group, in a society ruled by a sense of the ‘porous’ self there will be a “great pressure towards orthodoxy.” (42) But in contrast to this impulse, one can also very clearly observe in modern-day Korea other forces that derive from the adoption of the new bounded, ‘buffered’ sense of self, which prioritizes disengagement as a source of self-efficacy. As a result, , in the Seoul subway carriage we find the melding within the same person of characteristics of ‘porosity’ and of ‘buffering’ in relation to the self, of collective behaviour and disengagement.

Has the speed of social transformation been fundamentally traumatizing for Koreans? Are the visible exterior signs (the persistent mask, the obsessive zoning in on the cellphone screen) the manifested signs of an interior mental state that is, in a sense, a kind of mental and social derangement?

Social Bonding

This morning I saw about a hundred barn swallows lined up along the same electrical cable near our village. Occasionally, they swooped away across the rice fields for a short time before returning to the line again.  These swallows are doing some socializing before departure for far away southeast Asia. By socializing, they are also bonding, strengthening ties and group coordination that will be vital for surviving the epic journey ahead. This is what the RSPB says on its website: “Swallows migrate during daylight, flying quite low and covering about 320 km (200 miles) each day. At night they roost in huge flocks in reed-beds at traditional stopover spots. Since swallows feed entirely on flying insects, they don’t need to fatten up before leaving, but can snap up their food along the way. Nonetheless, many die of starvation. If they survive, they can live for up to sixteen years.” (1) Usually, a pair of barn swallows nests under the eves of our house, but this year a pair of Red-rumped swallows set up home. Here they are:

But for some reason, after strenuously adapting the barn swallows’ nest to their own specifications (they prefer a tunnel entrance), in July the pair of Red-rumped swallows abandoned their finished nest and were never seen again.

*

As soon as I saw the swallows all lined up along the wire I thought of the lines of people waiting to pay their respects to the recently departed queen of Great Britain and Commonwealth. A friend in London had sent me pictures of her all-night vigil at the Palace of Westminster, and it was clearly a powerful experience for her, above all, one that gave her a profoundly meaningful feeling of belonging, of bonding with others and with her heritage.  As she wrote: “the Queen was extraordinarily in our lives.” 

It’s odd being so far away, so very much on the outside, although I too felt the news of the queen’s death as something very significant, and will probably be deeply moved by the funeral on Monday 19th. As everyone my age (and quite a bit older) keep saying: “she’s been there all my life!”

But I’m not here going to add my thoughts to the mountain of views on the British monarchy or the queen. Instead, I want to think about the psycho-social mechanisms involved in the kind of  bonding ritual  in which my friend, like so many others, is choosing to be  involved right now. Why is it so important?

The word ‘ritual’ is not one that has a very good press these days. It tends to be associated with religion, with convention and outdated behaviour. There’s not much place for ritual in our fast-paced, technological society. But that’s precisely the problem. As the British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner argued The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), the ‘ritual process’ is vital for the secure and  healthy maintenance of any society, which he defined in terms of  a binary tension between structure and anti-structure, modes of organization which together are the two major ‘models’ for human interrelatedness. The former refers to a differentiated and usually hierarchical  social system  that separates people into positions of ‘more’ or ‘less’, and thereby ensures security and stability across time.  But that is only one kind of society. Turner juxtaposed this ideal with another that  embraces  anti-structure,   “an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders.” (1969, p.96) As he explained:

Society….is a process in which any living, relatively well-bonded human group alternates between fixed and – to borrow a term from our Japanese friends – ‘floating worlds.’ By verbal and nonverbal means of classification we impose upon ourselves innumerable constraints and boundaries to keep chaos at bay, but often at the cost of failing to make discoveries and inventions…….[I]n order to live, to breathe, to generate novelty, human beings have had to create – by structural means - spaces and times in the calendar or in the cultural cycles of their most cherished groups which cannot be captured in the classificatory nets of their quotidian, routinized spheres of action.  (p.vii)

Turner adopted the Latin term communitas  in order to describe this idea of society as anti-structure, and the term ‘liminal’ to evoke the antistructural experience within the ritual process in order to describe the ‘in-betweenness’ or transitiveness of their state necessary for the deep bonding that antistructure facilitated.  As Turner writes, this is a model of society “as a homogeneous, unstructured communitas, whose boundaries are ideally coterminous with those of the human species.” (p.136)

A 1996 reprint of Turner’s classic text from 1969 published by Routledge: https://www.routledge.com/The-Ritual-Process-Structure-and-Anti-Structure/Turner-Abrahams-Harris/p/book/9780202011905

The problem with  any society based on structure is that it separates and hierarchizes into discrete parts and systems, making the desire and natural ability to intimately bond between individuals and across groups very attenuated, and therefore radically diminishes and circumscribes the potential richness of human relationships to each other and the world.  In our society, bonding is almost only something that happens on an individual or small group level – between lovers, members of the family, supporters of the same football team. Children are better at bonding than adults because they are less structured psychologically. Indeed, the more a society embraces structure the more atomized bonding becomes.   But we all crave to bond as expansively as possible, to experience communitas, and so societies develop ways through which to incorporate the experience of antistructure which is the prerequisite for  collective bonding into its rituals. In his study of Ndembu ritual Turner described the    African tribe’s complex manner of working through the dual impulses of structure and antistructure within elaborate ritual activity, but he also referred to modern western conventions, and  especially drew attention to such rituals as carnivals and other socially sanctioned rituals such as football matches or rock concerts in which the antistructural or liminality can be experienced.  

But as Turner stresses the immediacy and authenticity of ‘existential communitas’ cannot be endured for long by society.  “[T]he spontaneity and immediacy of communitas – as opposed to the jural-political character of structure – can seldom be maintained for very long. Communitas itself soon develops a structure, in which free-relationships between individuals become converted into norm-governed relationships between social personae’ This is  what Turner calls ‘normative communitas’, “where, under the influence of time, the need to stabilize and organize resources, and the necessity for social control among the members of the group in pursuance of these goals, the existential communitas is organized into a perduring social system.” (p.132) It is also a feature of any society that the powers vested in the maintenance of social structure will attempt to appropriate the energies of communitas, of antistructure, in order to maintain and strengthen their position. They will manufacture rituals that offer a modicum of the experience without any risk of the energies released spilling over into potential anarchic anti-social behaviour. 

North Korea is a good example of a political elite organizing society around elaborate rituals that blend structure and antistructure in order to guarantee the stability of their status quo. But here we witness more than just a ‘normative’ use of communitas. Rather, the North Korea  elite  propagates a version of what Turner terms ‘ideological communitas’, in that it has adopted a rigid utopian model of society based on the fundamental yearning for ‘existential communitas’, which it then exploits in order to maintain power.

Modern techno-scientific society based on instrumental reason is dangerously deficient in antistructural rituals.  And when they exist – especially within youth culture – they tend to be insufficiently linked dialectically to structure, and risk failing to pass the vital energy of communitas back into society at large. As a result, adult life is often characterized by a nostalgic longing for the antistructural experiences that characterize youth because such experiences are unavailable to the adult world.

But the British Royal family is an excellent source of ritual processes. One could say that it presents to the world the caricatured image of society as structure, of society as a series of rituals organized to maintain structure. As such, it acts is a mirror  in which society at large can see both the virtues and the vices of living deeply within structure, with the “innumerable constraints and boundaries to keep chaos at bay.”  This is precisely what the queen and the new king call ‘duty’. But the royal family also provides moments when the people can experience  tame or ‘normative’ forms of   communitas:  during the rituals surround the funeral of the queen, for instance. These ‘normative’ forms provide the opportunity for deep and expansive social bonding, the experience of non-hierarchical oneness, while at the same time re-affirming the pre-eminent need for structural hierarchy. I suppose one could argue that, anthropologically speaking,  the continuing significance of the Royals for us moderns, whose lives are starved of ritual, is to offer the experience of both structured and normatively liminal or unstructured relationships to the world (in small and well targeted doses). In the light of the dire straits in which Britain finds itself, its people certainly need generous doses of both.

NOTES

 (1) https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/natures-home-magazine/birds-and-wildlife-articles/migration/migratory-bird-stories/swallow-migration/  Here is a great link to an article about how the swallow’s ‘disappearance’ in the winter has been explained historically: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/natural-histories/great-migration-mystery

Holding Heritage to Account

In today’s blog I include the second part of my talk for the International Conference on World Heritage, which was held in Korea in early September. The overall title was ‘World Heritage. Old Newness’, and my talk was entitled ‘Cultural Heritage as ‘Memory Event. The Case of Dansaekhwa’. In this second part, I widen the focus of my reflections to consider the crisis in the idea of ‘heritage’ in the West, and how it might relate to the idea of heritage in Korea.

 In my country, Great Britain, heritage is big business. We use the term ‘heritage industry’ a lot. In fact, it’s been argued that the entire island is one great ‘heritage’ theme park.  Here’s an example of some of my heritage from near where I grew up in East Sussex in the south of England:

This is Bodiam Castle, built between about 1380-85. It still looks in remarkably good condition, doesn’t it? The interior, however, is a gutted ruin. Bodiam Castle is now owned by the National Trust, which looks after around 300 properties, and also manages great swathes of the British landscape, like this, the series of chalk cliffs on the South Downs overlooking the English Channel known as the Seven Sisters, also near where I grew up:

In relation to the arts, the National Trust website proudly announces: “no other organisation conserves such a range of heritage locations with buildings, contents, gardens and settings intact, nor provides such extensive public access.”  Recently, however, the Trust became another victim of the on-going and increasingly crazy culture wars. In 2020 it published a policy review paper that addressed its properties’historical relationships to the slave trade and colonialism. As the UK’s  Guardian newspaper’s website reported on November 12th 2020, the review paper “explored how the proceeds of foreign conquest and the slavery economy built and furnished houses and properties, endowed the families who kept them, and in many ways helped to create the idyll of the country house. None of this is news to most people with a passing acquaintance with history, and the report made no solid recommendations beyond the formation of an advisory group and reiterating a commitment to communicating the histories of its properties in an inclusive manner.” (1)

But it caused quite a furore. People on the political right, in particular, saw the Trust’s apparently guilt-ridden questioning and pathetic attempts at atonement  as reprehensible evidence that  its “ leadership has been captured by elitist bourgeois liberals”, as a letter from a group of enraged Members of Parliament put it -  by people who were “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the ‘woke agenda’.”

What this little scandal reveals is the fact that the idea of ‘heritage’ is in crisis, at least in the West. The Guardian article goes on to mention the academic Patrick Wright, author of the best-selling On Living in an Old Country who, writing in 1985, described the National Trust as having been created as a kind of “ethereal holding company for the spirit of the nation”. But he was critical of this ideal, and his special target was the Prime Minster of the time, Margaret Thatcher, and her efforts to co-opt a certain image of Britain to help maintain her hold on power. Today, post-Brexit and in the light of the so-called ‘woke agenda’,  the issues Wright raised back then have become even more pressing. Take Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s family home, which is also not far from my hometown:

Chartwell’s historical associations with the slave trade made it one of the Trust’s targets. As The Guardian noted, within the concept of heritage places “are easily mythologised as Britain’s soul, places in which tradition and inheritance stand firm against the anonymising tides of modernity. They are places of fantasy, which help us imagine a rooted relationship to the land that feels safe and secure. As Wright pointed out, this makes the project of preserving them necessarily defensive, and one that doesn’t sit well with the practice of actual historical research – which contextualises, explains and asks uncomfortable questions.”

The issue pivots on the problem of inheritance. Who in the present decides what is worth celebrating in the past, and how can they be held to account? What can or should be politely ignored or forgotten, and what must be condemned? At its worst, ‘heritage’ is an anodyne way of referring to the ownership of the past by the powerful in the present, who use it to help consolidate their position through permitting those with little or no power to enjoy some of the nation’s patrimony on the weekend without upsetting the status quo, while also allowing them to avoid dealing with the kinds of moral qualms and ambiguities that characterize the rest of their lives.  Of course, there are far more positive ways to describe heritage. For example, that it a social category dedicated to countering the alienating effects of modern existence through providing the possibility of resonant relationships to the past. 

I’m not sure to what extent the Republic of Korea should be engaging  in the kind of mea culpa correctional process now going on in the West. Should you also be actively exposing the extent to which, for example, many of your admired Confucian scholars condoned slavery and the brutal subordination of women? Or is the Republic of Korea at a different stage of cultural development, or developing on a significantly different path, and so introducing  ‘Western’ principles of social justice would actually be a new form of cultural colonialism?  The context for the celebration of Korean heritage today is the legacy of Japanese colonization, rapid westernization, and an ideologically divided people. These facts demand a unique attitude to heritage to which everyone should be sensitive. The situation is very different to Britain, whose heritage nests within a far more unbroken and triumphalist story, one that is now in dire need of revision. Perhaps in Korea, the cultural situation demands a rather less uncompromising and aggressive relationship to its heritage. 

Then again, the universality of the principles of justice now   being employed to judge the past seems unquestionable.  Slavery, the subjugation of women, these do seem morally repugnant wherever you stand –  at least, if you’re standing in an open society that Is dedicated to maximizing the possibilities of human flourishing,  at least in principle.   But do we want to be reminded of these dreadful things - the past’s legacy of cruelty and woe - every time we visit our nation’s’ heritage. Must we always say, as Walter Benjamin did as the Nazi’s closed in, ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ Won’t it ruin our day out?    

But it is in this context that artists could be very useful. Their ‘unofficial’ view on things may help to enliven heritage. They don’t shy away from the truth, but they’re also not (or should not be) hanging judges standing on the moral high ground and passing judgement. Through perceiving the present’s similarities and differences from the past in more than a reactionary and traditionalist sense, but also in taking more than a stance of hostile deconstruction and critique, artists can show how to resist   institutional sclerosis.

Notes:

(1)  (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/12/national-trust-history-slavery?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&fbclid=IwAR2Ar4xEPtJ17i7QHdZZnMS8lCbb48T6TsOL8nMqU7jwb4QOnvCM-dd8bbs)All images courtesy of the National Trust.

Images courtesy of the National Trust.

‘Old Newness’

A few days ago I gave a talk at an International Conference on World Heritage held in Korea. The title of the conference was ‘World Heritage. Old Newness.’ The two-day conference included a video address from Stephan Doempke, the Chair of World Heritage Watch in which, amongst other things, he discussed the damage to cultural sites in Ukraine: since the war began on 24 February, UNESCO has verified damage to 168 sites.

My talk was in the section of the conference dedicated to ‘Artistic Interpretation of World Heritage and Creation of Future Heritage’, and was entitled ‘Cultural Heritage as ‘Memory Event’. The Case of Dansaekhwa’. I am posting the first part of the talk today in a slightly different version. I discuss the Korean art tendency known as ‘Dansaekhwa’ (One-colour-painting), which emerged in the Republic of Korea in the 1970s - I have written about  Dansaekhwa on more than one occasion in this blog and also published several essays on various aspects of the tendency, and there’s a chapter on it in my book ‘The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art’ (2020). In this talk I discuss how these Korean artists’ works can be seen to transform the rigid experience of Past and Present into a more personal and inward experience of Then and Now.

First if all, here are examples of works by some Dansaekhwa artists:

Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture No, 28-73, 1873, Pencil and Oil on Canvas, 194.0 x 130.0 cm. Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul.

Yun Hyong-keun. Umber, 1988-1989. Oil on linen, 205 x 333.5 cm. Courtesy of Yun Seong-ryeol and PKM Gallery, Seoul

Chung Sang-Hwa (1932-), Untitled 75-10, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 161x130cm. Courtesy Hyundai Gallery, Seoul.

Installation shot of works by Lee Ufan from the 1970s at Kukje Gallery, Seoul.

 ‘Cultural Heritage as ‘Memory Event. The Case of Dansaekhwa.’

By ‘memory event’ I mean a recollection of a specific occurrence which includes vivid details for the one doing the recollecting. It implies a ‘momentary’ sense of time, a temporal experience in which the linear chain between before and after is broken, and a moment drops out of its historical connection with other moments and gets a significance of its own. A ‘memory event’ overcomes the sterile binary of ‘past’ and ‘present’, substituting instead the potential for synthesis.  One re-imagines the experience of history as something partially freed from linear order and objective causal succession.  The Past and Present become the ‘Then’ and ‘Now’, a more personal and less rigid relationship to time.

The term ‘memory event’ fits very well the relationship to history evident in  Dansaekhwa artists’ works. They blended an interest in Western modern art with what they consider important aspects of their own indigenous culture that are conducive to expression through monochromatic painting. In particular, they emphasize the tangible -  the physical and sometimes laboriously repetitious working of a painting’s surface - and they engage more than the sense of sight by including touch and movement as part of the encounter.  Dansaekhwa artists were motivated by the desire to unite or bring into alignment their bodies and their work in order to bridge the gap between the mental and the physical, the inside and outside. For them, a painting becomes as a living intermediary between the self and the world.   

The cultural background to their intention  is the artists’ attachment to pre-modern, pre-Western cultural ideals, which they sought ways to re-imagine  for modern day Korea.  This was possible because of the awareness of history as the perpetual coming into existence, developing, decaying and going out of existence of all things. Rather than the Western idea of progress, their relationship to time was more characteristic of  what has been called the East Asian “‘Tao’ of history “, a relationship with which Dansaekhwa artists were intuitively associated. This meant attuning to   alternation:  to repeated occurrences in   space and time and involved bringing together ideas and things across time and place. It characterized relationships to the past in terms of what is meaningful from the perspective of the individual constructing the connection in the present. In this temporal model, time is experienced as non-linear, dissolving, diaphanous, and ephemeral.  It is something that can only be perceived, measured and remembered through an individual’s actions. As a result, history is conceptualized as a situation with potential in the present, something to be used to advantage in the now.

It seems evident that the artists associated with Dansaekhwa possessed a still graspable connection to the forms of social life in which the traditional, pre-industrial, experience of time  was grounded. They were immersed in a deep and pervasive background culture that permitted them to envisage a different relationship to history from Western artists, who were trapped within linear time. They lived within the “Tao’ of History’, and  hoped to give material expression to a vision of the future of modern Korea that conjoined Western influences with the appreciation of the continued validity of their inherited traditions, which were understood not as tokens buried within immobile tradition but as renewable resources.  However, the moment in the development of Korea in which Dansasekhwa  existed, one when it was possible to articulate an ‘unofficial’, personal, but socially liberating relationship to the past -  to see  the Then of pre-modern Korea  in the Now of modern Korea  -  has probably passed. The ‘memory events’ of young Koreans are no longer fed by these pre-modern, pre-westernization springs. They are much more deeply buried.   

French Roses and Oak Trees

Some Rose News

It’s been a while since I wrote my blog, the reason being that I’ve been in my house in central France over the summer. It’s the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Two-and-a-half years! Although others have been staying there, and keeping an eye on the garden, several of the roses I planted just before I left the last time (in February 2020) didn’t make it, alas. And July-August isn’t the best time to enjoy the rose-garden. But several roses were in bloom. Here’s one: Reine des Violettes , a wonderfully fragrant magenta coloured Hybrid Perpetual, cultivated in France and in commerce since 1860.

In my book By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose I write that Hybrid Perpetuals “were crosses with Portland, Chinas, and Bourbon Roses, and are upright plants about six feet tall, quite fragrant, and mostly pink or red. Between 1850 and 1900 they were considered the characteristically new or modern roses. As the name suggests, Hybrid Perpetuals inherited the remontancy characteristic from being crossed with a Chinese parent. This longer blooming period became a hugely appealing new feature for European rose growers. But the Hybrid Perpetuals would soon be overshadowed by the Hybrid Teas, which possess the general habit of the Hybrid Perpetuals but have the more elegantly shaped buds and free-flowering character of their parent, the Chinese Tea Rose.“

Concerning my book about roses, I’m pleased to say that it is now available in Italian. Here’s the back and front cover:

A New Project?

I’ve been thinking about the oak tree because just down the road from my house in France straddles the immense Forest of Tronçais, which at 26,000 acres is one of the largest stands of sessile oak (Quercus petraea) in western Europe. Amongst other things, the Forest is celebrated for supplying oak wood for wine and brandy barrels; almost all great wines – red or white – are aged in oak, and quite possibly oak from the Forest of Tronçais. In 2021, twenty-six of its more than 200 years old oaks were chosen for the reconstruction of the spire of the fire-devastated cathedral of Notre-Dames de Paris.

It is not too much to say that human civilization is both literally and metaphorically built on oak trees like those in the Forest of Tronçais. For millennia, oak lumber was the premier building material for houses, boats, and furniture. The oldest surviving Viking longboat is made of oak.  Oak wood also served as fuel in the form of logs, and later, as charcoal.  The acorn was an abundant and nutritious food.  The bark was used in the production of leather. It was also valued medicinally as an antiseptic and hemostatic, a pacifying agent in inflammation, a healing agent for burns, and a cure toothache and gastropathies. Many important manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells and the American Declaration of Independence, were written in ink made of oak gall,  produced by wasp larvae who live on the oak tree.  The  oak is central to many myths and religions, especially of Europe. The Greeks, Romans, Celts, Slavs, and Teutonic tribes all venerated the oak tree above all other trees. The ‘Golden Bough’ that serves as the title to James Frazer’s celebrated foundational text on world mythologies was sheltered within a sanctuary of sacred oak trees. In Celtic mythology, the oak symbolized the virtues of strength, courage, and wisdom, and the word ‘Druid’ may derive from the Celtic meaning “knower of the oak tree.” Contemporary witches suggest hanging a sprig of oak in the house to ward off negativity, strengthen family unity, afford protection, and promote prosperity.

At the western edge of the forest stands a very old oak named La Sentinelle. Born around 1580, during the Wars of Religion then raging in the region (and that led to the sacking of my village, and the destruction of its walled château) La Sentinelle means ‘The Sentry’ or ‘The Watchman’ . It’s my favorite of the ancient oaks in the forest, and I always make a point of visiting it and giving it a hug. Here it is as of early July, 2022:

As you can see, La Sentinelle certainly looks its age. Deeply fissured, gnarled, and cracked, and not very elegant looking, it would take four people with arms outstretched to gird its stocky, nobly, trunk.  It puts me in mind of a story of the Chinese sage, Chuang Tzu, or Zhuangzi, (369—298 B.C.E). Here it is as translated by Solala Towler in Chuang Tzu – The Inner Chapters, the Classic Taoist Text (2010):

Once a master carpenter named Shih was travelling with his apprentice on his way to the state of Chi. When they arrived in Chu Yuan village they passed a huge old oak tree sheltering the village shrine. It was huge, large enough to fit several thousand oxen under its branches. It was 100 spans and towered over everything else in the village with its lowest branches a full 80 feet in the air. These branches were so large they could have been made into a dozen boats. Many people were standing under it, their necks craned as they tried to see the top. But the master carpenter did not even turn his head as they passed it; but walked on without stopping for a moment.

His apprentice took one look at the immense tree and ran after his master saying: “Since I first took up the axe to train with you Master, I have never seen a tree as magnificent. Yet you do not even look at it, much less stop. Why is this?”

The carpenter said, “Enough! Not another word about this tree! Its wood is useless. A boat made from its timber would sink; a coffin would rot before you could put it into the ground; any tool you made from it would snap. It has too much sap in it to make a door, and a beam made from its wood would be full of termites. Altogether it is a completely useless tree and that is why it has lived so long.”

One night, after he returned home, the ancient tree came to the carpenter in a dream and spoke to him. “What are you comparing me too,” it asked, “useful trees like cherry, apple, pear, orange, citron and all the other useful trees? Yet for these trees, as soon as the fruit is ripe they are stripped; their branches are broken and torn off. It is their usefulness that causes them so much abuse. Instead of living out the years heaven has given them they are cut off halfway through. So it is for living things. This is why I have worked so long to cultivate the spirit of uselessness. I was almost cut down several times but I have been able to attain a great level of uselessness and this has been very useful to me. If I had been more useful I would never have attained the great age that I have, and grown so large.

“The two of us are similar. We are both just beings in the world. How is it that we go about judging other beings? You, an old and worthless man, about to die, how can you judge me and call me worthless?”

Shih the carpenter awoke then and spent a long time lying in his bed trying to understand this strange dream. Later, when he shared his dream with his apprentice the young man said, “If this ancient tree is so interested in being useless why has it allowed itself to become part of the village shrine?”

His master said, “It is only pretending to be a shrine. It is its way of protecting itself. Even though its timber is useless, if it were not a shrine it would have been cut down long ago. It is totally different from other trees. You cannot hope to understand it!”

La Sentinelle is on last legs, its death accelerated by climate change. Since I last visited, it had lost several of its huge branches..

I realize my life has been intertwined with the oak from almost the beginning. The house I grew up in had a pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) – the most common kind of oak in England - growing in the garden. It was much taller and much older than the house and completely dominated the garden. In the summertime, all I could see out my bedroom window were its leaves and branches, which almost but not quite reached close enough for me to leap out the window into its canopy, like the young aristocrat in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees (1957), who rebels against his dull family by climbing into an oak tree in the garden and then refuses to come down - ever. Today, in South Korea, the hills around my house are mostly covered in young oak trees. The majority are Quercus dentata, which is smaller in size than the typical European oaks, but has the largest leaves of any – some are bigger than my open hand. 

in the not to distant future my burgeoning interest in the oak tree will bear fruit as a new book. And in my next post I’ll be over my jet lag and ruminating once again on things Korean…..Well, Probably.

Slaying Satan near the DMZ

About a week ago, Pope  Francis in an Interview concerning the Ukraine-Russia war said:  “We need to move away from the usual Little Red Riding Hood pattern, in that Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad one. Something global is emerging and the elements are very much entwined.” At first, I was relieved to see the head of the Roman Catholic Church speaking common sense, trying to insert a bit of nuanced reality into the black-and-white narrative. Then I remembered that Pope Francis is head of an institution that is exemplary in peddling one of the most egregious Little Red Riding Hood stories.  After all, it is founded on the assumption of a basic polarity in which the world is divided between God (good) and Satan (bad). 

Reading the Pope’s comments made me think of a sculpture that sits beside a recently built Catholic church not far from where I live, which is located right next to what was once the main highway between Seoul and Pyongyang, but which today is just a minor road. Running parallel to it is a wide dual carriageway that head up towards the DMZ, and, for those with permits, continues onwards to Panmunjom about two  miles away, where not so long ago President Trump met Kim Jung-un.  As you can see from the photograph above, the sculpture, which is actually a plastic cast, is very realistic.

A website called ‘Religious Decor’ says the following in answer to the question why Saint Michael statues are so popular: ‘he is the greatest enemy of Satan and the fallen legions and is specifically named in the Book of Revelation to fight against Satan, descending at the end of the world, and commanding the armies of the Lord in their final struggle.’ Now, in my opinion, a violent (and, it has to be said, homoerotic) representation of a man murdering another man does not seem a very appropriate one for a church  - or indeed any building - especially one located near the DMZ. I am deliberately bracketing out the Catholic iconography, and looking at it for what it actually depicts. 

The statue belongs to a church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima, which has a small convent attached. It is actually a kind of bunker church, as the space is located  underground. In this picture you can see the steps down to the entrance:

Entrance of Our Lady of Fatima church.

Above ground is an open area where you can do the Stations of the Cross. There are also a shrine to the first apparition, and one to Our Lady.  Here they are:

Fatima, which is in Portugal, is one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations for the faithful. The  first photograph above shows a re-staging of the ‘Angel of Peace’ appearing to  three child-shepherds in spring 1916, and again  in the summer, and a third time in the autumn. The Angel told them that heaven had “designs of mercy” and taught them to offer prayers and sacrifices. In  May 1917 things started hotting up. Our Lady herself appeared to the children, in the end a total of six times, the last in October 1917, by which time a huge crowd had gathered, and weird things were reported to have happened to the sun.  

In passing, I note the association of such apparitions of Our Lady with the rose, my special interest. Witnesses claimed to have seen a shower of rose petals during and after the apparitions.  Annually a group of Catholic faithful in the United States named ‘America Needs Fatima’ makes it a special mission to deliver masses of roses to the site. On his pilgrimage to Fatima in 2017 Pope Francis declared: “Hail Queen. Blessed Virgin of Fatima. I implore to the world the concord between all peoples. I come like prophet and messenger to wash the feet to all, around the same table that unites us. Together with my brothers, for you, I consecrate myself to God, O Virgin of the Rosary of Fatima."

Saint Francis’ word help explain why there is a church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima near the DMZ: because the “Angel of Peace’ and Our Lady asked the children to pray for peace and for humanity to do penance to help bring it about.  But ‘peace’ can have a strange way of happening. Read this, from ‘The Catholic Thing’ website, discussing the immediate aftermath of the apparitions on events in Portugal and beyond:

Historical changes began almost immediately. Physicist and theologian Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, who traveled to Portugal to undertake a thorough scientific investigation of eyewitness accounts and depositions regarding the “miracle of the sun,” observes in his book, God and the Sun at Fatima:

The day after the miracle of the sun Portugal’s history began to change in the voting booths, though at that time nobody could see the ultimate portent of this.  What, one may ask, if Portugal had fallen the prey of the plans of Lenin who described Lisbon as the most atheistic capital in the world? He would not have watched Lisbon so closely, had he no designs about it. What would have happened to Spain [during the Spanish Civil War], with Portugal already in the Communist camp? And what would have become of France, ruled by a “Popular Front,” if the entire Iberian Peninsula had turned into an outpost of Moscow?

 So, what is this person saying, exactly? That the apparitions at Fatima was God’s way of giving the green light to fascism?  

I assume that within the Little Red Riding Hood world of Catholicism Saint Michael and Fatima converge near the DMZ to signify the destruction of the atheistic  Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  For part-and-parcel of this kind of  stark dualism are polarizations like this in which opposing communism leads one to embrace fascism. But as the Pope says (but surely must find difficult to enact within the institution he leads) “the elements are very much entwined.”

It is  worth noting that the Russian Orthodox Church has sided with Putin, causing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to schism. The war, and the role of the Orthodox Church in condoning it, makes the implications of the following lines from the same website I quoted from above seem, to say the least, distressingly ambivalent:

 Signs [of Fatima’s influence on events]  in post-1989 Russia are many: Orthodox Christians number 60 million, including the president and prime minister. According a 2009 National Geographic article: ‘In 1987 there were only three monasteries in Russia; today there are 478. Then there were just two seminaries; now there are 25. Most striking is the explosion of churches, from about 2,000 in Gorbachev’s time to nearly 13,000 today.

Here, to end this post, is the uncompromising atheist Sam Harris writing  in The End of Faith (2005):

Many have observed that religion, by lending meaning to human life, permits communities (at least those united under a single faith) to cohere. Historically this is true, and on this score religion is to be credited as much for wars of conquest as for feast days and brotherly love. But in its effect upon the modern world – a world already united, at least potentially, by economic, environmental, political, and epidemiological necessity – religious ideology is dangerously retrograde.

So, back to the statue of Saint Michael slaying Satan. I think it is shockingly bad taste and should be removed. How about you?

 References:

Angela Giuffrida, ‘Pope Francis says Ukraine war was “perhaps somehow provoked”,’ The Guardian, Tuesday 14 June 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/14/pope-francis-ukraine-war-provoked-russian-troops

https://www.religiousartdecor.com/who-is-like-god-archangel-saint-michael-statues/

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2013/09/08/fatima-and-world-peace/

On the occasion of receiving the Russian translation of my book.

Last week, my UK publisher, Thames & Hudson, sent me two copies of the Russian translation of my book ‘Seven Keys to Modern Art’, which is published by Ad Marginem. In Russian, the title is:  

Семь ключей к современному искусству.

My name is:

Саймон Морли.

What a beautiful looking language! I felt proud when I looked at the book. But also very sad. Since the Ukraine-Russia war began in late February many commentators have lamented the fact that the land of Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Kandinsky and Tarkovsky is now behaving like what these same commentators call ‘barbarians.’ How did it happen?

I have asked my Korean friends and students if they think Russia is part of Europe, and most of them say it is not. It certainly doesn’t seem to belong in the “West’. As Putin himself declares, it is  the ‘West’ that is making war on Russia. By “West’ he means mostly the United States. But the animosity may go much deeper. After all, Russia has a significantly different history to western Europe because it straddles so much of the Eurasian continent. Not many people realize that Russia shares a border with North Korea! In fact, it’s thanks to Russia – or the Soviet Union, as it then was - that North Korea continued to exist, at least up to the early 1990s, at which point China stepped into the role of primary supporter of the sick and deranged child of Marxist-Leninism. But that’s another story.

In 1917, Russia chose a dramatically different kind of modernity to the rest of Europe. Marxism as a political philosophy was born in Germany and elaborated in England as a theory to explain the development of the new capitalist industrialized societies, but a predominantly agrarian nation became the first nation to call itself ‘communist.’ Strange. Very quickly the Bolsheviks adopted an authoritarian system of governance which claimed to be ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ but  obviously was not, which caused great confusion for left-leaning intellectuals and Communist Party members globally. But perhaps the actual story of what happened is now becoming more clear.

The ideology of communism was important not because of its intrinsic ‘scientific’ validity in predicting the inevitable evolution of capitalism toward the ‘classless society’, but because it served as a way of making a rapid and violent redistribution of power, glossed as a ‘revolution’, seem inevitable and benign. But actually, what happened in Russia (as later in North Korea, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, etc.) was a massively accelerated transformation that was sufficiently anarchic that power could be quickly transferred to those most ruthlessly wanting it. Marxist ideology, defined succinctly as “the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction” by the art historian Paul Wood,  served as useful window-dressing. But the reality was always the kind of redistribution of power that a democratic system cannot permit, and indeed, is explicitly designed to render as difficult as possible. The Russia of today is the result not so much of the practice of communism as of the rejection of the democracy that step by step (and very  imperfectly) the “West’ adopted over the period of two centuries. 

The ’West’ opted for the ‘open’ society rather than the ‘closed’ society.  These terms were first used by Karl Popper in his two volume ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’ (1945). Popper argued that what was so important about the democratic principle central to the modern ‘open’ society was not, as was the case in the Classical world, because it focused on the question “Who should rule?” (although this continues to be a fallacy dear to modern democracies) but rather because it confronted the problem of how a state can be “constituted so that bad rulers can be got rid of without bloodshed, without violence.”

What is so striking about much of the Russian propaganda about the war is the projection onto the Ukrainian and ‘Western’ Other of precisely the characteristics of Russia itself. After all, a good synonym for a ‘closed society’ is ‘Nazism.’ So, if you switch the pronouns from ‘they’ to “we’ you get quite an accurate accounting of Russian actions. Putin and the Russian elite’s current war is essentially a war not against ‘Nazism’ but against the principle that bad rulers can be got rid of without violence. This is what Putin hates about the Ukraine. They got rid of their bad rulers more or less without violence, and are leaning decisively toward democracy.  The idea that he and his kleptocratic system could be voted out is unthinkable because it depends on a profound transformation in society that would make his kind of rule impossible. This transformation is one in which leaders are made accountable to large numbers of people and do not simply base their rule on consolidating power and privilege and protecting themselves from potential and aggressive rivals.

Seeing my name in Russian, a script that is now more illegible to me than Korean, and thinking of the Russians who made it possible for my book to be published there, is therefore a melancholy experience. Can they continue to publish books like mine? In fact, another of my books, ‘The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art’ is due to be published by Ad Marginem. But maybe now it won’t be. How much censorship is being exerted? Is modern art sufficiently harmless these days that the Russian leadership doesn’t mind?  It seems highly unlikely there will be a compelled return to Socialist Realism (see my blog post of North Korean ‘Juche Realism’).  Then again, maybe these days there is no need. As the Russian art historian Boris Groys pointed out in ‘The Total Art of Stalinism’ (1992), Socialist Realism grew out of the same heady cultural climate as the modernist avant-garde, in that both believed art could change the world. Maybe no one believes that anymore. It’s all part of the ‘culture industry’. But insofar as that ‘industry’ is radically oriented toward the values of neoliberalism and America, it does seem feasible that there will be a clamp down in Russia. 

So I hope Russians can find my book. I hope that what I write about the artists I discuss, and the seven ways of thinking about art I offer, helps them celebrate and have confidence in the values of an open society in which bad rulers are regularly peacefully voted out of power.

Resonance in the Cave

A negative hand-stencil on the wall in Grotte Chauvet, France, made about 30,000 years ago.

In the last Post, I discussed resonance and alienation as the two poles of our relationship to the world. I drew on the fascinating theory of the contemporary German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, and used the Seoul subway as a paradigm of modernity as alienation. In this Post I want to take the long view. I want too go back to the beginning: the Upper-Paleolithic cave-painting.

The capacity for having resonant and alienating relationships to the world was born with modern humanity, or what prehistorians (who take the long view) mean when they say ‘modern’:  humans who are anatomically and cerebrally identical to us.  One could say people living today  are the descendants of the most resonance-oriented ‘modern’ humans. While Rosa stresses that modernity is characterized by a crisis of resonance, and an excessive levels of alienation, he also stresses that both resonance and alienation both have clear benefits in terms of the survival of our species. They are ways to adaptively transform the world. Both require a certain cognitive ability, one that we share with the Upper Palaeolithic cave-painters of 30,000 years ago, who like us, were humans with the capacity to feel resonantly attached to the world but also to feel alienated. For it would be naive and dangerously misleading to assume that these people - like hunter-gatherers of today - lived in a permanently resonant relationship to the world. This was and is impossible for any humans. As Rosa writes, resonance and alienation exist in dialectical relationship:

At the root of resonant experience lies the shout of the unreconciled and the pain of the alienated. At its centre is not the denial of repression of that which resists us, but the momentary, only vaguely perceptible certainty of a transcending ‘nevertheless.’ Alienation born of indifference and repulsion must first become palpable before resonant relationships to the world can be developed. Capacity for resonance and sensitivity to alienation thus mutually generate and reinforce each other, such that the depth of the indifference or repulsion one experiences seem also to define the potential depth of one’s resonant relationships. [emphasis in the orginal]

These two kinds of adaptive responses to the world could not have been made without a significant development in human evolution, an abrupt transition towards the recognizably ‘modern’ mentality, a cognitive ‘explosion’ that produced not only the cave-painters’ consciousness but also ours, and that made alienation and resonance intrinsic parts of the human story. How ‘explosive’ this transformation actually was is hotly debated, however, and new archaeological discoveries are continuously extending backwards in time the point of ‘ignition’ or attenuating it, so it looks less and less like an ‘explosion’ and more like an extended ‘blooming.’ For example, it was announced in early 2021 that the world’s currently oldest known painting - of a life-size wild pig - had been discovered in Indonesia and dated to 45,500 BP. This find is significant not only because it pushes the ‘beginning’ back yet again, but also because it is in Indonesia not Europe, suggesting also a far greater geographical distribution of early ‘modern’ humans with the inclination, for whatever reason, to paint caves. But the important point is that there was a major transformation in the human mind for some still, as yet, unknown reason – perhaps climatic, demographic, or, if we are to believe the more ‘far out’ theories, an alien visitation.

This amazing transformation in the structure of the human mind was vital for the emergence of the capacity for adaptive relationships to the world. In The Pre-History of the Mind (1996) the ancient historian Stephen Mithen argues that in the earlier stages of the evolution of the mind, which he dubs Phase 1, the mind was dominated by ‘general intelligence’, that is, by “a suite of general-purpose learning and decision-making rules.” In this primordial state we can hypothesize that neither hope nor despair troubled the human mind. In the next stage, Phase 2, the mind evolved so that general intelligence was supplemented by multiple specialized intelligences each devoted to a specific domain of behaviour, such as linguistic intelligence, social intelligence, technical intelligence, and natural history intelligence (knowing about the environment on which life depended), but they worked in isolation from each other.  In Phase 2 hope and despair would also not have existed, at least not in any recognizable sense. Finally in Phase 3, the ‘modern’ mind evolves. Now, minds have multiple specialized intelligences that work together, and there is a flow of knowledge and ideas between various behavioural domains.  This phase archaeologists date to the Aurignacian period (45-30,00 BP), the earliest phase of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, when the first figurative art appeared, including the first of the paintings in Chauvet Cave. 

In Phase 3 the capacity of our ancestors to adaptively respond to the world, was greatly enhanced, because the mind was now characterized by ‘cognitive fluidity’. As Mithen writes, this meant that “[e]xperience gained in one behavioural domain can now influence that in another. Indeed, distinct behavioural domains no longer exist. And brand-new ways of thinking, subjects to think about and ways to behave arise. The mind acquires not only the ability but a positive passion for metaphor and analogy.”  Humans acquired the capacity for complex social performance and ritual, for vicarious and imaginal experiences, for verbal, visual, and gestural persuasion, and distinct physiological and emotional states. It is Phase 3 that provided humans with the resources for resonance, but also, of course, for alienation.  We became truly human once we could reflect on our earthly existence and see the pervasiveness of suffering and hardship, the sheer capriciousness of fate. As soon as we were able to remember good and bad experiences, and to imagine them happening again, we were made aware of uncertainty, and it is in this sense that resonance and alienation and not polarities, but rather interdependent parts of the complex whole of human consciousness.

People of the present share with their cave-painting ancestors of 30,000 years ago the same core emotions of desire, fear, happiness, and sadness. We still live our lives very like them, by shunting erratically between positive and negative states of mind. Psychologists have pinpoint five bundles of personality traits which all humans universally possess in differing degrees, and despite the obvious differences between the lives of Upper Palaeolithic cave-painters and us, we nevertheless share these same basic traits, which predispose us to approach the world in recognizably similar but also the inevitably divergent ways determined by culture.

First, there is our  degree of extroversion. This refers to how stimulating or straining we find interactions, and so will have a fundamental influence on how we relate to both the human and non-human world. Second is neuroticism, or the tendency to get nervous, anxious, worried, and unstable in relation to the world. This trait influences how rational choices are made, and inclines us towards excessively idealized or irrational thoughts and actions, which we erroneously believe can reduce feelings of insecurity. Neuroticism is a key driver of alienation. Third is agreeableness, or how helpful, optimistic, kind, and empathetic we are. Agreeableness greatly affects what and how we engage with the world in both positive and negative ways - positively, by making us incline to align personal interests with those of others, and negatively, by making us conformist and too eager to align our own beliefs and goals with those of a peer group or leader.. The agreeableness trait can lead us in both directions - to more resonance and more alienation. Fourth, is conscientiousness. This refers to how self-disciplined and prepared we are, and will determine how resolute we are in pursuing goals in spite  of perceived obstacles. Because of this, conscientiousness is a vital prerequisite for experiencing resonance, as it is inevitably experienced within uncontrollable and often difficult and threatening circumstances. Then again, too much conscientiousness can shut down resonant relations through enforcing too much control. Finally, there is openness, or the extent to which we are curious, inquisitive, take risks, and are creative. Where the capacity for resonance is concerned, this psychological trait is probably the most important of all, because it has a major impact on how controlling or uncontrolling we are in relation to experience, making us more or less inclined to conform and willing to accept novelty and uncertainty.

All these aspects of the spectrum of human personality would have impacted on Upper Paleolithic humans’ capacity to experience resonance and alientation, determining what kind of goals they set themselves, and how successful they were at achieving them. But just like for us, conscientiousness and openness would have been the most salient.  Which means we are the descendants of the more conscientious and open human beings.

But psychologists have also shown that we are hardwired with a ‘negativity bias’. Instinctively, we are more pessimistic than optimistic, and  pay much more attention to prophets of doom and gloom than prophets of liberation and light - as world religions and modern news coverage demonstrate. However, this makes very good sense in terms of optimizing chances of survival. One can say we are also the ancestors of those humans who thought a cave up ahead concealed a dangerous predator, not of those who assumed it was a safe and comfortable place to spend the night.  For our ‘negativity bias’ has been honed over tens of thousands of years to make us better at confronting the volatility, capriciousness, and inconstancy of situations. A feedback loop makes this tendency a self-fulfilling prophecy: because most of our attention is directed at information that brings confirmation of our prior predisposition to be pessimistic, so we assume we have a reasonable attitude.  That we prefer our current affairs media to traffic in overwhelmingly bad news, which we also believe is the actual and important news, is symptomatic of this  bias running rampant in modern times. Inevitably, this ‘negativity bias’ inclines us toward an alienating relationship to the world. But we obviously also share with the cave-painters the capacity to override our ‘negative bias’ - otherwise resonance would be impossible. Psychologists call this mental trick the ‘Pollyanna Principle’ (named after the cheerful and optimistic girl of the children’s book). In some circumstances humans have an in-built tendency to selectively favour the positive, to look on the bright side, to recall more positive memories than negative ones. People who supplement their ‘negativity bias’ in this way tend to experience more vivid and positive future-oriented thoughts. Those who don’t, can become depressed or suffer from chronic low moods.  This ability to imagine positive mental imagery in relation to future events or situations also serves an important evolutionary function: it allowed humans to plan and make decisions that are more goal-directed, and thereby to overcome obstacles that may otherwise have led to crippling doubt and alienation, leading to endless delays in decision making or outright retreat. 

Recent research also shows that in the genetic lottery some humans are born with a natural predisposition to see the ‘cup’ as always half full, while the less fortunate tend to see it as habitually half empty. Life experiences, within normal limits, will do little to change this inherent proclivity. People also tend to look for confirmation of their innate predisposition by embracing ideas or intellectual tendencies that mirror them. But evidence of genetic predisposition also means we should acknowledge that the ‘losers’ in the gene lottery will inevitably also be biased, and may fail to make a fully reasoned assessment of a present situation and the outlook for the future. Consequently, they will be unable to be open to the possibility of resonance when it is feasible to be so. But does that mean those who win in the gene lottery and are inherently Pollyanna-optimists will also be more truly resonance experiencing? Hardly.  Optimism is a strategy for protecting ourselves from the reality of negative outcome, not coming to terms with the uncertainties of life - its inevitable obstacles and failures. To experience resonance we must be able to trust that nature is somehow on our side, despite all the evidence to the contrary. If our goals are chosen intelligently, and the interest of the community and nature are borne in mind, hopefulness will allow us to find meaning individually and collectively in the present moment, no matter how troubled that moment may be. The cave-painters would also have been hapless victims of the gene lottery. Perhaps the person who made the hand-stencil in Grotte Chauvet thought their metaphorical cup was always half empty, and he or she painted it to cheer themselves up.

Because they were human, Upper-Paleolithic humans also thought in terms of pathways. Even new-born humans are pathway-thinkers immediately after birth, and during childhood early lessons are refined. At approximately 1 year old a baby already realizes it is separate from other entities and can cause chains of events to happen. Children quickly understand the process of causation, that events are not unrelated in time and that one event elicits another event through cause and effect.  So, by this early stage all healthy humans have a sense of personal agency.   With awareness of causation and agency come awareness of pathways and goals, and the acquisition of goal-directed hopeful thoughts. These are crucial for a child’s survival and thriving, which are greatly improved by the routine anticipation of future well-being. It is obvious why positive expectations - pathways and goals – would have benefited the survival of the cave-painters: people with higher levels of resonance have higher levels of psychological health than those who experience greater levels fo alienation. Being resonant would have yielded higher confidence and protected them against future sources of fear and anxiety, and obstacles to personal and group flourishing. A resonance experiencing cave-painter would therefore be better at adapting to the unforeseen and coping with it than an alientated one.  Those ancestors with high levels of collective confidence in the possibility of resonance would have been able to think more effectively about the future, while those with lower levels would have catastrophized about the future. Upper-Paleolithic humans with faith in and experience of resonance would also have been more likely to actively engage the others in their group, when compared to  those shadowed by alienation. They would have more consistently felt a strong sense of mutuality with others in their group, on whom they knew they could call for support.  For we humans are ‘ultrasocial’, that is, have adapted to be superbly cooperative. The cave-painters would have known how to profit from kin altruism, a deep social bond based on close familial connections. But this bond would also have extended to wider forms of altruism that involved non-kin reciprocity, for example, during seasonal hunts, and, probably, while painting caves. The capacity for positive, hopeful, motivational - resonant - states functioned as a highly efficient method of muffling or cloaking volatility and uncertainty under the safe canopy of a higher, positive, purpose. Resonance-filled conviction established the grounds upon which sacrifice and suffering in the present were recognized as necessary preliminary stages on the way towards beneficial, pleasurable, or happy results in the future.  Being resonant therefore has its roots in an age-old survival strategy honed by humanity over millennia, one with which the cave-painters were already intimately familiar.

Image source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Detail-du-panneau-des-Mains-negatives-salle-des-Panneaux-rouges-de-la-grotte_fig3_285598204

Alienation and Resonance on the Seoul Subway

The Seoul subway. Paradigm of alienation?

When I look at my fellow Seoul subway passengers, the word that comes to mind is ‘alienation.’ In the photo above everyone’s eyes are downcast to their smartphones, and their mouths are masked.  Isn’t this almost a caricature  of what being alienated is like?

But its not quite so simple. These people may be alienated from their immediate physical environment, but they are massively compensating for this sad situation by transferring their attention to the world within their smartphones where they can get some kind of resonance – the antidote to alienation.  When I surreptitiously glance at what they’re looking at, it seems to be mostly social media feeds, shopping feeds, on-line games,  webtoons   - online comic strips, YouTube pop videos (mostly K-Pop), and  tv shows.  These days, there are many places for your mind to be rather than on a horrible subway train deep underground in the company of total strangers.

The lure of the smartphone is obviously in part compensatory, and it works, insofar as people obviously find a modicum of sustenance from whatever it is they are attending to. But there’s a vicious cycle at work, because the more alienating the immediate environment, the more people  need  to, and can, escape to a digital one. Since facemasks became mandatory in public spaces, the conditions for generating social contexts of acute alienation have skyrocketed. As many sociologists and psychologists have pointed out, it is via the expressions conveyed by the mouth - especially the smile - that many resonant social cues are communicated. Hide the mouth, and you hide a vital source of empathetic communication. The other locus of empathy is the eyes, and as these are now downcast, the alienating effect is much exacerbated.. But into this affective desert of the three-dmeinsional world in which are bodies are located flows the sustaining river of the internet.

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but its hard not to think that the ‘rulers’ of the internet have a vested interest in maintaining and even enhancing alienation in the real world so that we will seek out some kind of resonance in a virtual one.

These terms, ‘alienation’ and ‘resonance’ derive from  the writings of the contemporary German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, and what he says helps us understand the dynamics of an especially alienating environment like the subway, but also much more generally, the alienating dynamics of modernity as a whole. Rosa’s thesis is presented in depth in Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Polity, 2019), where he employs the physio-musical metaphor of ‘resonance’ to describe the most cherished relationship desired by humans across time and space, which, he says,  is to feel that the world is somehow benignly responsive.  We all want to live in an oasis, but we fear that the world is a desert – mute, arid……alienating.  Rosa emphasises that these two poles of our relationship to the world are enacted through socially learned systems of belief and rituals that serve to define our basic hopes and fears in specific ways. Thus, he emphasizes, a “key question is then in what contexts, under what conditions, and through what praxes a subject has experienced being borne up in life, where they search for oases – and in what other contexts they have experienced the desert.”  In this sense: “Resonance can be understood as both descriptive and a normative concept, one that helps us to understand social reality on two levels at once. First, the human subject and human consciousness necessarily evolve in and from resonant relationships between and experiencing centre and something that it encounters…..Second, because this is the case, human activity can also be understood as being motivated, in its deep structure, by the longing and quest for resonance as well as the fear of being exposed to a cold, hostile world.”

Crucial to Rosa’s argument is the fact that in order for resonance to occur it is necessary to be in a state of consciousness that combines control and lack of control, a fluid sense of both separation from and fusion with the world. Resonance is only possible when there is “a relation between two bodies that are at once open enough for a relationship while at the same time remaining sufficiently stable and closed so as to ‘sound’ at their own frequency or ‘speak with their own voice’.” This means “resonance is possible only by accepting, or rather affirming, an inaccessible, irreducible Other that can never be completely adaptively transformed and always contains within itself the possibility of contradiction.”

Following earlier theorists of modernity, Rosa argues that modernity in toto – but especially late modernity -  is culturally oriented toward alienation because it is structurally driven toward controlling the world through appropriation and domination, making existence seem manageable, calculable, and predictable.  In The Uncontrollability of the World (Polity, 2020), Rosa writes: “We are structurally compelled (from without) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things – segments of world – within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliably controlled.”  But resonance “ultimately cannot be reconciled with the idea of intellectual, technological, moral, and economic mastery of the world.”  As a result, we exist in a condition of profound alienation, inwardly disconnected from each other and the world” “Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself.”

In the pessimistic prognoses of the Left, Rosa notes, “The catastrophe of resonance in the sense of the world falling permanently mute……appears to be not an unfortunate accident, but the very telos of the process of modernization”, and while Rosa concurs with this recognition of the systemically rooted tendency of modernity to drive people toward greater alienation, he also distances himself from earlier theories by incorporating the lessons of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology.Specifically, he draws on the idea central to phenomenology that human relationships with the world involve responsive relationship on both sides, and Rosa’s theory is ultimately founded on the conviction that there is “a fundamental relatedness that precedes the division of subject and object and serves as the very basis both of the presence of the world and of subjective experience.” This means that human relationship to the world “are first established existentially and corporeally, and that the world, as the always already present other side of said relationship, necessarily concerns us in some way  as subjects, that it has significance for us and that we find ourselves intentionally oriented toward it.” As a result, “resonance appears not as something that first develops between a self-conscious subject and a ‘premade’ world, but as the event through which both commence’. It is therefore in relation to a world not of inert things but of ‘affordances’  that the subject negotiates the world. Here, it is recognized that our relations to the world are generated outside the representational regime of any given culture, and emerge very directly from the body

Rosa’s deepening of the basis for social analysis and critique leads him to conclude that “a history of modernity as that of a catastrophe of resonance is one-sided and overly simplistic.”  A situation of total socio-cultural alienation or total control is impossible. Thus, he casts his theory as part of a counter-history “which makes it clear that modernity is both at once: tremendous sensitivity to resonance and catastrophe of resonance simultaneously.” The diagnosis of modernity as only mute and cold fails to adequately gasp the essential paradox that modernity both starves people of resonance while at the same time nurturing the great desire for such resonance, and that it organizes social structures within which genuine forms of resonant relationship to the world can be explored.

In sum, Rosa argues that meaningful human existence requires responsive openness to being affected by the world – being touched, moved, or ‘called’ –  and this in its turn, depends on a culture in which  the world is in some sense capable of  ‘responding’ to our desirous approach.  But while resonant relationships are severely constrained within modernity, this same modernity also contains the outlines of visions of better, more resonant, worlds. For the escalation of the appropriation of the world during the modern period has also produced an escalation of longing for resonance. Modern culture is therefore characterized by the presence of social spaces dedicated to creating the conditions that allow people to temporarily experience visions of better worlds - of oases - and to preserving memories of them.

In this ultimately hopeful prognosis of the fate of modern existence, society is understood to contain social structures aimed at facilitating the goal of recalling, creating, and preserving resonant relationships to the world. We are reminded that a better world is  possible, w a world where  relationships to the world are truly resonant. In turning to the social structures designed to facilitate such relations, Rosa writes: “What drives modern subjects to visit museums and movie theaters, concert halls and opera houses, and to read novels, poems, and plays as if their lives depended on it is the fact that these activities allow them, at last at a pathic level, to test out and rehearse in a playful, exploratory way widely different modes of relating to the world – solitude  and abandonment, melancholy, attachment, exuberance, anger and rage, hate and love – and thereby moderate and modify their own relationships to the world.”

The problem, as Rosa acknowledges, is that the deep craving for resonance has become increasingly commercialized. This is obvious in relation to much popular culture, and the potential for monetizing resonance has been greatly expanded by the internet. Isn’t it in the interests of those in control of social media, for example, to maintain feelings of alienation in the real world so as to maximize the need for resonance in the commercialized digital one?

Which leads me back to the  Seoul subway.  I wouldn’t say the ‘alieneation-effect’ has been masterminded my some malign cabal, but it does seem as though the society in which we are living is becoming more an more alienated ‘off-line’, and as a result, the ‘on-line’ world is gaining ever increasing shares of our deep craving for the resonant oasis through offering us compensatory, but ultimately, all to often trivial, commercialized, exploitative, and fake forms of resonances. But, as Rosa emphasizes, alongside all these manufactured and commercialized forms of ‘resonance at a price’ or ‘resonance-light’  there also exist genuine possibilities of resonance within modernity. But maybe not on the Seoul subway system. And maybe not through your smartphone. After all, one of the main obstacles to having real resonance via the digital is that it leaves your body out, leaves it frozen in real space while you mind roams far away. Another, is that a compelling attraction of the smartphone is the degree of control it confers on the user, and as Rosa emphasizes, seeking and exerting control makes resonance very difficult to experience.

Image sources:

Photo of Seoul subway: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/world/asia/south-korea-coronavirus-shincheonji.html

Hartmut’s Rosa’s Books are available at:

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Resonance%3A+A+Sociology+of+Our+Relationship+to+the+World-p-9781509519927

https://www.wiley.com/en-kr/The+Uncontrollability+of+the+World-p-9781509543175

Juche Realism and False Optimism

My interest the art of North Korea derives in part from a broader fascination in how the mass media create reality-proof delusions. This is especially interesting right now in relation to the Ukraine-Russia conflict and how the Russian state has sought (quite successfully, so it seems) to control the Russian people’s perceptions of the war. To those outside the deception, it seems hard to believe that people can be so gullible. But as several commentators have pointed out, the alternative to existing within the reality manufactured by the state is too dangerous and harrowing, too radically at odds with the kind of reality in which people can bear to live. People prefer the delusion, which at least offers consolation and security, and allows them to continue to have a sense of self-efficacy and confidence.

The close links between Russia and North Korea in terms of shared ideology have been underlined by Kim Jong-un’s recent congratulatory message on Russia’s Victory Day. But in the case of North Korea, the disconnect between the reality as we on the outside see it and the one ordinary North Koreans perceive through being fed on a mono-diet of ‘Juche’  and racist propaganda is even more extreme. Nevertheless, the same basic psychological mechanisms are surely at work in the North Korean people as innate only other authoritarian regimes, but in democratic societies like the United States, where conspiracy theories are rife..

In this second post on North Korean Juche Realism, I consider just what thoughts and emotions the North Korean people  are buying into, and why.

A young Kim Il-sung contemplates the future. An example of Juche Realist painting.

Another Juche Realist masterpiece.

Juche Realism shares an important social function with religious art. It ensures social cohesion through images that rise above time and chance. It binds together through transforming the unspecifiable, pervasive, and uncontrollable state of existence into a specifiable, identifiable, and controllable state of named fears and offers the promise of protection.

Juche Realism is aesthetic experience manipulated to create a permanent condition of collective dispositional optimism. This is achieved through ritualistically ‘aestheticizing’ life, in the sense of keeping life’s inherent uncertain and fearful dimensions at bay through turning life into something idealized that can be safely viewed from a distance.  Optimism is channeled along four avenues indicated by psychologists. It aestheticizes the optimism that comes with feelings of social coherence by depicting the world as comprehensible. As a result, the North Korean people feel strengthened by being able to make total sense of, manage, understand, and feel masters of adversity. It aestheticizes the optimism of social hardiness by depicting stressful circumstances and re-casting them only as opportunities for certain growth and strengthening. It aestheticizes social preparedness by focusing only on readiness to confront setbacks and successfully take advantage of opportunities. Finally, it aestheticizes the optimism of self-affirmation. For example, many paintings depict the North Korean people as inherently superior, casting historical achievements of the pre-modernized Korean people and of the DPRK and its leaders in a manner that has not historical veracity but fosters a sense of confidence and pride in the present, thereby making decision-making more efficient and collectively directed.

Juche Realism is a ritualized fantasy space in which the three core positive life-goals are satisfied in the present: the desire for survival, the desire for attachment, and the desire for mastery. By depicting imagery of encounters with and management and self-regulation of fearful and potential despair-inducing situations, Juche Realism encodes collective feelings of trust, calm, safety, protection, and successful survival.

Through images of trust and openness, and total love of the leader, it encodes the confirmation of ‘sociopolitical’ bonds and attachments. Through signs of absolute efficacy, power, and control, it encodes ‘sociopolitical’ security and mastery, and implicit within this is the wish-fulfilling certainty of the DPRK’s triumph over time. Especially through faith in the skill, wisdom, and power of the leader, the North Korean people can adapt to circumstances in the present and to display a remarkable degree of social cohesion.  The regime uses three basic defences against the encroachments of a reality that would inevitably presents challenges to this positive illusion. It uses externalizing explanations by placing the blame for bad or failed outcomes on factors outside the DPRK, such as the United States, The Republic of Korea, or Japan. It uses variable explanations by casting setbacks or problems as temporary rather than endemic and likely to continue in the future. Thirdly, it uses specific explanations, in that it describes failure as occurring in only one context rather than as systemic.

***

The brutality of the Japanese colonial era and the horrors of the Korean War set the stage in the DPRK for the emergence of a nation obsessed with national myths of persecution, suffering, and endurance. The state’s dogmatic intransigence demanded in the cultural sphere the rote reiteration of fantastical narratives. Juche Realism is a form of ideologically tailored visual illusion that breeds dependency and instils over-confidence in the level of control the Kim regime has over the past, present, and, above all, the future. It creates a ritualized virtual reality in which the world appears better than it is. In this sense, Juche Realism serves to artificially bolster self-esteem in a situation in which the people have actually lost all individual agency, all genuine social value. In the dystopic reality of the DPRK the ‘sociopolitical’ self is the happy hostage of the state’s absolute power.  All action is determined by externalized forms of interaction coordinated by the state. Juche Realism forces the North Korean people into supine and dependent roles which to those beyond its zone of hegemonic influence are reminiscent of the submissiveness of a child to a parent.  The Kim leadership is cast as all-powerful parent, capable of granting the wishes of the children who please them. But behind the façade of optimism constructed by Juche Realism lies the reality of a brutal totalitarian regime, and the North Korean people also know that any deviation from the allotted ‘sociopolitical’ role within the state ideology of delusional optimism will be ruthlessly punished by the all-powerful father. The marriage of art and power which obliges North Korean artists to work within the absurd and demeaning constraints of Juche Realism’s simplistic messages of optimistic edification places what is produced, however technically accomplished and expressive, at the antipodes of genuinely ‘real’ or ‘truthful’ art. Its ‘realism’ cannot be discovered beyond the works themselves. It cannot be described in terms that are not blatantly at odds with what anyone outside the DPRK knows about the world. Because the ‘truths’ of Juche Realism are not susceptible to present inquiry, any desire to have genuine knowledge about the outside world must be crushed. There can be no progress, because the regime would be incapable of surviving any change that progress brought. But, when a gust of contradictory reality somehow does finally find its way past the facade, and it becomes clear how greatly the leadership has failed to match its grandiose claims, the disappointment and disillusionment of the North Korean people will be rapid and devastating.

Kim, Father and son, do a bit of sailing.

NOTE: The images in today’s post are reproduced from (top to bottom) 1. Min-Kyung Yoon, ‘North Korean Art Works’, Korean Histories, 3.1, 2012; 2. and 3. Min-Kyung Yoon, “Reading North Korea through Art’, Border Crossings. North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection, ex. cat., Hatje Kantz/Kunstmuseum Bern, 2021, 72 – 95.

Juche Realism: North Korean Art.

In today’s post, which is Part 1 of two posts, I’m going to discuss the kind of art that is mandatory in the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea.

It’s called Juche Realism. Here are some examples:

Jo Jong-Man, ’After Securing Arms’, watercolor on paper, 1970s. Depicting a heroic episode from the Korean War. (Image via cctv-america.com)

Park Ryong Sam, ‘Farewell’, 1977. watercolour on paper. Another Korean War narrative. (Image via https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/north-korean-art)

Unknown ‘The Year of Shedding Bitter Tears’, Fragment 2, c.1994, watercolor on paper. This collectively painted work was made to commemorate the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994. (Image-grab from Yoon, Min-Kyung, “Reading North Korea through Art’, Border Crossings. North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection, ex. cat., Hatje Kantz/Kunstmuseum Bern, 2021)

A totalitarian ideology, Hannah Arendt wrote, “differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man."  In the DPRK, the inevitable non-realisation of the prophecy meant that as in the Soviet Union, which installed Kim Il-sung in power, Kim was soon obliged to devise strategies for cushioning the masses from the realities of failure and the oppression of authoritarian rule. But as was the case in Stalinist Russia, Kim realized that it wasn’t necessary to strive to make real external conditions match ideological goals; it was only necessary to change how the masses experienced external conditions by censoring all dissenting views and veiling day-to-day reality by a fantasy world created by artistic means, a fantasy world whose content derived wholly from the state-generated mythology.  

As I discussed in a previous post (June 21st, 2020, ‘North Korea: ‘Theater State’), the DPRK has developed a complex system of rituals in which the public space becomes a theatre in which allotted roles are played by all North Koreans. The entire population is regularly called upon to perform in the fantasy ‘total work of art’, in which actions are determined by externalized modes of interaction. Life is thereby ‘aestheticized’ by turning it into something to be enacted rather than acted upon, and the real locus of social life is the public not the private space. The North Korean people become submissive performers of a fabricated life, rather than free and self-determining agents in a real one. This is perhaps most explicitly demonstrated in the annual Arirang Games, which involve elaborate displays of huge numbers of people working in precise unison in synchronized movements. It is also evident in the extraordinary spectacles of collective mourning that followed the deaths of Kim Il-sung in 1994 and his son Kim Jong-Il in 2011.   Such ritualized mourning was emotional expression on the collective level and unrelated to individual psychology.  

Vasily Sergeyevich Orlov, ‘Native Land’, 1930s, oil on canvas. An example of Soviet socialist Realism, the model for North Korean Juche Realism. (Image: https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/socialist-realism-art)

Art plays an important role in organizing and directing the state ‘performance.’ Like Soviet Socialist Realism upon which Juche Realism is based, such as the example shown above, painting in the DPRK is characterized by narrative allegories in the style of illustrational figuration - ‘illustrational’ in the sense that a clear message is unambiguously communicated. It is, in effect, a perverted form of nineteenth century History Painting, involving the staging of significant narratives for dramatic effect. But while North Korea’s artistic culture was initially merely imitative of Soviet Socialist Realism, it soon displayed significant signs of deviation to bring it into line with the more general deviation from Marxism-Leninism in state ideology. This was defined as ‘Kimilsungism’, and later, as ‘Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism’, after his son, Kim Jong Il became leader. 

Kimilsungism was formulated for the Korean people uniquely, and involves a transferral of political focus from the international to the national level, and a rhetorical shift from expressions of class unity and struggle to the unity of the North Korean people. Central to the new doctrine is the uniquely North Korean concept of juche, which derives etymologically from ju, meaning ‘the main principle’, and che, ‘body’ or ‘self’. The compound word is therefore usually interpreted as referring to ‘sovereign autonomy,’ ‘self-determination,’ or, most commonly, ‘self-reliance.’ As a political philosophy, ‘Juche thought’ was largely designed for foreign consumption, and intended to bring the regime an aura of political legitimacy and profundity. But the principals of ‘juche’ nevertheless informed the visual aesthetics of North Korean art, contributing to its salient characteristics, and determining how it differed in terms of technical media, themes, and mood from the Soviet model. 

In 1966 Kim Il-sung delivered a speech entitled ‘Let Us Develop Revolutionary Fine Arts’ in which he sought to distinguish Korean-style Socialist Realism and introduced the concept of 'Juche Realism'. His son and heir Kim Jong Il subsequently codified the principles in a book entitled On Fine Art (1991). While the outlook of Soviet Socialist Realism was intentionally international, Juche Realism was fundamentally nationalistic, forging an inseparable link between individual North Koreans, the people as a unified community, and the state based on the ideal of national autonomy. At first, in emulation of the Soviet Union, the western materials of oil on canvas were dominant media, and while they continued to remain important North Korean artists from the late 1950s were trained onward in a style dubbed Joseonhwa (or Chosonhwa) - Joseon-painting or DPRK painting (‘Joseon’ is how North Korea refers to itself). What makes Joseonhwa distinctive is not so much a deviation in figurative style from the basic conventions of Socialist Realism, however, but a change in the media employed: ink or colored water-based paints on paper. These are the traditional painting media of East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea), and the decision to adopt and adapt them was as a practical display of ‘Juche’ enacted on the level of technique, of relying on indigenous resources and conventions rather than foreign ones. But this decision also aimed to be a critique of the local tradition. For, in contrast to the literati or scholar-nobility conventions of pre-modern Korea, which derived from China and favoured monochromatic works in ink on paper or silk, Joseonhwa paintings are made in bright colours. 

Three main narrative themes in Juche Realism can be identified, which to some extent parallel those of Soviet Socialist Realism:  the triumph of heroism over adversity; love of the leader and the nation; and abundance in food production. As such, prominent subjects in Juche Realism are scenes of individual and group acts of heroism and courage, particularly related to the life of Kim Il-sung as a guerrilla fighter in the insurgency against the Japanese in China during the 1930s and 1940s, and during the Korean War (which according to the DPRK narrative, had been started by the ROK and ended in DPRK victory). These scenes also feature ordinary male and female soldiers and depict the overcoming of great obstacles through heroic and superhuman effort. The second typical theme concerns the expression of the tender, paternal, love of the Kim leadership for the North Korean people, and the reciprocal affection of the people for their leader. Third, there is the theme of abundance in food production, exemplified, for example, by paintings of Kim Il-sung visiting collective farms. In this case, the goal is to demonstrate that under benign leadership the DPRK possesses a perfectly efficient infrastructure that binds all sectors, providing not just communal sustenance by abundant flourishing.  

At the heart of Juche Realism lies a kind of “revolutionary romanticism”,  which especially emphasises pathos. The aim is to instruct the North Korean people in how to see, feel, and internalize the historical truth as presented by the DPRK’s ideology, thereby gaining mass compliance through emotionally moving the people via the representation of inspiring, comforting, and confidence-boosting tableaux with which they can readily empathize and use as models of correct behaviour to emulate and mimic. Images express affirmative feelings which demonstrate that the leader has the capacity to overcome all adversity and to continuously give birth to the new society. Juche Realism creates an imaginary “alternative reality”, one whose goal, as the art historian Min-Kyung Yoon puts it, is the “visualization of an emotional truth that conveys values rather than factual accuracy.” These emotional truths become the basis for historical truth.  Thus, the idea of ‘truth’ is epistemologically flattened and conflated with the official narrative controlled and disseminated by the regime, which admits no heterodoxy or challenges by parties outside the regime. 

So, the world Juche Realism evokes is an illusion beyond realization in the material world, and while it employs the conventions of mimetic realism, it is not involved in recording reality but in producing it.  In this sense, Juche Realism is performative rather than descriptive. Paintings are visual texts made up of signs whose power to influence occurs primarily on the level of affect, feeling, and emotion rather than discursively as conscious and rational reflection. Because of the monopoly over representation possessed by Juche Realism it functions as a powerful source of mimetic social behaviour. Indeed, no other sources of mimetic behaviour are available. The North Korean people thus are compelled to uniquely imitate the idealized conduct, actions, and practices that are depicted, and in a feedback loop this behaviour is consolidated and duplicated in everyday life.  It is this mimetic circle that creates the bridge between the fictive world of representation and the actual world of social interaction. Furthermore, the idealized nature of the behaviour guarantees that mimetic behaviour takes place despite actual, real-world, evidence that contradicts the idealization. The result is that a situation is produced in which elevated emotional such as self-esteem, reduced anxiety and depression, and a general sense of well-being are encouraged and channelled toward the maintenance of the status quo. 

Juche Realism functions as a pedagogy of submission. It helps construct  a social myth that shields the North Korean people from uncertainty, expressing the guarantee that under the Kim leadership they are safe from all danger. Through their status as performers within the state ritual, they receive a positive sense of collective power, efficacy, and confidence. In existential terms, Juche Realism facilitates the goal of the DPRK’s authoritarianism, which is to engineer the mass relocation of agency from the individual to the collective, and thereby to the state. Juche Realism aids and abets the process wherein the individual is radically deconstructed to become an integral part of a collective and eternal socio-political ‘organism’. 

Juche Realism should therefore be distinguished from propaganda, if by this term one only refers to the purveyance of biased or misleading information.  For in Juche Realism the ancient wish-fulfilling power of the image, which binds art to sacred ritual and supernatural belief, has been carried over into a secular system. Juche Realism is a form of transformational imagery which is part of the wider ritual process that channels the supernormal or extramundane powers purportedly embodied in the reigning ideology. Juche Realism is therefore fundamentally different from secular western humanistic art whose conventions of figuration it appropriates, linking it to a pre-modern worldview in which the image is a powerful talismanic presence to be utilized within communal rituals of piety and devotion. The cultic dimension of Juche Realism is most obvious in the reverence shown toward the portraits of the Kim leadership, which are treated like sacred icons - especially portraits of Kim Il-sung, who is worshipped as provider, healer, and saviour. 

In my next post, Part 2, I will think about Juche Realism’s success in creating a consoling aura of delusional optimism that serves to pacify the North Korean people..

Dream Journey to the Peach-Blossom Land

Spring arrived suddenly,, here in Korea. It was below freezing, and now is in the low 20s.

The first sign of spring are always the flowers of a delicate purple shrub called Jindelae, which grows in the shade of the tree covered hillsides.  Here’s some I picked and relocated to my studio.

Next, there arrive the fruit-tree blossoms. There a small orchard close to my house that always reminds me of the peach orchard in Ahn  (or An) Gyeon’s painting ‘Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land’ (1447).   Here’s the orchard nearby:

And here’s a detail of the painting. The original is a handscroll in ink and light colour on silk, and is very long, measuring 438 cm x 106 cm.  So, it’s impossible to see very clearly in reproduction in its entirety. The orchard is at the top right of the handscroll.

One of the painting’s 23 colophons was composed and penned by Prince Anpyeong, who commissioned the work. In it he describes how he had a vivid dream in which he became the fisherman described in a famous poem by the Chinese poet Tao Quian (365-427CE) called A Peach Blossom Spring. Prince Anpyeong writes that soon after having his dream he asked Ahn Gyeon to paint the handscroll. He also describes what he saw in his dream: ”The paradise is a land of mountains, range upon range formed by deep gorges, and the rocky peaks are lofty and remote…….Mountains on four sides stood like walls in thick clouds and mists. Peach trees in the near and far distance were reflected through hazy, rosy clouds.” It is this peach grove, which we see in the right-hand section of the painting,  that announces the location of the secret Utopian community. 

Tao Quian’s poem was written during a time of great political turmoil for China, and the origins of the symbolism of the sacred peach lie in Taoism. The immortals were said to live in a paradise of eternal youth and eternal life. Xi Wangmu, the Queen of the West, was believed to live on Mount Kunlun, and it was said that eating a peach from Xi Wangmu’s grove, which grow only once in every 3000 years, granted a person eternal youth and eternal life. The paradise of the Taoist immortals was a place free from troubles, so people often sought to embody this perfect world in their daily lives by adding a grove of peach trees to their garden or building a sanctuary for themselves. Tao Quians’  poem begins with a fisherman following a stream, and losing track of the distance he traveled. He encounters a peach blossom grove, and after enjoying the fragrant air filled with blossoms, looks for the end of the grove and finds a tight crevasse in a hillside. He squeezes through, emerging on the other side to see a village surrounded by lush fields, ponds, mulberry and willow trees, and towering bamboo. The villagers accept the fisherman into their homes, and he speaks to them of the dynastic changes and continual warfare experienced by the people of China since the villagers became separated from the rest of China.  After a stay of several days the fisherman departs with well wishes, and a request from the villagers that he keep their paradise a secret.  But  on his return journey the fisherman leaves markers along the way, and he is soon leading an expedition to find the place again. However, all his efforts -  like those of the many others who would follow him – ended in failure. Since that time no one has ever re-entered the ‘Peach Blossom Land.’

Ahn’s masterpiece is therefore a painting of a dream of a poem.. 

 Handscroll painting is an intimate form of visual art that can be viewed by only a few people at a time. In contrast to a hanging scroll, the handscroll usually tells a story that extends across time. Unrolled from right to left, so that about 50 cm is revealed at a time, the section to be viewed is then re-rolled before another section is unrolled. The same character or characters may appear at multiple points over the extent of a painting, something like a cartoon strip or animated film. But Ahn’s painting is unusual insofar as it unrolls from left to right, and there are no human characters at all. As I mentioned, we don’t see signs of the utopian community itself – just three outlying and empty buildings at the edge of the orchard at the middle and top right of the painting. We can only imagine what it’s like. 

To end today’s post on a more realistic note, here’s a picture of a local pillbox. Note the small Jindelae blossoms just to the left. Such military structures are everywhere around here, part of the defenses against the failed utopia on the other side of the DMZ.

For my next post I will do a short photographic inventory of some choice examples of local defenses.