Blue jeans are still subversive (if you live in North Korea)!

More zany news from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: Blue jeans are still subversive over there! Recent evidence of this is the censoring of a British television series about gardening that’s been pirated by the North Koreans to show on state television. The host of ‘Garden Secrets’ is Alan Titchmarsh, who is something of a household name in the UK, and definitely harmless in every way.  But when he’s seen wearing jeans, the DPRK censors do that bizarre digital blurring-out effect. This is what it looks like:

For a while a few weeks ago, the BBC had fun reporting the absurdity of this procedure.  As the news item put it: “Jeans are seen as a symbol of western imperialism in the secretive state and as such are banned.” Alan Titchmarsh was on record as saying: "It's taken me to reach the age of 74 to be regarded in the same sort of breath as Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Rod Stewart. You know, wearing trousers that are generally considered by those of us of a sensitive disposition to be rather too tight".

The subliminal message behind the story is clear: those North Koreans are definitely deranged and we (the Brits) are not. In fact, one of the perennial cultural roles of ‘exotic’ places located beyond the British Isles, especially those very far beyond,   is to serve as sources of amusement and self-satisfaction for us Brits. The underlying message is usually that the only people with any common sense are us. Elsewhere, people are want to believe in the most silly nonsense, and to behave in ways that are perverse, indecent, childish, dangerous, etc. etc.  In this way, the British status quo gets normalized as what’s ‘normal.’ As the public announcement says these days on the UK’s public transport system: ‘If you see something that doesn’t look right, call xxxxxx. See it. Say it. Sorted.’ Evidently, we are all supposed to automatically and unequivocally know what looks ‘right’ is. But how? Because we are habituated to a certain way of thinking and doing things. And for that to be possible, we need to be reminded regularly of the extra-ordinary. Which is where foreigners come in handy.

*

As you almost certainly know, denim jeans were designed in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States as work wear. The inventor is usually credited as the German immigrant Levi Strauss, who moved to San Francisco during the ‘gold rush’ and patented the innovative design feature of riveted denim in 1873.

By the time I was ready to wear jeans in the late 1960s there were basically three brands on offer: Levis, Wrangler, and Lee, which were all American. As I became fashion conscious in my late teens in the mid-seventies, I decided for some reason (maybe it was something to do with Jack Kerouac and the Beats) that I could only wear Levi 501’s, the original, button fly, shrink-to-fit design (zippers were a standard feature by the mid-1950s). But there was nowhere in my hometown that sold these classic jeans, and so I would make a pilgrimage to nearby Brighton, where there was one shop that reliably stocked them. Once back home, I’d put the cherished (and rather expensive) item on, then lie in the bath watching the indigo dye turn the water blue as the jeans molded themselves nicely to the form of my lower torso and legs (or that was the goal, anyway).

And as they did,  it was as if by an act of magical anointing I became part of the great success story. I became part of the American Dream. For while jeans are certainly cheap, comfortable, and hard-wearing, much more was being worn by my younger self than just blue cotton denim. By this time, jeans were a very powerful cultural signifier.  What had started out in the west and mid-west of America as hardy workwear for cowboys, lumberjacks, farmers, and construction workers, by mid-twentieth century had morphed  into a style icon sought by the young throughout the ‘free’  world. Like Coca-Cola, hamburgers and hotdogs, pop music, and rebellious and sexy youth, jeans came to represent a freer, happier way of life based on the American Dream. 

First of all, American GI’s on service overseas – in Germany and during the Korean War and the Vietnam War in the East – wore them on leave, and they became  a potent symbol of the new causal look of the Pax Americana. But at the same time, 1950s movies starring Marlon Brando and James Dean made jeans look attractively rebellious, and on Marilyn Monroe they looked sexy.  So, jeans became increasingly a symbol of youth rebellion and anti-establishment attitudes. Many US schools in this period banned jeans from being worn by students.  By the sixities jeans were what pop stars wore, and anti-Vietnam War protesters, and they were established as one of the most recognizable signifiers of non-conformity, if not of outright depravity. When I put on my blue Levi 501’s, aged sixteen in the provincial England of the mid-1970s, I was unconsciously identifying with the dominant version of ‘success’ within my society.

By the late 1980s you could buy ridiculously expensive ‘designer jeans’. This demonstrates how a symbol of rebellion gets easily co-opted or recuperated by what erstwhile rebellious young people even today (the West, anyway) call ‘the System.’  Jeans whre youa dn I come from are  are definitely not any danger to civic order. Who knows what brand Alan Titchmarsh was wearing when he shot his gardening series. I bet they weren’t Levi 501’s. Then again, maybe they were…

 My mum didn’t like blues jeans, either. I mean, back in the sixities and early seventies she didn’t like me to wear them.  We lived in a suburb of a small seaside town, and she insisted I didn’t wear jeans when venturing into the centre of town. But eventually she bowed to the heady winds of cultural change that blew through the early 1970s and gave up on the dress restrictions. I never ever, ever thought I’d be able to draw a straight line between my mum’s sartorial code from back then and those of the DPRK today.  But this yet more tragic proof that the DPRK is trapped in a time warp. Its animus to blue jeans belongs to the cultural values of the 1950s, not the present day. It quite simply hasn’t been able to progress beyond an ideological construct from the beginning of the Cold War. 

But the DPRK is not alone. What the others o-called  ‘rogue’ nations -  Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan - have in common with the DPRK is precisely the refusal to westernize, to fail to swim with the seemingly inexorable tide of neoliberal global culturalism. To  fall for the ‘American Dream” which has been exported to the ‘free’ world.

It’s worth spending a little time to consider just what this ‘dream’ is (or was).  One on-line dictionary says it is “the ideal by which equality of opportunity is available to any American, allowing the highest aspirations and goals to be achieved.” But that seems a bit evasive. The website ‘Investopedia’ cuts to the economic chase: “The American Dream is the belief that anyone can attain their own version of success in a society where upward mobility is possible for everyone.”

But that’s narrowing things too much. From an artistic perspective, the American Dream means  success equated reward for the pursuit of extreme freedom of self-expression,  willingness to shock and offend, and to push creativity continuously towards the ‘new’. In fact, these radical values were  already part of the modern ‘Western European Dream’, but they were embraced and enhanced when they migrated to the ‘New World’, along with the useful additional assets of economic, military, and political power.  Which makes one wonder: just what is ‘success’? 

A more critical perspective is need. How about one applying a Marxist interpretation? Here’s something I found on the Internet: “When viewed through the lens of Marxism, the "American Dream" is now more accurately described as a widespread fallacy than a meaningful goal to strive toward.”  This quote comes from a very interesting source: a text written in 2023 by a pair of Iraqi academics in the course of writing a critique of Arthur Miller’ Death of a Salesman’ (1949). This play is generally recognized as a searing indictment of the narrowly materialistic version of the ‘you-can-make-it’ ethos of the ‘American Dream’. (Just in passing, recall that, improbably, this same Arthur Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe, which means he could admire her figure in denim jeans at his leisure)  The Iraqi academics, Ali Khalaf Othman and  Fuad Sahu Khalaf, conclude:

What Willy  (Loman, the eponymous ‘salesman’ who commits suicide) seemed to forget or really, judging from his actions, lacked even knowing, and I would go as far as saying, most of the world lack in knowing this next information, is that meritocracy, which is the system that is advertised in America, the system that is so alluring it makes America the land of dreams for refugees, because as long as you work hard enough, you can do anything, right? Well, no, not really. Willy found out the hard way, his family found out the hard way, and I hope, actual people can learn from this play and know before they find out the truth behind the American dream, the hard way.

These authors know what they’re talking about. Iraq is definitely a nation that was offered the ‘American Dream’. In fact it was forced upon them down the barrel of a M14. Disaster followed. Afghanistan is another tragic failure of this ‘dream’. Iran stand as the pioneer of such refusal, when in 1978 it had its Islamic revolution. What’s happening in Gaza and in Ukraine are also in their very different ways versions of the same refusal..

I’m wearing Levi 503’s as I write this post. I’ve given up on the original button-fly model, but the 503’s still have the same classic cut but with a zipper fly (much easier to handle as you get older). I purchased my pair (and lots of other Levi’s clothes, as I have become a walking (and somewhat aged)  advertisement for this American icon)  at the Levi’s store in the Lotte Outlet in Paju Book City, near where we live. It’s just a stone’s throw from the DMZ.  I can imagine a North Korean border guard averting his eyes regularly, as across the narrow Han estuary he glimpses through high-powered binoculars South Koreans of all ages passing lewdly  by in denim jeans (including Levi’s, but also, no doubt, ones by Armani).

I’m in absolutely  in no doubt where I’d rather be living: somewhere I can were jeans whenever and whenever I like.

And to end, here’s the label from my current pair of Levi 501’s. Subversive stuff, indeed!

NOTES

The photograph at the top of the post is a screen grab from the BBC News website: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68664644

The dictionary definition is from: https://languages.oup.com/google-dictionary-en/

Investopedia quote is from: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/american-dream.asp

The essay on ‘Death of a Salesman’ can be found at: https://www.iasj.net/iasj/download/29d6c8a71ed03d4b 

‘Modern British’

Installation shot my my exhibition at Art First, London.

After a couple of weeks of silence because I’ve been in England and now am in central France, in today’s post I write about my exhibition in London, which ends on 28th March.

As you can see from the installation view, in most of the works in the exhibition, what you first see is a coloured rectangle. Then, as you move closer, you make out a text written on the painted surface. This writing is almost the same colour as the ground of the painting and is built up in painted layers to produce a relief effect. The result is that the text stands out from the surface, casting small shadows. Once you are close enough to attend to the text, you can see it has been painted by hand, not printed. It is perfectly legible, and one can easily identify the source as a book cover or title page.

A photo of the second painting on the left. Stanley Spencer, 'Penguin Modern Painters’ (1947), 2023, acrylic on canvas, 53 x 66 x 4 cm. Below: A detail.

Installation shot of right side paintings. Below: details of the second and fourth paintings from the left . W.H. Auden, ‘Some Poems’ (1940), 2023, acrylic on canvas, 44.5 x 42 x 4cm, and Virginia Woolf, ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927), 2023, crylic on canvas, 53 x 42 x 4cm.

My source books are works by British writers and about British artists selected from the first half of the twentieth century up to the 1950s. The choice I made of novelists and poets is quite random. They are W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Wilfred Owen, George Orwell, and Virginia Woolf. The choice of the specific books by these authors is also more or less random. Sometimes, they are personal favourites. The ‘Book-Paintings’ based on The Penguin Modern Painters series (published between 1944 and 1948) are very close to my heart because my father owned several, and they were one of the principal ways I learned about modern art.  The one si have painted for the exhibition feature Stanley Spencer, Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, and Victor Pasmore. There is also a painting based on the LP box cover of the first recording of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem,  an example of a tentative new series of ‘Album-Paintings’. I chose this particular composition because I wanted to make an uncomfortable link to the present; Britten had in mind the First World War, but wars today in Ukraine and more recently in Israel/Gaza are very much on everyone’s mind. Also, Wilfred Owen’s poetry is used by Britten, which links the music to one of the books I painted. 

Benjamin Britten, ‘War Requiem’ (1962), 2023, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 x 4 cm,

There is also a work on paper from my ‘Paragraph-Painting’ series. In these, I directly paint with acrylic paint over paragraphs or verses of text or images on pages cut from books or magazines, and thereby produce what can be described as ‘ready-made’ geometric abstract art.  The work shows all the pages of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’.

The Waste Land, 1922, 2021-23, acrylic on Penguin book page, 103 x 67cm. Below: a detail.

*

You could call my artistic practice a kind of cultural ‘remix.’  Whereas postmodern practices engaged in varieties of ‘appropriation’ in which there was a transfer of cultural signs from one sphere to another, in ‘remixing’ (a term most often used in relation to contemporary music but that is in fact a basic characteristic of digital culture in general), transfer involves a significant modification of the cultural sign. So, for example, while I don't much change the original layouts of the book designs, in migrating one medium into another I make considerable transformations in the source’s size, colour, and texture. As a result, the experience of my work is very different from the experience of the source.

Through the references to books, I explore painting’s status as a cognitive sign or code. I connect to a cognitively rich sphere that draws in associations and memories from beyond painting that relate to modern history and culture.  But I also exploit painting’s noncognitive potential – its significance as a way of  sending out or drawing in affective forces or energy. These qualities, which can make painting feel like a powerful presences, elude categorization or coding and  are more about resonance or elusive interaction between the work and the viewer.  

There aren’t many obvious traces of my hand on the surface of my paintings because I want to draw attention to my body as something silent and still, rather than in dynamic action. I find ways to diminish the telltale traces of my subjectivity and bodily presence. I suggest intimacy, and a contemplative mode of attention. The maker of the work has to somehow get out of the way.

When you look at my paintings you are being drawn to simple physical properties. These consist of basically two elements: colour and texture. Colour offers itself to the senses before it becomes something symbolic (for example,  when red signifies danger). But colour is unreliable from a cognitive point of view, as it is always shifting and never remains the same.  This is because colour perception is a property of the retina not of things. The colours I choose derive from multiple sources. They can be relate to the actual colours of the source book or image, prompted by a mood I associate with the source,  from the specific season when and the place where I painted the work and so have nothing at all consciously to do with the book, relational, in that the colours are arrived at because they seem to work well with another adjacent colour, or can be arrived at intuitively.

I slow or delay the usual facility of language. I’m interested in the proximal view. In close-up seeing. I hope to draw attention to the porous boundary between the self and the world. As a result of the formal changes I introduce, the usual figure/ground contrast produced through the visual perception of the colours, images and letters on a book cover or title page is replaced by subtle variation in tone and texture. The contrast between the different elements is far less definitive than in the original figure/ground gestalt, and in fact is so unstable that at a certain  distance it collapses altogether, and all you see is a one coloured rectangular ‘ground.’  My ‘figure’ seems to be absorbed into the ‘ground’ or to be emerging from it.  Then again, the fact that the text on my paintings is rendered in relief, supplements the usual activity of seeing by engaging tactile values. This engages the ‘haptic’ dimension to perception. The term comes from the Greek meaning ‘palpable’ or ‘suitable for touch’, and refers literally to the ability to grasp something.  The haptic requires engagement at close range and intimate physical contact and provides the brain with input from surfaces and information about direction and position, thereby providing greater intimate awareness than the distancing faculty of sight.

Because a viewer’s movements in relation to my painting surface determines whether they see just a coloured rectangle or a surface covered in text the status of my paintings seem to  be transitive rather than static. The effect I aim to produce is of a kind of ‘in-between’, a shifting space where nothing is definitively fixed. Perhaps my special interest in evoking this ‘in-between’ is a consequence of having lived the first six years of my life in on the top floor of a block of flats directly overlooking the English Channel – a vast and ever-changing expanse of sea and sky.

*

This exhibition relates to one I did at Art First in 2007 called ‘The English Series’, and it is in a sense a continuation of the same theme. But since 2007 I’ve left the UK and now live in South Korea and France, so thinking from a distance about what it means to talk of ‘British culture’ has also played a part in making me want to create new works on this theme.  Also, the Brexit farrago has happened and the Covid pandemic, both of which in their very different ways have shed light on what it means to be British in the early twenty-first century.

The Irish writer Fintan O’Toole has recently described the Brexit vote as being driven by British people’s “hysterical self-pity”. I hope this lamentable trait isn’t my nation’s outstanding one. Here’s the opinion of one of the authors I draw on in the exhibition, George Orwell, writing in 1941:

The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement. And with this goes something that is always written off by European observers as ‘decadence’ or hypocrisy, the English hatred of war and militarism.

Orwell’s views were coloured by current events; he was writing as Britain stood alone against the very ‘ungentle’ Nazis. I’m not sure ‘gentleness’ would come to mind these days as a defining character trait of us Brits. But then again, it does seem that, comparatively speaking, we British continue to hate war and militarism more than many other nations. Our policemen still mostly don’t carry guns. Not that this has stopped our leaders getting Britain embroiled in various conflicts -  Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind. But, paradoxically or perversely, perhaps they thought Britain was fighting precisely to defend the value of ‘gentleness.’

My painting after the first edition of George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’. 2023, acrylic on canvas, 53 x 42 x 4cm.

*

‘Presentism’ now holds sway culturally today. We live in a society in which the past is routinely interpreted in terms of today’s attitudes, values, and concepts, and as a result, is judged negatively. So, for example, in my exhibition there is only one woman, Virginia Woolf, and no people of colour. These absences are an accurate reflection of the dominant social norms of the period I cover, which are no longer those of contemporary British society. However, my intention is not to expose the sexist and racist prejudices of that time, nor to ignore them. I wanted to make paintings that celebrate British writers and artists and the culture they hoped to nurture, a culture to which I belong, albeit in attenuated and conflicted ways.

From the perspective of living in South Korea, I view the mounting critique of ‘Western values’ by the so-called ‘progressive’ Western cultural elite with amazement.    From the roof of my house near the infamous DMZ that divides North from South Korea I can see the mountains of a nation whose people are deprived of even the most basic freedoms we take for granted. Despite all its many and obvious faults, we should be proud of our cultural heritage. I worry that in our avid quest to expose the failings of the past (and their lingering hold on the present) we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In other words, we ignore or take for granted much of inestimable value, underestimating the fragility of the hard-won cultural freedoms we already enjoy.

Is Kim Jong Un Preparing for War?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

Oh, dear.

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

NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sacred Tree at the DMZ

This 600 year old Zelkova has a good view of the DMZ and the mountains of North Korea..

There are very few ancient trees in South Korea, and In a previous post  (see link below) I explained why. But some venerable old trees do still survive in places, mostly by chance, and one of them grows very near where we live. It’s a six-hundred-year-old Zelkova that stands on a small hillock beside the village of Majeong-ri, not far from Imjingak and the DMZ.

Because of the presence of the tree, one can be certain the village is a very old settlement. In fact, it sits beside the former main road between Seoul and Pyongyang, which means once upon a time it must have been quite a lively place. But it was surely decimated during the Korean War, and today is a very sad and decrepit cluster of nondescript buildings. But somehow, the Zelkova tree survived the apocalypse of war and post-war reconstruction, and so here it stands today!

Traditionally, almost every village in Korea had a shrine of some sort dedicated to placating the village guardian spirit.  The shrine could take various forms. One was a sacred tree, which would become the focus for the community's rituals aimed at guaranteeing protection, prosperity, and good harvests. The sacred trees often had straw rope wrapped around them, or were decorated with strips of white hanji (mulberry bark paper), white cloth, or coloured streamers.​ As you can see, there’s nothing like that on the tree near us, but there is a primitive altar, on which someone has placed an offering of rice and rice wine.

*

Even discounting the traditional animistic rituals associated with guardian spirits, we can obviously still learn much from ancient trees.  One of the most important lesson is being led to consider the longue-durée, the processes that unfold across many generations. As a society, we have very rapidly lost a sense of slow time because we live in the accelerated time that is generated by the capitalist economic system and technological innovation. It used to take at least ten months to sail from Europe to Korea but now it takes only twelve hours by airplane. Social media especially encourages a shallow and fugitive sense of time. Such wafer-thin temporality, which is based on obsessive acceleration, is a key cause of the pronounced sense of alienation that pervades society.  This is perhaps especially true in South Korea, where modernization has occurred at unprecedented speed. There is almost nothing older than one hundred years. Most things are less than  thirty years old. On the other hand, South Korean women now hold the record in longevity. They live longer than any one else, on average. So, this is a society of ageing humans and a youthful environment. Which is why a six-hundred-year-old Zelkova tree is really something very special over here.

But living in compressed time has also provoked a backlash. There is now a ‘slow’ movement in South Korea. This idea originated in Italy a few decades ago, and the aim is to reduce the pace of modern life in areas as diverse as cuisine, holidays, fashion, and work. One website explains:

 Slow living is a mindset whereby you curate a more meaningful and conscious lifestyle that’s in line with what you value most in life.

It means doing everything at the right speed. Instead of striving to do things faster, the slow movement focuses on doing things better. Often, that means slowing down,  doing less, and prioritising spending the right amount of time on the things that matter most to you.

Sounds good! Apart from the use of the trendy word ‘curate’. ‘Curate’ means to organize or present something, and nowadays it is often used in relation to one’s identity on social media. As Psychology Today puts it: “The curated self is a product of the technological revolution. The curated self is the selection, organization, and presentation of online content about yourself. Online has become a canvas to recreate who we are. Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram —take your pick and start painting your dream profile.” But the influence of on-line social media has now filtered back into ‘off-line’ existence, and the term is used in popular culture more broadly to imply that we should identify with the aspect of ourselves presented to or perceived by others. In other words, we are persona all the way down. There is no ’authentic’ self. The result is that we feel alienated from the world and ourselves. So, by using the word the promoters of the ‘slow’ movement on this particular website is surely undermining its raison d’être by implicating  it in the root problem it aims to counter. 

*

Here’s another lesson to learn from an old tree.

The Chinese Daoist classic Daodejing, written sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries BC,   uses an analogy that draws on the characteristics of the tree and its practical use for humanity by describing the spiritual ideal as “returning to the uncarved block”. It urged people to keep in mind the nature of things before they are ‘carved up’ by language and social convention. This primordial holistic vision is called the ‘Tao’ – the Way. So apparently, already over two and half thousand years ago there was a big problem: we already didn’t live in nature but only in relationship to nature.  The Daodejing hoped to remind people of the importance of being in touch with ‘wildness’; not in the sense of being recklessly out of control but of being in balance or harmony with natural principles. 

*

And here’s one final lesson.

The consensus is now that humanly caused atmospheric changes are fast reaching an irreversible tipping-point and it is already too late to stop global warming. So, the goal now is to limit the negative impact on the biosphere in the future, and one suggestion is to start thinking in the very long-term by planning the restoration of primal forests so that trees en masse have the chance to live out their potentially long lives, like the solitary and very lucky Zelkova near us. These primal forests would be protected, and bring none of the familiar economic benefits to a region. Then again, they would offer other kinds of employment in the form of guides, guards, fire-watchers, and maybe even universities for the study of the tree and the forest, and humanity’s relationship to nature..

Interestingly, as Robert Pogue Harrison notes in his excellent book Forest, one possible provenance for the English word ‘forest’ is the Latin foris – ‘outside’. The Latin term Forestis silva described unenclosed wood lying beyond a city wall. But in the medieval period, European monarchs moved to take control of large tracts of woodland because they wanted to protect the wildlife which they hunted as a recreational ritual central to the codes of honour of the aristocratic warrior caste. Therefore, a ‘forest’ became a habitat set aside as a royal game preserve and was subject to strict forest laws so that the trees were put beyond people’s greedy reach. Which is one reason why there are so many ancient oak trees in Britain, for example - up to one thousand year’s old. My country’s royal family and aristocracy were especially zealous in the guardianship of their forests right up to modern times. So you could say that today, once again, this is what ‘forest’ means, although obviously for very different reasons. And so, the medieval European king ironically turns out to be the first conservationist, As Pogue Harrison wryly remarks: “an ecologist today cannot help but be a monarchist of sorts.”

NOTES

My post on reforestation in Korea can be read at: https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/the-south-korean-tree-planting-miracle

An interesting article on sacred trees in South Korea is : Robert Neff, ‘Korea's ancient trees’, The Korea Times, 2021/10/24. https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/opinion/2024/01/715_317421.html

For the description of ‘slow living’ see: https://slowlivingldn.com/what-is-slow-living/

For the definition of ‘curate’ see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/202302/the-curated-self#:~:text=The%20curated%20self%20is%20a,start%20painting%20your%20dream%20profile.

Robert Pogue Harrison’s book is Forests (Chicago University Press, 1992).

2024 and Hope

One of my watercolours. I gather leaves, twigs, etc. from around where I live and then paint them life-size in trompe l’oeil. This one spells the word UTOPIA.. Which seems fitting for todays’ post.

The news media always seems to welcome the new year by striving to cheer us up with reasons to be hopeful. But they’ve been working harder than usual this year!

In fact, the daily news provides ample and depressing evidence that people will invest their hope in the most bizarre things. QAnon, for example.  The motley followers of QAnon know that hope is fundamental to the meaningful life, and after their own fashion have the expectation of a positive outcome. But like so many hopeful people throughout the length and breadth of history, their expectations were not realized. But also like people in the past it seems that even in the face of disappointment many QAnon supporters have been able to rebound, regroup, re-calibrate, and keep on hoping for the same old mad things.

But unlike our ancestors and too many of our contemporaries, most of the intelligentsia know that hope is all too often founded on delusion, over-confidence, over-simplification, errors of judgment, and moral, practical, personal, and collective failure.  Especially worrying, however is  not so much the fact that the beliefs of QAnon followers and the like are obviously delusional and not founded on the sound and reasoned assessment of the possibility of a positive outcome, but that nowadays it seems to be becoming extremely difficult to feel hopeful through rational appeal to the facts or through a balanced assessment of the situation in the ways that  we in the ‘reality-based’ community consider essential.  

Then again, to borrow a metaphor of the poet Seamus Heaney, hope and history sometimes try to “rhyme”. It is our responsibility to continue to struggle to identify abiding hope-filled ideals robustly capable of carrying us through such uncertain and dangerous times.

Here are 15 dimensions of history and experience that, for better or worse, will bring people hope in 2024:

1. HUMANITY

Hope is primordially rooted in confidence in the efficacy of the human species, our collective capacity to overcome terrible adversity and prosper. In looking at the beginnings of human culture, we can see the origins of hope in fundamental evolutionary prerogatives. Upper-Palaeolithic cave-paintings made as long as 40,000 years ago tells us a great deal about the power to communicate across thousands of years a message of hope through the celebration of humanity’s capacity to exercise influence over events that affect human life.  The cave-paintings in Grotte Chauvet in south-west France, discovered in 1994, are twice as old as the oldest cave paintings known at that time - about 36,000 years old. One of the cavers who made the amazing discovery saw a drawing of a mammoth on the cave wall and spontaneously cried out in excitement: “They were here!”

2. NATURE

As every springtime in particular reminds us, the natural world is a deep source of hope.   In terms of evolution, the powerfully uplifting responses we have to nature are probably closely linked to the fact that for our ancestors the sight of new plant shoots and blossoms, and the migration of animals, signalled the end of a period of dangerous lack. Hope is inextricably linked to notions of the sacredness of nature. The primordial Mother-Goddess, also known to anthropologists as the Great Earth Mother or Earth Mother Goddess, was loving, protecting, and inviting, but she was also fierce, destructive, and terrifying.  Humanity owed her everything.   But it is also an indication that we are part of nature, of the non-human whole. Within the pagan view of the sacred, nature was understood as the source of bounty but also of the devastatingly destructive, and demanded total reverence. Pagan myths remind us that from the moment of birth human existence is a struggle with the begetter of life - the life-giver and life-taker, the regenerator all-in-one, and that hope resides in aligning human life with this process.

3. TRANSCENDENCE

Buddhism teaches the idea that unconditioned hope is  rooted in the transcendence of the ‘illusions’ generated by physical and emotional craving. Hope resides most certainly in our capacity to transcend the perpetual cycle of suffering. The Buddha argued that there is a reliable way to release humanity from suffering, protect other beings, mitigate harm, and build a better world. He claimed there was a ‘threefold’ path to overcome suffering based on a realistic and tangible form of hope.  These ideals also have certain parallels in Greek philosophy, especially as taught by the Stoics, and it is possible that both hope and fear are equally dangerous because they irrationally bind us to external circumstance over which we have little or no control, and as result are both primary sources of anxiety.

4. HEAVEN

Religious faith is historically one of the surest foundations of hope. The Monotheistic religions teach that  it is necessary to believe  that when misfortune strikes  it is through  moral failing. It is because we have transgressed and God  has punished  us. But Christianity is unique amongst world religions in stating that along with faith and charity (or love), hope is one of the three theological virtues.  The realisation of all our hopes, the ultimate goal of securing of eternal life, lie in God’s hands alone. In practice, this often means stealing oneself for a lifetime of sacrifice, the model for which in the Christian  religion is Jesus Christ. In being crucified, Christ showed his immeasurable love through  dying on the cross, thereby sending a message of transhistorical and enduring hope. Both Christianity and Islam guarantee eternal life in heaven to the faithful, making the hereafter the ultimate goal, and insuring the faithful’s life against fearand disillusionment. While the pagan Greeks used the term elpis - ‘hope’ - to refer to a positive attitude to an open-ended future, Christian belief in the Resurrection of Christ transformed hope into something far more powerful: the eschatological hope in Christ’s Second Coming.

5. LOVE

Love of another person can be described as our willingness to prioritize another’s well-being or happiness above our own.  Neurophysiologists describe love as a neurochemical state of being that has probably existed since humans became human, and as such, feelings about love, involving attachment, attraction, and the sex drive, remain more or less the same through time and place.  Love can be   fleeting or involve long term commitment.  Psychologists have classified love according to four kinds, each of which involve hope: attachment or protective love, compassionate love, companionate love, and romantic love. But is love a choice or biologically or culturally programmed?

6. WAR

Although nowadays we prefer to deny it, war is a powerful vehicle for hope, especially when it is considered a righteous way to remove an obstacle.  War is often the result of the clash not only of power groups but of different values, of different conceptions of hope.  It is often said that from the rubble of death and destruction, hope is born. Historically, religious differences often merged with the violent struggle over power. Both sides believe in the justice of their cause and are willing to die for it.  Both sides see violent struggle as a means of achieving deeply hope-infused goals.  The current conflict in Israel/Gaza is rooted in opposing visions of hope.    

7. THE MARKET

In the modern period it has been assumed that the market was naturally self-governing, and that economic intervention was generally unnecessary and usually unproductive. Within this system, hope becomes intimately linked to voluntary exchange and private property.  Following Adam Smith, the great majority of economists believe the market economy works most efficiently when left to regulate itself., and the economic orthodoxy of neoliberalism assumes that central authority and government planning stood in the way of the market economy. But as Karl Marx warned, free markets  can easily be manipulated,   and that is why he advocated  that the state should take away all private ownership of the means of production. As a result, two radically different visions of economically-rooted hope emerged: the socialist and the capitalist.

8.   SCIENCE

The character and goals of our hope have been transformed by the rational, mathematical, and experimental principles of science and scientific discovery. In the seventeenth century in Europe the Scientific Revolution evolved out of the worldliness and secularism of the Renaissance., and hope grounded in super-naturalism was supplanted by hope founded on naturalism. Mysticism and faith were replaced by hope in reason and appeal to the senses. The scientific method involves systematic observation, measurement, experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. Applying objective and rational thought to all aspects of life, the methods of the natural sciences hugely increased human understanding of the world. Reason and empirical research became primary sources of hope, challenging those previously enshrined within traditional religious faiths.  Evolutionary theory transformed our understanding of humanity’s relationship to other living organisms and to the material world in general, and became a powerful a new source of hope by offering a key to the mystery of life. But evolution could also be perceived as a profound threat to traditional belief systems, to the foundations of the meaningful life.

 9. FREEDOM  

The struggle for freedom in the modern age has been fired by hope-driven struggle against injustice. Traditional ideals of duty and sacrifice have been replaced in the West by the pursuit of happiness and the desire to challenge oppressive authority. Humanity is no longer judged to be born in sin, but  instead is compared to a tabula rasa that is free to self-create. In the eighteenth century in Europe, the idea of universal progress, of confidence in human potential through the application of reason, became a dominant value when moral and political philosophy began to see freedom as a universal right. The influence of the French Revolution is especially strong in relation to the development of modern ideas of hope, binding it closely to the rights of citizens and the power of the nation-state. It created a new language of hope based on institutions following the secular values of natural rights, democracy, and republicanism, which during the next two centuries would help direct what kinds of hope was most valued.  Yet the evocations of individual and collective patriotic hope jostled with the revolutionaries’ preoccupations with the very different hopes of the counter-revolutionaries. 

10. SOCIAL EQUALITY

Historically, all societies have been founded on hierarchies of power that are inherently unequal. and oppressive. Although women account for half the human population, for most of history and throughout the world they have been treated as inferior to men and refused a role in business and political life. Slavery, required and condoned by agricultural and then industial societies condemned millions to servitude. The empowerment of women and racial minorities in modern times has been the direct result of the ideas of the Enlightenment, which stressed the universal right of equality for all, and was also bolstered by the growing economic power and independence created as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution.

11. UTOPIA

Utopia means ‘no place’,  and the term dates from the seventeenth century. But the dream of a more perfect society which  the term came to embody has fired many hopes across all of human history.  We explore how modern dreams of collective hope have been embodied in radical political movements, and why they have always ended up causing terrible suffering.  In 1917, visions of hope drove millions towards the realisation of a socialist utopia in Russia, towards what they believed was a society that the people themselves in control. Communism embodies hope in its most directly modern political form, wedding it to belief in scientific and historical inevitability. People often continued to invest their hope in utopian social and political agendas despite their obvious failure in the past. History shows that utopianism always fail disastrously to bring about the avowed goals, and instead leads to civil war, totalitarianism, reigns of terror, show trials, concentration camps, mass starvation, and the violent death of millions.   

12.  NATIONALISM

While one of the most fundamental and perennial hopes of humanity is for a secure existence for oneself and one’s loved ones, people have diverged greatly in ascertaining how to achieve such security. In modern times, security has been sought in broadly two ways: collectivistically and individualistically. Love of one’s nation can go far beyond sentimental patriotism, and in the modern age authoritarian nationalism in the contemporary guise of ‘popularism’ is one of the most significant and divisive sources of hope. . Hitler persuaded his supporters that he was the sole embodiment of true hope for Germany,  perverting the religious vision of the Chosen People and transforming it into the German Volks’ exceptional mission in the world by casting himself as the only solution to a crisis. A Nazi  election poster from 1932 declared: “Last Hope – Hitler!” 

13. TECHNOLOGY

In the modern age people’s hopes have been commonly linked to faith in technological innovation which bring realizable solutions to the ever-changing problems faced by society.  As the website to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development declares: “Science and technology bring hope in times of crisis”.  The Guardian headlined an article from 2013: “Technology is our planet’s last best hope.” Technology has the capacity to reduce the burden of labour and bring humanity closer together. Social media and communication technology using the internet  have hugely contributed to the freer distribution of opportunities and knowledge. As social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo demonstrate, to communicate online can be an unprecedented democratizing force, a channel for hope which disseminates new perspectives, draws attention to ignored problems, and allows for organization in the ‘off-line’ world to solve them. But the Internet is also where different meanings of hope clash.

14.  HEALTH

The desire to protect one’s own, one’s loved ones, and one’s society’s health is a a powerful goal.  Modern medical science has contributed to the increased collective hopefulness of humanity, and has reached such heights of confidence that the perennial dream of human immortality  is being brought realm of possibility.  It is estimated that in the age of Shakespeare 150 out of every 1,000 new-born children died during their first year, and a third of all children were deceased before they reached fifteen. In the twentieth century there was a huge reduction in infant mortality, and in England today, only five out of 1,000 babies die during their first year, and seven out of 1,0000 before the age fifteen. Thanks to the success of medical science we have found ways to prevent deaths from such former infant killers as diphtheria, measles and smallpox, general improvements in hygiene during operations, and the discovery of anaesthetics and antibiotics. One of the most important sources of disease and death is pathogens and parasites, and we fought Covid 19 with advanced medical technologies based on the principle of the vaccine first developed in 1796.. 

15, YOUTH

A recent survey of academics working in diverse disciplines found that the single most frequently cited source of hope for the future is young people.  ‘Generation Z’ - those born from the mid-to-late 1990s to the early 2010s – are statistically more likely to be hopeful than ‘Generation Alpha’ and ‘Millennials,’ and are much more hopeful than the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. Young people are reinventing activism. The potential of younger generations to take on the world’s huge challenges equipped with new ideas, and to be unintimidated by the failures of the hopes of the past, is exemplified by the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

NOTES

I highly recommend this website: https://www.existentialhope.com

The end of the year (or one of them)

North Korea’s Juche calendar for 2010.

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

‘Some Books’. An Exhibition

Me with works from my current exhibition in Seoul.

In my solo exhibition at Song Art Gallery in Seoul I show mostly what I call my ‘Book-Paintings’. These are based on the covers and title pages of real books. But unlike the original sources, the text is painted almost the same colour as the ground and is built up in painted layers to produce a relief effect. Both the content (the sources) and the perceptual experience of the form (colour, texture, etc.) are inextricably connected elements of an encounter with the paintings,, but in today’s post I focus on the content.

Here are some examples:

Three ‘Book Paintings’ Left to right: ‘Eliot. The Waste Land’ (1972)’, ‘Rilke. Duineser Elegien (1923)’, and ‘Camus, La Peste (1947)’. All are from 2023, acrylic on canvas, and 53 x 41cm

A side view of ‘Camus, La Peste (19470). The title of this novel translates into English as ‘The Plague.’ I made it as a kind of memorial to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Left to right: ‘Nietzsche, Zarathustra (1943)’ and ‘Nietzsche, Zarathustra (1950)’. Both works are from 2012, acrylic on canvas, and 120 x 160cm.

The source books for the paintings were all written by Western thinkers and writers of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century: the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the poets T.S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke, and the writer Albert Camus. A triptych of gold ‘Book-Paintings’ evokes the Western humanist tradition from which these thinkers and writers come, and in this case I left out the texts that supply the name of the author and publisher so as to focus attention on the evocative titles: ‘Civilization in the West’, ‘Revolutionary Change’, ‘The Idea of the Humanities.’

‘The West’, 2018-2023, gold acylic on canvas, triptych: 41x32cm each panel.

‘Freud. Die Zukunft einer Illusion (1928),’ 2022, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 38cm

Installation view. The ‘Nietzsche’ paintings on the left, and ‘Freud’ on the right.

I began making the ‘Book Paintings’ in the late 1990s because I wanted to introduce a historical dimension to my work as an artist but in an unorthodox way. This desire was motivated by the prosaic fact that my first academic studies were in history (I have a BA in Modern History from Oxford University), and so making paintings like these was a way to link areas of interest and expertise. But the series also arose from my belief that painting is an excellent medium through which to communicate historical consciousness. That is, the complex relationship between the past, present, and future. 

When I started making ‘Book Paintings’ it wasn’t my intention to use them to celebrate aspects of Western culture, but that’s how the project has ended up, especially when seen within the context of South Korea, the country where I’ve lived since 2010.

But it’s definitely not a ‘politically correct’ time to engage in such a celebration, especially not for a straight white middle-class British male like me to do so. This is an Age of Correction, in the sense that the traditional Western elites are being forced into often serial acts of mea culpa. But living in South Korea has allowed me to stand back from the society from which I come and to see it a little differently, and perhaps more clearly. Especially, living near the DMZ for ten years, within sight of North Korea, has given me a much greater sense of what is valuable within Western culture and therefore needs celebrating, protecting, and nurturing, not just deconstructing and denigrating. For in many ways, the Republic of Korea is a ‘poster child’ for the benefits of embracing Western culture, and specifically, the variety espoused by the United States, which is closely associated with consumer capitalism.   And while South Korea is very far from being perfect – it is clearly rife with systemic vices, both imported and indigenous - it is obviously an infinitely preferable place to live than the grotesquely deformed nation known as the Democratic People’s Republic, which lies on the other side of the DMZ. This difference between the two contemporary Koreas is largely because of South Korea’s successful adoption and adaption of cultural values associated with liberal secular humanism and North Korea’s rejection of this path.

But my point stretches further than just the Korean peninsula. The current war in Ukraine is further evidence of how fragile the positive values associated with Western culture are, and how they need vigorous defense. And, although it’s certainly contentious to say so, it seems to me a similar confrontation is occurring now in Israel/Palestine, but alas it is also one that shows just how easily the Western values worth celebrating get perverted by unscrupulous leaders.

NOTES

The exhibition ‘Some Books’, runs until January 5, 2004.

Song Art Gallery’s website is: www.songartgallery.co.kr

Boundaries, terrestrial and extra-terrestrial

A screen grab from the Guardian on-line (November 28th).  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/north-korea-claims-spy-satellite-has-photographed-white-house-and-pentagon

Recently, North Korea boasted that it had successfully launched a spy satellite into orbit. The Guardian newspaper on-line (November 28th) reports that it has ‘sent back “detailed” images of the White House, the Pentagon and US nuclear aircraft carriers that have been viewed by the regime leader, Kim Jong-un.’ The Guardian published the photograph at the top of today’s post. Hilarious, isn’t it? The T-shirts sported by the science wonks are priceless. I want one!  I imagine the piece of paper they’re holding shows Scarlett Johansson sunbathing beside her pool in her USD 3.88 million home in Los Feliz, recorded while the satellite was passing over Los Angeles.

It would be comic, except the news has now brought us one step closer to war. Again. Life near the DMZ has just gotten fractionally more insecure. Am I just imagining it, or are there more live fire-drills taking place? More troop movements? It may be a ruse. After all, they have already failed twice. But the suspicion is that Russia has recently provided much needed technological support, and in return, North Korea is providing Russia with thousands of artillery shells. What a diabolical marriage made in Hell!

*

I was struck by the chance juxtaposition in the media of this advanced extra-terrestrial surveillance technology with what’s currently going on in Israel/Palestine: the contrast between two relationships to the world - between attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil and having panoptic access to the entire world.

In Israel/Palestine what we see playing out in terrible  detail via the media is a crisis brought on by a fundamental human orientation to land and territory. Strife and war between humans have historically always been about appropriation of land.  A sense of being at home in a particular place is axiomatic. The securing of a particular area of land through migration, colonization, and conquest leads to the setting up of social order and the organization of economic life of society.  Only by dwelling somewhere do we feel truly human. This also meant that because societies are historically grounded in the occupation of a particular area  of land, the construction of boundaries is absolutely necessary.  

So, what is happening in Israel/Palestine is an ancient struggle for the appropriation of land, one that in spite of all the huge changes that have occurred over the past one hundred years remains central to human meaningful existence. Two peoples claim the same land as their own.

And yet, at the same time, thanks to globalization, a thoroughgoing deterritorialization of human existence has occurred. In fact, this process began long before the period usually described as ‘modern’. The uniquely iintimate link between being human and dwelling on the land was destroyed over 500 years ago when the oceans were systematically opened up.  From this point onwards, human society ceased being land-based and lost its status as the connection to specific area of the Earth.  Humans were no longer earth-bound. With the development of maritime technology - improved ship construction,  the  invention of the compass,  the science of mapping -  Europeans spearheaded the subjection of the entire planet to appropriation and control which had begun millennia before. when humans first developed boats that could carry them across the oceans. The general assumption became that by the end of the twentieth century, globalization meant the struggle between humans for the appropriation of land was over.  Humanity had spread all over the entire globe, across land, sea, and space, and there was nowhere else to go.

The North Korean’s launching of a spy satellite is in line with the logic of modernity in this sense. It is part-and-parcel of the process through which humanity has detached itself from its terrestrial bonds and manufactured a god-like view which bestows upon it immense power. It is this technologically-assisted extension of human perception that dominates our experience of the world – at least those of us who live in the developed world, and those who seek to maintain their security in relation to this world – nations like North Korea, for example.  To ensure a secure boundary for appropriated land entails the production of technologies that will deter others from making a grab for it. In other words, boundaries. In this sense, the spy satellite is a contemporary standard form of boundary establishment generated on a global rather than terrestrial scale.

Meanwhile, in Israel/Palestine boundaries of a more ancient kind were erected. Israel constructed a fence to pen in the Gaza Palestinians. But this fence proved catastrophically inadequate. This was not because of sophisticated technological subversion, however, but rather because of the violent invasion of land by humans.

In this sense, the conflict in Israel/Palestine brings together the pre-modern and modern, the post-terrestrial and the terrestrial. Israel’s folly has been to attempt to live like a globalized nation in a region that is still trapped in a feud over land, trapped in a way of dwelling on earth - of being human - that is ancient, and has been kept alive through the bungling of modern leaders.

*

But however awful the conflict in Israel /Palestine is, in a weird sense it is actually reassuring on a certain level, in the sense that it is enacting a very familiar kind of struggle over the appropriation of land based on historical precedent, religious justification, and political compromises. With climate change, the conflict between the global and the local will become even more tense. It is transforming the land upon which people dwell, forcing many of them to migrate and causing perpetual conflicts over dwelling rights. We will be seeing lots more violent struggles over land use because of the pressures of climate change, but they won’t be rooted in evident history like the one in Israel/Palestine.

As Bruno Latour writes in Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime, , in order to effectively confront climate change we need “to be able to succeed in carrying out two complementary movements that the ordeal of modernization has made contradictory: attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil on the one hand, having access to the global world on the other. Up to now…. such an operation has been considered impossible: between the two, it is said, one has to choose. It is this apparent contradiction that current history may be bringing to an end.’

NOTES

The Guardian article can be accessed at:  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/north-korea-claims-spy-satellite-has-photographed-white-house-and-pentagon

The Bruno Latour quote is from Down To Earth. Poltics in the New Climatic Regime (Polity, 2018), p.12 

Murderous keys to history

The bomb shelter in our village near the DMZ.

Recently (November 14), BBC News on-line ran an article headlined ‘South Korea fears Hamas-style attack from the North’. It began: ‘On Sunday, when South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol hosted US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin at his home for dinner, he urged Mr Austin to be vigilant against any type of North Korean attack, including surprise assaults "resembling Hamas-style tactics".’

We who live near to the DMZ like to joke that people living and working in Seoul are more endangered by North Korea than we are, that we’ll watch the missiles flying high over our heads, aiming at targets in the densely populated metropolis. And anyway, as you can see from the photograph at the start of today’s blog, there’s a handy bomb shelter just one hundred meters from our house.  But this shelter probably wouldn’t be much protection against marauding North Korean soldiers if, for some extraordinary reason, all the many South Korean soldiers garrisoned around here took their time arriving to project us. But in such darkly ‘propitious’ circumstances, would the North Koreans set about wreaking in our village such ghastly vengeance on me, my wife, and all my neighbours – the children, pregnant women, elderly, their pets -  as Hamas did in Israel? This is more than just a macabre thought-experiment, because it helps foreground what is specific about the worldview of Hamas. These North Korean soldiers will certainly have been conditioned to hate South Koreans (and a British citizen whose nation supported the Republic of Korea during the Korean War and has done so ever since),  but will they act with such extreme and calculated savagery as the Hamas militants did in Israel?  Will they record their deeds on social media? Does the ‘alternative’ reality which the North Korean soldiers inhabit also put them beyond the rules of war respected by open societies and inscribed in UN charters?

*

Hamas and the North Korean Communist Party are vastly different political organizations, but both are variants of totalizing forms of ideology. Increasingly, however, in Israel/Palestine two rival and implacably hostile totalizing religious ideologies confront each other: Islamic fundamentalism and Zionist settler fundamentalism. These ideologies offer to believers a reality tailored to  achieve the illusion of absolute control of time - the past, present, and future –  and of space - both physical or profane and sacred.  As Hannah Arendt observed in the late 1940s in relation to what she called ‘totalitarianism’, this kind of ideology “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."  

Absolute faith in possessing the ‘key to history’ is what unites the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas and the Zionist settlers with the so-called ‘communist’ system of North Korea. They all share the belief that they have been empowered to see the inescapable future. They believe they possess the secrets of prophecy. Totalism breeds and sustains a mindset founded on the wilful absence of alternatives, on the compulsory, the single-minded, and on autosuggestion, in that the prophesy is apparently self-fulfilling.

Let’s stop for a moment to consider how we - by which I mean those of us lucky to be able to say in public that we are liberal free-thinkers - differ from these fanatics. What do we take for granted when we reflect on the relationship between the past, present, and future?

Unlike members of Hamas, Zionist settlers, or card-carrying members of the North Korean Communist Party, we assume that life is ambiguous and multi-layered. We accept that any potential actions we take respond to meanings that exist on several historical dimensions.  More or less articulately, we think about the short- middle- and long-term. The short-term involves the succession of the before and after that constrain our everyday actions, which means any prognosis we might make about the world is bound situationally. The middle-term turns our attention to trends deriving from the course of events into which enter many factors beyond our control or that of our group or ‘tribe’ as acting subjects.  This means we take into account transpersonal conditions.  On the long-term plane we factor in ‘metahistorical’ duration, that is, certain anthropological constants that resist or elude the historical pressures of change, and so do not respond to immediate political pressures in the present.

The believer caught in the iron grip of a totalizing system does not see the world like this at all. Emboldened by faith in the capacity to prophetically foretell the future, they willingly accept the absence of alternatives and work to conform events to their prior belief-system. This means they reject any view of their situation based on an understanding of short-term succession that constrains everyday actions. They do not see themselves as bound situationally. They also reject middle-term trends. The only transpersonal conditions they believe in are those that conform to the shape of the prophecy.  This prophecy also determines the structure of the long-term plane of anthropological constants; in a religious ideology, human destiny is uniquely tied to the demands of a deity, or in non-religious ideologies, in deity-like humans, such as the Kim dynasty in the DPRK who rule by a kind of supra-human ‘divine right’.

But, of course, there is a fundamental difference between the ideology of Hamas and Zionism on the one side, and the DPRK on the other: the influence of monotheistic religion.   But while the religiously centered worldviews of Hamas and Zionism share these common roots in religious tradition, Hamas is far more radical. Like other Islamic fundamentalist movements, such as ISIS, Hamas believes in violent jihad – Holy War. Followers consider that the teachings of Islam contained in the sacred texts legitimize, indeed glorify, attacks on non-believers, and that the only just future goal is the global establishment of the Islamic caliphate. As such, all means justify the achievement of this single future. In fact, there is no limit to the actions permissible in the present in order to reach this desired end, which also entails the greatest of rewards for those who take up jihad: a believer who dies during jihad is cast as a martyr who goes directly to paradise – Jannah.  The ‘infidels’ they slay, meanwhile, have been rewarded with what God wants for them:  eternal damnation in Hell - Jahannam.

 *

As many commentators on the left indicate, the state of Israel is in danger of becoming what they call an ‘apartheid’ nation governed by Zionist totalizing ideology. But for the time being, at least, it remains a democracy within which, during the vengeful assault on Gaza, attempts are credibly (and often futilely) made to act according to the rules of war. In his ‘Making Sense’ podcast Sam Harris proposes we try a sobering thought-experiment.  We know that Islamic fundamentalists are willing to use their own people – other Muslims – as human shields.  In some senses, this is precisely what Hamas is doing now in Gaza. What if Israel tried the same tactic?  What if their soldiers rested their gun barrels on the shoulders of Israeli children or set up a command post under a hospital? What would Hamas fighters do? The answer is as obvious as it is terrifying: all the Israelis would be massacred. However dreadfully compromised Israel’s position is today, it’s leadership – even the extremist Zionists - still find using human shields to be beyond the ethical pale.  Hamas and other Islamic fundamentalist movements do not.  

Back in the late 1940s, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism was limited to political ideologies. In that period, religion really did seem to have lost its influence over politics. But since the end of the Cold War it has become obvious that religion definitely remains a significant and divisive force. This is a fact that commentators on the left seem reluctant to acknowledge. But now we are being forced to recognize the limits of the secular mindset in understanding glabal conflicts. Treating the struggle in Israel/Palestine as primarily about  ‘decolonization’, about an ‘apartheid’ behemoth crushing a defenseless and displaced people,   is to apply an optic that is  dangerously narrowly secular and Western. For example, the slur ‘apartheid’, derives from the racist and secular system imposed for a period by whites on blacks in South Africa.  Historically, that system did not entail religiously motivated racism or establish itself on a global and radically exclusionary vision of society.  Its a critical template that seems viable to a secular culture, but it fails to recognize the significance of the religious dimension to the conflict.  

As Sam Harris emphasizes, it is almost impossible for secular Westerners to grasp just how different this worldview of the jihadist or Islamic fundamentalist is, and how totally the true believer embraces its core tenets. Harris notes that especially we liberals on the left often bend over backwards to try to rationally analyze these people’s beliefs and actions according to the narrow humanist criteria bequeathed to us by Western humanist sociology and anthropology. What we fail to understand is how totally their worldview is at odds with and premised on the total rejection of our own worldview.

This is why calling the brutal assault by Israel on Gaza ‘genocide’ fails to describe that is taking place. ‘Genocide’ is defined as the deliberate killing of large numbers of people of an ethic or national group. Israel isn’t deliberately killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But there is no doubt that its thirst for revenge has made it insensitive to the costs its revenge entails, and blind to the seemingly obvious fact that violence will always be met by more violence.

The situation in Israel/Palestine is so tragically complex that making any kind of  valid prognosis on the basis of the short-term is almost impossible – for example, a political solution is essential but, right now, it looks impossible. The mass protests against Israel taking place worldwide - including in Seoul - are mired in seeing the crisis only in the short-term view. But things look bleak on the mid-term level; so many interpersonal and impersonal agents are involved – not just the Israelis and Palestinians and their intertwined histories.  And if we attempt to rise above the bloody fray and take in the long-term view, what do we see?  Unfortunately, nothing very encouraging. Just the tragic truth that eventually implacable rivals who are trapped in the spiral of revenge lose the will to fight and learn to co-exist in peace.  

*

Which brings me back to the chances of us, here near the DMZ, being gruesomely tortured before being killed, Hamas-style, by marauding North Korean soldiers. One thing for certain, the North Korean invaders wouldn’t be sharing their vile actions on WhatsApp and Facebook using our phones, for the simple reason that they won’t know how to use the technology, and anyway, no one back home could answer their calls.  But to end on a less facetious note;  the ideology within which the North Korean soldiers live and breathe may be repellent to the values of the open society, but it does not glorify sadistic violence against  religious non-believers and those of us who have rejected religion entirely. Jihadist violent antipathy to the world makes the so-called Juche ideology of the DPRK seem relatively – I stress ‘relatively’ - anodyne. It is familiar, and not so hard to encompass within our own Western worldview. Jihadism, by contrast, is wholly other. But more than that: it is a self-consciously adopted position premised on the destruction of its own other, which is not just we liberals but anyone who doesn’t share their extreme interpretation of Islam.  Co-existence is therefore not an option. This is why a ceasefire isn’t a viable option.

North Korean soldiers do not believe that when they commit atrocities and then die fighting that  they will  be rewarded for their crimes by going straight to Paradise. That any children they murder, because they are innocent in Allah’s eyes have been fast-tracked to paradise, and that I and everyone else they get their murderous hands on, will roast for ever in Hell.  This, I suppose, is some kind of cold comfort.

NOTES

The BBC article can be read at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67411657

The Hannah Arendt quotation is from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

Sam Harris’ excellent Making Sense podcast on this subject can be heard at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBm8nQ2aBo

I draw for my discussion of short- mid- and long-term thinking about time and history on Reinhart Koselleck’s  The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, translated by Todd Samuel Presner and Others (Stanford University Press, 2002) Chapter 8.

Decay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

 NOTES

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

Mimicking America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

Fences

A DMZ fence (actually, two fences).. Photographed from my car while driving along a stretch of the ‘Freedom Highway’ not far from my home where the DMZ’s southern limit borders the South Korean mainland.. Across the Han estuary is North Korea.

I live near a fence - actually, several fences - that have been erected to defend South Korea from North Korean aggression. People have asked if the current terrible escalation in the conflict between Hamas and the state of Israel, which began when Hamas forces breached the fence dividing Gaza from Israel, has provoked in me any specific reactions concerning the wisdom of living near a border separating sworn enemies - in close proximity to what Bill Clinton once called “the most dangerous place on Earth”.

*

Obviously, there are major physical, contextual, historical, and ethical differences between the Gaza fence and the DMZ fence. For example, the Gaza fence isn’t a national border. It’s a stop-gap measure first devised by Israel in 1994 to serve as a security barrier, and is one physical dimension of the wider confrontation with Palestinians seeking their own state. Specifically, the 60 kilometer-long fence was erected to protect Israeli citizens from Hamas attacks,  the militant faction of the Palestinian leadership that controls the Gaza Strip and has declared itself willing to do whatever it takes to reclaim all of Palestine from Israel. The Korean Demilitarized Zone was also a stop-gap measure created in 1953 at the cessation of hostilities between the two belligerent versions of modern-day Korea. As a peace treaty wasn’t signed, the DMZ was intended to make a new invasion by either side as difficult as possible, thereby guaranteeing a higher degree of security for the citizens of both Koreas, who belong to states that are rival claimants to the legitimate rule of the entire Korean peninsula.

Physically, there are major differences between the two fences.  The latest and most formidable version of the Gaza fence, the so-called ‘Iron Wall’, was completed in 2021. As the Washington Post wrote on October 10th:

The project was publicly announced in 2016 after Hamas used underground tunnels to attack Israeli forces in the 2014 war. It required more than 140,000 tons of iron and steel, according to Reuters, and the installation of hundreds of cameras, radars and sensors. Access near the fence on the Gaza side was limited to farmers on foot. On the Israeli side, observation towers and sand dunes were put in place to monitor threats and slow intruders.

Disastrously, however, as we now all know, on October 7th this ‘Iron Wall’ was rather easily breached at 29 points, and Hamas fighters encountered little resistance from the IDF once they were through because most of  its units were deployed  to control unrest on the West Bank, and so were able to go on a murderous rampage.  Israel was obviously far too confident that one 20-foot-high fence with a concrete base, observation towers, obstructive sand dunes, and advanced surveillance technology would offer sufficient protection for its citizens. As the Washington Post reported, Matthew Levitt, director of the counter-terrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, remarked sanguinely: “It’s still just a fence. A big fence, but just a fence.” The Israelis were well aware that a proportion of the people on the other side of this fence were committed to extreme violence to achieve their goal, which is nothing less than the annihilation of the state of Israel. Furthermore, the fence effectively turned Gaza into an open-air prison, thereby inevitably stoking the fires of anger, frustration, and resentment. It was clearly wishful thinking on Israel’s part to believe a fence would provide viable security, and a massive strategic blunder that has had tragic consequences.

At 248 kilometers long, the DMZ possesses the world’s longest barbed-wire fence.  But if it was only one tall and long fence – even a fence augmented by watchtowers and surveillance technology -  people in South Korea wouldn’t feel as secure as they do and for so long. In fact, there are multiple fences on both sides of the official border, which is called the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) that runs down the middle of a  wide buffer zone no-man’s-land between the two Koreas. This is four kilometer wide – 2 kilometers on both sides - and neither the North nor the South Korean armies are permitted within this zone, which is patrolled by the UN, who cautiously avoid stepping on or driving over the one million plus landmines buried within.  Sometimes, due to natural topographic barriers, such as bodies of water – for example, on Ganghwa Island, which I mentioned visiting in a recent post, or next to the highway along which I was driving in the photograph illustrating this past - the width of the DMZ narrows. Some areas, like near where we live,  have double or triple fences and layers of concertina wire. But this isn’t all: there’s also the Civilian Control Zone (CCZ), a stretch of land that lies between the DMZ and the Civilian Control Line (CCL) which restricts public access in areas  of South Korea adjacent to the DMZ. In some areas, the CCL stretches 10km south of the MDL. On the other side of the border, North Korea has similar multiple layers of defense.

The DMZ. Note how close Seoul is to the border. The photograph at the beginning of this post was taken in a region to the northwest of Seoul, next to the sea. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#/media

But even with this impressive barrier in place, intrepid people from both sides have still tried to get through – or under – the DMZ since 1953. There are four incursion tunnels dug by the North which South Korea know about, but it is believed there are as many as twenty more undiscovered ones! The so-called Third Tunnel is quite near us. It was located in 1978 in an incomplete state and is 1,635 meters long. Perhaps because it’s so close, I haven’t visited it, but I have gone down the Second Tunnel, which is  further north-east near the town of Cheorwon. Here, because the tunnel is very cramped, you must wear a protective helmet, and as I’m tall  it was quite a squeeze for me. For North Korean male soldiers, who (as I mentioned in a previous post) now have an average height that is as much as 8cm shorter than their South Korean counterparts, it would  no doubt have been somewhat easier going. This tunnel was revealed in early 1975 by  South Korean guards  who heard the sound of explosions deep underground. The total length is 3.5km. 

But amazingly, people can even successfully cross the DMZ above ground. Not so long ago, a North Korean soldier defected by swimming one stretch. On February 17th 2021 the Korea Herald noted:

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) announced, Tuesday, that the North Korean was caught in the Civilian Control Line (CCL) in the eastern border town of Goseong, Gangwon Province, earlier that day…… The JCS added that he likely swam south near the Unification Observatory and passed through a drainage tunnel located at the bottom of an iron fence on the inter-Korean border.

Even though surveillance cameras spotted the North Korean multiple times after he came ashore, the military failed to take appropriate action, while the drainage tunnel was also poorly equipped to prevent infiltrations. The North Korean was taken into custody following a three-hour manhunt after he was first spotted by surveillance cameras at a checkpoint. He is currently being questioned by investigators. The man in his 20s reportedly expressed an intention to defect to the South.

*

The DMZ and the Gaza fence are present-day descendants of historical physical obstructions or barriers that were erected in attempts to secure and maintain regions of peace in times of endemic and internecine war. The most famous of all is, of course, the Great Wall of China, which is over 21, 000 kilometers long and was began over 3000 years ago.  Its function was to keep out miscellaneous ‘barbarians.’ In Britain, in the north of the country bordering what is now Scotland, we have the remnants of Hadrian’s Wall, which is approximately 140 kilometers long and was constructed about 2000 years ago to protect the inhabitants of the Roman province of Britannia.

Like these ancient walls (back then, metal fences weren’t an option),  the Gaza fence and the DMZ are ostensibly defensive. They have been built to increase the possibilities of peaceful existence for the builders and the people under their jurisdiction in situations where neighbours are regularly intent on violent incursion or full-scale invasion. The Gaza fence was meant to protect Israel against militant insurgencies from Gaza, while the DMZ defends citizens of both North and South Korea against attack.

But the situations are actually more complex in both instances. As already noted, an additional consequence of the Gaza fence was to turn the Gaza Strip into an open-air prison for those living on the inside. The tragically fatal flaw that led to the  breaching of Israel’s ‘Iron Wall’ was that it is actually also offensive, a weapon of destruction in the form of an obstruction. The DMZ, meanwhile, has permitted the leaders of North Korea to turn their country into an open-air prison for its citizens. In fact, for some time now, the DMZ looks more like a barrier erected to  prevent the free movement of North Koreans -  like the Berlin Wall was for East Germans – rather than one that protects North Korea from invasion.

*

Thanks to Hamas barbarism and now Israel’s vengeful response, we’ve all be reminded that given the chance, homo homini lupus est: man is wolf to man. Which is one way of explaining why, unfortunately, we will always need long tall fences.

NOTES

The Washington Post article can be read at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/10/how-hamas-entered-israel/

The Korea Herald article can be read at: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/10/113_304191.html

The map of the DMZ is from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#/media

For my previous blog post on Ganghwa Island and the DMZ, see: https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/a-view-of-the-north

For my previous blog post on the average height of Koreans, see: https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/a-nation-of-racist-dwarfs

What does an acorn look like?

Some acorns harvested from different species of oak tree around my home near the DMZ.

Recently, my neighbour in our village near the DMZ had hundreds of acorns laid out in front of his house in preparation for being soaked so the bitter tannins are leached away to make acorn powder for the jelly called dotori-mok.  As I mentioned in a previous post from this time last year, acorn jelly is very popular over here.  It’s very nutritious. A few days ago, a colleague of my wife’s assured her that it’s renowned for helping lower blood pressure. So, in today’s post I will indulge my interest in the oak tree again, and in the second part I’ll share some fascinating European oak ‘politics’.

*

In Korean, to describe what we call the oak tree they often say 참나무, cham namu, which literally translates as ‘true tree’ , but also 떡갈 나무, tteoggal namu, which generically refers to all native species of oak tree but is actually the name of one species, Quercus dentata. My neighbour’s acorns probably came from Quercus Acutissima, aka the sawtooth oak, Quercus dentata, aka the sweet oak or daiymo oak, or Quercus aliena, aka oriental white oak or galcham oak, which are common around here. Dentata is less common, as is the generally most common of all the oaks in Korea - Quercus mongolica, the Mongolian oak.

I doubt Europeans and North Americans would recognize most of the nuts and cups gathered in the photo above as belonging to oak trees.   Take a look at four:

Clockwise from top left are acutissima, dentata, mongolica and aliena..

As you can see, the acorn cups of the top two are very different from those of the two most common oaks that were familiar to me and anyone else living in north-western Europe,  which are Quercus petraea, the sessile oak,  and Quercus robur, the pedunculate or common oak (or, as it’s proprietorially known where I come from, the English oak):

On the left here are the acorns of the sessile oak, and at top right of the pedunculate. They are identical, except for the latter having stalks (or peduncules). Source: oak.https://www.gardensillustrated.com/plants/trees/how-to-identify-oak-trees.

Of the six main native species of oak in Korea, only Quercus aliena has acorn cups quite similar to those of European oaks, while Quercus mongolica looks like a more rugged version. Korean and European oaks are also very different in tree structure, bark, and leaf form, but both are also very different from the oaks native to North Americans. So, it’s interesting to consider that although an English person and an American both will say or write ‘oak tree’ and assume they’re referring to the same thing, they’re almost certainly visualizing distinctly different-looking trees.  

*

Speaking of Europe, I’ve discovered that the oak tree is interestingly implicated within a complex web of modern-day ideological confrontation and war. 

For example, it came as a shock to learn that the Nazis had a special thing about the oak tree. At the beginning of the twentieth century the German nation’s nature-protection movement was more developed than anywhere else and recognizing that the oak in particular bore the special imprint of German history, German culture, and German habits, attitudes, and tastes. The National Socialists exploited this native love of the forest, and of the oak tree in particular. The Hitler Youth badge of honour contained oak leaves, and its Wandervogel wing of weekend hikers was in some ways a precursor to today’s Forest Schools and other organization which combine education and immersion in nature.  The Party’s motto was blut unt boden (“blood and soil”), and the heady myth of the wild untameable forest as the mystical source of the German Volk’s racial strength and purity was vigorously promoted. The Nazis celebrated the pantheistic dreams of the German Romantic poets, the artist Caspar David Friedrich’s moody paintings of death-haunted winter trees, and the composer Wagner’s Teutonic melodramatic operas, which often have forest settings.  Their propaganda machine even claimed that the briefcase bomb intended to kill Hitler, which was planted by a group of dissident German officers in July 1943, failed to kill its target thanks to the protection afforded by a sturdy German oak table.  

The Nazi’s love of the oak tree also explains why one year-old saplings were presented to the gold medalists at the notorious Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. Interestingly, the choice was not the sessile oak, the dominant species throughout Germany, but the pedunculate, aka the English oak. But the symbolism of the ‘‘Olympic’ or ‘Hitler oaks’ didn’t quite have the intended effect.  Jesse Owens, the African-American athlete who put paid to the Nazi’s Aryan vision of racial athletic superiority by winning spectacularly at the Games, came home with three saplings, one of which is today growing healthily beside Rhodes High School in Cleveland, where Owens trained. 

Jesse Owens with his three Hitler oak sapling. Source :https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/owens-medals 

At How Hill on the UK’s Norfolk Broads there’s a very odd-looking oak tree stump with a yacht carved at the top and the famous symbol of the Olympic Games etched in black onto its side. This is all that now remains today of a Hitler oak planted by the British Olympic yachting team’s helmsman Christopher Boardman: 

Source: http://www.tournorfolk.co.uk/howhill/hitlertree.jpg

As the Nazi’s exploitation of the German people’s affections for the oak tree demonstrates, like many other things in the twentieth century a tree could become an ideological freighted symbol enlisted to further a cause. The German nature myths, the deep-rooted idea that the forest is the shadowy counterpoint to the domesticated values of society and exposes its vulnerability and artificiality, could be perverted with terrible consequences.  

Sometimes the oak tree would be witness to terrible acts of human barbarism; during the Second World War the dense foliage of the great oaks of the primordial forest of Poland, for example, hid places where Jews were shot by German forces and buried in mass graves. And within the dark depths of these same vast eastern European forests, resistance fighters withdrew then suddenly emerged to harry the invading Germans.

Fortunately, the oak could also become a potent anti-Nazi symbol.  In central France in the Forest of Tronçais, near where I have a house, one of the veteran oaks (born around 1640) is today called ‘Chêne de la Résistance’ (The Resistance Tree). But it used to be called ‘The Maréchal Pétain Oak’ in honour of Philippe Pétain, the ruler of the Unoccupied Zone or Vichy France, the notorious regime that collaborated with the Nazis, and under whose jurisdiction the forest was placed at that time. The tree-naming ceremony  in 1940 was held in the leader’s presence, as this archival photograph commemorating the event shows:

 Source: https://zerotrois.fr/baignereau/troncais/resistance

Pétain  was back in the forest again in 1942 visiting the large camps located there of chantiers de jeunesse, a compulsory youth movement similar to the Hitler Youth that required young Frenchmen in the Unoccupied Zone to serve patriotically for a period of time.  But some of the local woodcutters didn’t like having a tree named after the Vichy leader, and  in February 1944, several months before D-Day, three of them scaled the wire protecting the tree, then one climbed the perfectly straight trunk to remove the plaque saying ‘Chêne Maréchal Pétain’, replacing it by a sign that said, “Chêne Gabriel Péri Patriote français fusillé par les nazis” (‘The Gabriel Péri French Patriot Shot by the Nazis Oak’).  Péri was a prominent communist journalist, politician, and member of the Resistance movement.  The woodcutters also adorned the plaque with a huge red bow tie, made from a scarf and tied to the tree with barbed wire. Their rebellious intervention didn’t last long, of course, and it actually took almost forty years before the  tree was officially renamed the ‘Chêne de la Résistance. En Souvenir de l‘acte de 13 Février 1944’, which is what you can see today if you visit the tree:

Source: https://lestetardsarboricoles.fr/wordpress/2016/05/17/le-chene-de-la-resistance-en-foret-de-troncais-allier/

NOTES

My previous posts on oaks and acorns:

https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/acorn-for-dinner

https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/acorns

An excellent book that explores the complex relationship between the oak, the forest, and culture is: Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory. Especially interesting is Chapter 2:

https://www.amazon.com/Landscape-Memory-Simon-Schama/dp/0679735127

A view of the North

North Korea seen from the Ganghwa Peace Observatory..

I recently visited Ganghwado Jejeokbong Peace Observatory, which is in the northern area of the Civilian Restricted Zone that abuts the DMZ. From the observatory, you can see the Democratic People’s Republic just 2 km way across the estuary.  

The Observatory entrance.

A guide gives a talk in front of a model of the area.

Ganghwa is an island, and not far from where I live. But as you can see from this map it’s necessary to take a sizeable detour via Gimpo due to the  restrictions imposed by the DMZ. The blue pointer is the location of the Observatory and the X is where we live. The dotted line is the border. Note how close this is to Seoul!

There was quite a lot of fighting around Ganghwado during the Korean War, but there’s also an interesting back story, linking it to an earlier violent period, and one that serves to put things in a wider historical context.

Determined to force the Korean government to end its isolationism, an armed American merchant schooner named the SS General Sherman sailed for Korea in 1866. The owner was hoping to open Joseon to trade, just as another American, Commodore Perry, had successfully done in Japan in 1853. But the crew outraged the locals, forcibly breaching the promulgation made by the government that forbade any contact with foreigners.  The crew where murdered and the ship caught fire and sank after it sailed into the Taedong River  which flows through Pyongyang. 

In 1871 the so-called United States Expedition to Korea was initiated with the intention of finding out what had happened to the Sherman and to make a show of strength that would force Joseon into ending its ‘closed doors’ policy. The ‘show of strength’ was made predominantly on and around Ganghwa Island.    The American stormed the fortresses there,  and in the end over 200 Korean Soldiers were killed.  But if the United States had hoped this show of military muscle would persuade the Koreans, it totally failed. The governed refused to negotiate and even strengthened the policy of isolation.

But the writing was on the wall.  In fact, it was Japan that sealed Joseon’s fate. In 1868 the Meiji government had asked for diplomatic relations with Joseon, which were rejected. Like the United States,  Japan then staged in 1875 an armed protest using a warship , and then pressed the kingdom to open its ports. The Treaty of Ganghwa was signed in February 1876. By 1905 Japan had deprived  Joseon of its diplomatic sovereignty and made it protectorate. In 1910 it was annexed and became a colony. This tutelage endured until imperial Japan’s defeat in 1945.

American servicemen stand atop one of the forts on Ganghwa Island after its capture. 1871.

Not surprising, the North Korean regime milks the propaganda value of the sinking of the General Sherman, holding rallies in front of a monument dedicated to the killing of Americans and the ship’s sinking. The monument is close to where the USS Pueblo is anchored - the U.S. Navy intelligence ship captured while in the East Sea in January 1968.

*

I have to say North Korea looked rather bucolic from the Ganghwa Observatory. Very unspoilt.  Through a telescope you can even zoom in on farmers working in the fields and soldiers on patrol.  Perhaps because I’d recently been stuck in horrendous traffic near Seoul and obliged to drive at a snail’s pace along a polluted highways flanked by rank upon rank of ugly tower blocks, I was struck by a huge irony.

Ecologically speaking, North Korea’s carbon footprint is tiny compared to its competitor to the south. Carbon dioxide emissions are estimated to be about 56.38 million metric tons in 2021 in North Korea. Its GHG emissions peaked in the early 1990s, and according to UN statistics, have declined by roughly 70% since 1993. As a result, North Korean CO2 emissions account for only 0.15% of global emissions. In 2020, the greenhouse gases emitted in South Korea totalled 656.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. An average person produces 13.5 tons of greenhouse gases per year.

What does this suggest?  Is a totalitarian regime that brutally curbs the freedom of its populace, and due to basic energy shortages is obliged to turn off the lights at night, the kind of state best styled to ensure we reach the target of Net Zero in 2030?   Is North Korea a role-model for balancing greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere by removing them from the atmosphere? 

Of course not!  What the view from the observatory does not show us the fact that North Korea is suffering total environmental collapse. An obvious sign of this is the contrast between the densely wooded hills in the South and the barren one’s you can see across the DMZ.

The following is an account of a visit made by Western scientists back in 2013 when it was still possible to go there:

 ‘When ecologist Margaret Palmer visited North Korea, she didn’t know what to expect, but what she saw was beyond belief. From river’s edge to the tops of hills, the entire landscape was lifeless and barren. Villages were little more than hastily constructed shantytowns where residents wore camouflage netting, presumably in preparation for a foreign invasion they feared to be imminent. Emaciated looking farmers tilled the earth with plows pulled by oxen and trudged through half-frozen streams to collect nutrient-rich sediments for their fields. “We went to a national park where we saw maybe one or two birds, but other than that you don’t see any wildlife,” Palmer says.

“The landscape is just basically dead,” adds Dutch soil scientist Joris van der Kamp. “It’s a difficult condition to live in, to survive.”

Palmer and Van der Kamp were part of an international delegation of scientists invited by the government of North Korea and funded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to attend a recent conference on ecological restoration in the long-isolated country. Through site visits and presentations by North Korean scientists they witnessed a barren landscape that is teetering on collapse, ravaged by decades of environmental degradation.

“There are no branches of trees on the ground,” Van der Kamp says. “Everything is collected for food or fuel or animal food, almost nothing is left for the soil. We saw people mining clay material from the rivers in areas that had been polished by ice and warming their hands along the roadside by small fires from the small amounts of organic bits they could find.

Since 2013 things have only gotten worse., North Korea has seen its longest drought and rainy seasons in over a century. Kim Jong Un and his cronies make  appropriate noises,  calling for immediate steps to counteract the impact of climate change. But it’s hopeless. After all, they spend all their money on armaments.

Which is to all just to say that appearances can be deceptive. I hate the way South Korea’s race to become a modern ‘developed’ capitalist nation has devastated the country’s environment, brutally slicing it up with highways and herding people into tower block ghettos. But I’m certainly glad I live here rather than across that 2 km stretch of water that laps against Ganghwa island.

 NOTES

The archive photo from 1871 is from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_expedition_to_Korea#/media/File:Ganghwa_3-edit.jpg

The quote is from: ‘Inside North Korea's Environmental Collapse. Scientists who recently visited the hermit nation report the situation is dire’, by Philip McKenna. Nova. March 7, 2013, available at: 

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/inside-north-koreas-environmental-collapse/

Immune System. East and West

Covid certainly isn’t going away. Friends and colleagues both here in Korea and in the UK recently have been or are currently unwell with the virus. I’ve had it twice. Will I make the hat-trick? So, although we are now acting as if the pandemic is over, it’s not. We’ve just normalized it, now we know the virus doesn’t represent an existential threat to our society. In the meantime, I’ve been hearing a lot about our ’immune system’. Don’t worry about face masks or vaccines. if you want to protect yourself against Covid just boost your immune system!

Wikipedia says:  ‘The immune system is a network of biological systems that protects an organism from diseases. It detects and responds to a wide variety of pathogens, from viruses to parasitic worms, as well as cancer cells and objects such as wood splinters, distinguishing them from the organism's own healthy tissue.’’

It seems to me that in the context of Covid (or any other potentially pandemic causing pathogen) we are wrong to just limit a useful notion of ‘immune system’ to the individual biological organism.  Although, as the definition demonstrates, the term obviously relates in a very concrete way to our own bodies and refers to a system that where the hair follicles  and skin create a boundary between us and the outside world, we would surely do well to recognize how our distinct corporeal body is inevitably connected to the wider environment, both human and non-human. So, really, we should be conceiving of the ‘immune system’ in systemic terms, that is, as referring to a network of which our own individual  biological immune system is just one integral part.

But whenever people say ‘boosting the immune system’ they only seem to mean their own. As if they exist in a bubble.  I would wager Westerners are more prone to this very limited notion than Koreans and other East Asians, or people who live in more collectively rather than individualistically oriented societies. 

One way of understanding how this might be true is to consider the distinction made by the philosopher Charles Taylor (whom I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion) between the ‘buffered self’ and a ‘porous self’. Taylor limits himself only to the historical analysis of Europeans, arguing that there has been a shift from the pre-modern ‘porous self’ who is conceived as being interrelated with others and the world, to the modern ‘buffered self’, which has more autonomy, and acts as if a separate and discrete individual entity.. A cross-cultural version of this is suggested by another philosopher, Thomas Kasulis,  who argues  that there are two ways of being in the world – what he calls the ‘analytical’ and integral’ (West), the other the ‘holistic’ and ‘intimate’ (East Asian). These terms emphasize the difference between the idea of an autonomous, individualized conception of the self, and one that is more interdependently conceived. Obviously, these self-representations are not rigidly culturally distinct. In our globalized world they are converging and blurring to produce new ways of being. In Korea, its clear that the individualistic ‘buffered’ ‘integrated’ self is fast superseding the more traditional, and Confucian, ‘porous’ self, or perhaps blending to become something between ‘porous’ and ‘buffered’. A ‘filtered self’, perhaps?

 I’ve already discussed in my blog how this  this distinction impacted on attitudes to face masks. It might aslo help explain variations in ideas about ‘immunity’. An ‘integral’ self would limit the idea to the physical or  biological body, while the ‘intimate’ self would more readily extend any notion of ‘immunity’ to the transpersonal. If you consider that your ‘immune system’ extends to the social body, not just your own body, then it would be ridiculous to only talk about making sure you  take exercise, eat citrus fruits, spinach, almonds, papaya, and green tea, and get enough vitamin A, C, D, and E, and selenium and zinc. These are important, of course, but you wouldn’t stop at concerns that are limited to what lies within the boundary of your own body. When you thought of ensuring effective immunity you would want to make sure you were linking your own immunity to that of others by, for example, wearing a mask and getting vaccinated..

NOTES

The image in today’s post is from: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320101

 The Wiklipedia quote is from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_system

 I refer to:

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2018)

Thomas Kasulis, Intimacy and Integrity. Philosophy and Cultural Difference (University of Hawaii Press, 2002)

‘Kim the Bulletproof Tank Engine’

As a child in the sixties I enjoyed reading a series of books about Thomas the Tank Engine. In colourful illustrations and simple words they told of the charming antics of anthropomorphized locomotives as they criss-crossed Britain.. Thomas and his locomotive friends remain classics, and the series is very much still in print, and I couldn’t help thinking of Thomas and co. when I read the news about Kim Jong-un’s visit to Russia, which is still on-going as I write this post.

For the tin-pot despot has his own personal bulletproof train that is so heavily armoured it can travel no faster than 37 mph. It’s a rather natty dark green with yellow trim. Here it is shown chugging through North Korea:

And here is Thomas the Tank Engine:

By coincidence Thomas first appeared in the second book in the series, published in 1946 (the first came out in 1945). That means it was published the same time that in far away Korea Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. Kim Il Sung, was put in place by Stalin to eventually become, in 1948, the ruler of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It therefore seems oddly appropriate that a regime that’s essentially stuck in a time-warp back in that epoch should be using such a characterful locomotive so evocative of those times in the 2020’s.

I think it would be nice to write an up-dated locomotion story called Kim the Bulletproof Tank Engine. But I doubt it would have the kind of happy ending to make it a children’s classic, although maybe today’s children are inherently more cynical than my generation. I don’t believe that for a minute, by the way! Thankfully, children are always born optimists and stay that way for a remarkably long time..

*

The news that Putin and Kim were meeting in Vladivostock led me to wonder yet again about their people’s credulity and compliance - their willingness to support or at least tolerate despotism. As I’ve already discussed in previous posts, an obvious explanation is fear. Protest carries a very high price, especially in North Korea. But it seems wrong to believe that the citizens of Russia and North Korea all live in abject fear. The evidence suggests they do not. One explanation is that a sufficient number are given a small bite from the cherry of power. The residents of Pyongyang, for instance, have a relatively secure standard of living. The story is very different in the provinces. But as long as the cadres close to the leadership are seduced into loyalty through adequate material, cognitive, and emotional rewards, their obedience is guaranteed without brandishing a cudgel. The same seems to be the case in Russia. Another important explanation is the obvious fact is that most people are not heroes. All they want is to live their lives protected from the possibility of unbearable uncertainty, and it doesn’t really matter how the uncertainty is assuaged.

In fact, people will believe in the most ridiculous things in order to achieve the cherished sense of security. It might even be the case that the more ridiculous the belief is, the better. Both historically and today, millions believe in nonsense, and it certainly seems to make them less insecure. It might even be the case that the more a belief departs from what can be factually verified, the more secure people feel in embracing it. In other words, the leap of faith is a way of minimizing uncertainty.

*

The meeting between the two tin-pot dictators was a great media event. In fact, maybe that was its primary function. During the parts that were made public, they both spouted the usual bullshit.

But, really! How can Putin get away with calling the Ukrainian regime ‘Nazi’ or Kim talk of his regime as as ‘democracy’? It seems obvious to us in the ‘free world’ that these are grotesque lies. But apparently, many Russians and North Koreans believe. They believe because they are lies based on a historical truth.

What Putin has done by invoking Nazism is to draw on the collective and traumatic memory of real events and spun it into a web within which to capture Russian people’s fealty in the present.

This is possible because, as neurologists show, our minds deal not with the direct processing of stimuli but in predictions. That is, we deal with what we already believe to be the case. We draw on ‘priors’ - memories, habits, and social consensus - to make sense of the uncertainty of unfolding experience. Whenever something unfamiliar presents itself we feel it as a ‘prediction error’, and this is uncomfortable and potentially fear inducing. We reduce the force of this negative affect and emotion by doing one of three things: we bend the meaning of the stimulus so its conforms to what we already know; we ignore it altogether; or we struggle to adjust our prediction to accommodate the stimulus. The last option involves imaginative growth, experiential development, openness to surprise. The other two are instinctual responses that totalitarian regime lean on in order to maintain their grasp on power. They know that humans will either adjust a new experience so it conforms to experiences already safely processed, or that they will ignore the experience altogether. Either way, the result is to guarantee a remarkable level of social conformity rooted in very deep seated fear of existential uncertainty.

But there is an ultimately optimistic possibility to draw from the fact that Putin brandishes the ‘Nazi’ slur and Kim talks about ‘democracy’. It is that, seemingly paradoxically, even these monsters recognize that people are fundamentally good. People live with positive values that prioritise the desire for personal freedom and the flourishing of society. That’s why even when they are perpetrating crimes against humanity they are obliged to wrap their heinous deeds in noble attire. It is therefore unlikely that anyone will publicly describe their barbaric acts as barbaric.

However, the despots nevertheless end up naming their crimes through accusing their enemies of what they are themselves responsible. We can therefore hold the words despots speak up in a mirror so they are reflected back upon them. For, in accusing others of being, say, ‘Nazis’, Putin is actually very accurately naming his regime’s own crimes.

Try the mirror trick. This is text from a speech made by Putin when he ordered troops into Ukraine on February 24rd, 2022:

“Its goal is to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine, as well as bringing to justice those who committed numerous, bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation.”

And now, let’s hold these words up in the mirror, where it becomes something nearer to the truth:

“Its goal is to subject the people of Ukraine to bullying and genocide. And for this we will strive for the militarisation and nazification of Ukraine, as well as refusing to bring to justice those who committed numerous, bloody crimes against civilians.”

NOTES

The images of Kim’s train are sourced from : https://www.npr.org/2023/09/11/1198781448/kim-jong-un-vladimir-putin-meeting-north-korea-russia

The image of Thomas the Tank Engine is sourced from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Tank_Engine#/media/File:Thomas_the_Tank_Engine_1946.webp

For more on the mind and ‘prediction” see, Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty. Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press, 2016), available on Amazon at::

https://www.amazon.com/Surfing-Uncertainty-Prediction-Action-Embodied/dp/0190217014

The Putin quotation is taken from: https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/in-putins-words-why-russia-invaded-ukraine/

Just published ‘Modern Painting’!

I’m back in Korea, and finally over jetlag. Waiting for me when I got home were the author copies of my new book: Modern painting. A Concise History. It’s published by Thames & Hudson as part of their World of Art Series, and is available now in the UK and in October from Amazon.com.

Here is s a sneak preview of the Preface:

It may come as a surprise that the predecessor to the present book in the renowned World of Art series is Sir Herbert Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting, first published in 1959, revised by Read in 1968, and finally reprinted with an additional concluding chapter by Caroline Tisdall and William Feaver in 1974. Read’s history assumes without question the importance of painting, or at least some forms of painting, as a vitally ‘modern’ art medium. One of the reasons for the delay in the appearance of a new survey in the World of Art series is that around the time Read published his book, and certainly when it was revised, painting’s status fell into question. The experimental impetus driving art forward, the desire to innovate, seemed to have ended up producing blank canvases, or near enough. At the same time, painting as a medium was condemned by the artistic avant- garde as outdated and too much of a commercial product. Instead, various conceptual practices that were anything but paintings took centre stage. But times have changed. Within contemporary art, paintings in many, many styles have secured valued places alongside a host of other practices that embrace radically expanded ideas about art.

Read began his history with the French artist Paul Cézanne – that is, in the late nineteenth century. This new volume starts about one hundred years earlier, with the emergence of Romanticism in European art. Read’s choice was primarily motivated by the fact that for him the honour of being called a modern painter was only to be awarded to those who made certain kinds of paintings. He argued that it was not enough for an artist to ‘belong to the history of art in our time’ in order to be described as ‘modern’ in the specific way he defined it. His narrative drew a line between late nineteenth-century Post- Impressionism and what came before, as well as a line around types of painting associated with less innovative styles that did not reject the conventions of optical realism forged in the Renaissance. Read saw ‘modern’ art as being geared towards challenging these conventions and dedicated to perpetual innovation – with one style trumping and making redundant what came before as art moved inexorably towards what Read described as the goal of ‘making visible’ rather than ‘reflecting’ the visible (which is what he assumed realistic painters did). In stylistic terms this boiled down to either abstract art and the repudiation of any obvious reference to the visible world, or the dreamlike imagery associated with Surrealism.

This new concise history tells a more inclusive story than Read’s, one that places painting in a broader stylistic, historical, geographical, and gender and ethnic frame. It is structured as a loose timeline. Where it seemed interesting to do so, I have quoted the words of the artists themselves, but I have avoided quoting from critics, theorists and art historians. At the end of the book there is an Appendix in the form of a series of questions that the reader might like to ask of the artists and the ideas discussed, but also of the text itself. This is followed by a Further Reading section for those that want to dig deeper.

I hope this new history allows the artists and paintings it discusses to be appreciated within a diverse and inclusive intellectual, historical and social framework. I am certain that, especially from the perspective of the new plural centres of the globalized

contemporary artworld, the story told in these pages will still look overtly centred on Europe and North America. But the concept of ‘modern art’ was born in Western Europe, and it is inextricably bound up with the forces of westernizing modernity. Furthermore, there is no escaping the fact that ‘‘art history’ as a genre is in itself a fundamentally western discipline invented for organizing cultural artefacts and their relationships within specific categories across time and space.

Finally, I want to stress that there is no substitute for knowledge by acquaintance. Only by seeing real paintings in museums and galleries will we be able to develop valuable relationships with them. This truth is especially important to recognize nowadays, since we are becoming more and more dependent on experiencing the world via digital media. While the Internet allows easy and free access to an unprecedented number of images of paintings, compensating generously the inevitable difficulties involved in seeing real ones, we should always remember that a photograph of a painting is just that, a small-scale, flat, synthetically coloured, digitally generated reproduction. But, more concerningly, a photograph of a painting on a screen or in a book displaces it into a context in which we experience it sitting down within the kinds of spaces that encourage the more cerebral or intellectual modes of thinking associated with word-based knowledge. Real paintings, by contrast, are meant to be experienced in three-dimensional environments within which we physically move around, and where we are open to more embodied, sensual forms of experience and knowledge.

Follow this link to order the book on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Modern-Painting-Concise-History-World/dp/0500204896

‘SPECISME SEXISME RACISME LES VRAIS INVISIBLES!

While I was walking around the city of Bourges, which is forty minutes north of the village where I have my house in central France, and from where I’m writing this post, I noticed this prominently sited mural. It says on the left: ‘SPECISME SEXISME RACISME LES VRAIS INVISIBLES! (Species-ism, Sexism, Racism The True Invisibles!)

What especially struck me was the presence of the first term, which I hadn’t really considered so obviously a characteristic dimension of the ‘systemic’ prejudices blighting society. But because of humanly-driven climate change we are certainly going to hear much, much more about how our inter-species violence also extends to the trans-species - and beyond. When you line up ‘species-ism’ alongside ‘sexism’ and ‘racism’ you’re enlarging the case against humans to take into account violence not just against other humans but against other animals. 

An online dictionary defines ‘species-ism’ or ‘speciesism’ as: “the assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of animals.” In this sense, it’s used by radical vegetarians who declare, for example, that ‘meat is murder’. But why stop at what we’ve done to fauna? Why not extend the condemnation to flora as well? Even to rocks and minerals and things like rivers and seas? After all, wide-scale environmental abuse is  why we are now calling the epoch the Anthropocene. In the current cultural context, ‘species-ism’ is actually a sub-set of the wider malign legacy of civilization: anthropocentrism. We humans adopt an exploitative position in relation to the world by putting the interest of our own species first - at the centre. For millennia we have certainly been lording it over non-humans – other animals - but also the entire biosphere. The result is that we have brought the Earth to a potentially catastrophic precipice.

*

Humankind certainly seems to have a general tendency towards anthropomorphic projection. As the French anthropologist Philippe Descola observes, humans have “a propensity to interpret phenomena and behaviour observable in their natural environment by endowing non-humans with qualities that are similar to those of humans.” Indigenous peoples practice anthropomorphic projection, but as anthropologists have shown, they are not aggressively anthropocentric. For them, seeing the world anthropomorphically also means having specific obligations in relation to non-humans, the possibility of opening social relations with them. Descola describes what he terms “identification”:

It results from the fact that humans arrive in the world equipped with a certain kind of body and with a theory of mind, i.e. endowed with a specific biological complex of forms, functions, and substances, on the one hand, and with a capacity to attribute to others mental states identical to their own, on the other hand. This equipment allows us to proceed to identifications in the sense that it provides the elementary mechanism for recognising differences and similarities between self and other worldly objects, by inferring analogies and distinctions of appearances, behaviour and qualities between what I surmise I am and what I surmise the others are. In other words, the ontological status of the objects in my environment depends upon my capacity to posit or not, with regard to an indeterminate alter, an interiority and a physicality analogous to the ones I believe I am endowed with. I take interiority here in a deliberately vague sense that, according to the context, will refer to the attributes ordinarily associated with the soul, the mind, or consciousness – intentionality, subjectivity, reflexivity, the aptitude to dream – or to more abstract characteristics such as the idea that I share with an alter a same essence or origin. Physicality, by contrast, refers to form, substance, physiological, perceptual, sensory-motor, and proprioceptive processes, or even temperament as an expression of the influence of bodily humours.

Anthropocentrism is something else altogether. In effect, it drives a wedge between humans and everything else. This is how the Australian environmental philosopher Freya Mathews ( a recent discovery for me) describes it in The Dao of Civilization (2023) “ Anthropocentrism was the groundless belief, amounting to nothing more than a prejudice, that only human beings matter, morally speaking; to the extent that anything else – animals, plants, ecosystems, the natural world generally – matters, it does so only because it has some kind of utility for human beings.” Mathews traces anthropocentrism to as long ago as the Neolithic agrarian revolution, so as to understand how the animist focus of anthropomorphism, which is still evident in Indigenous cultures today, became perverted into anthropocentrism. As she writes in her most famous book, The Ecological Self (1991) once anthropocentrism was wedded to the mechanistic scientific worldview in the seventeenth century Europe, the recipe for ecological disaster was prepared: ‘from a mechanistic perspective, Nature is itself devoid of interests and is therefore indifferent, so to speak, to its own fate. Nothing that happens to it matters to it. It is in this sense, in itself, devoid of value.”  A dualistic relationship was established between ‘nature’ (the non-human) and ‘culture’ (the human) within which ‘civilization’ became inherently exploitative and violent.

Clearly, an anthropocentric worldview is not so much the opposite of anthropomorphism as described by Descola in relation to the Indigenous worldview  but rather a possible deviant consequence of anthropomorphism, one where the human capacity to project onto and identify with the world carries with it  feelings of separation, superiority, and aggressive entitlement. The key point is that anthropomorphism in itself is surely a ‘good thing’ and certainly does not preclude the recognition that humans and non-humans are separated by differences of degree, not of kind.  But how can we restore to anthropocentrism a less arrogantly controlling and more generously reciprocal attitude to the world within which we live?

Mathews and other environmentalists and ecologists urge us to shake of this malign anthropocentric relationship to the world and become instead ‘biocentric’ or ‘ecocentric’. The former stance implies we recognize living things carry equal and inherent value, while the latter extends this recognition to indicate that environmental systems as wholes carry inherent value. Both ‘-isms’ clearly seek to displace humans from the centre, where the centre is deemed to confer unique and superior status.

but I’m not sure making reference to the trio of species-ism, sexism, and racism is the right way forward. After all, wedding speciesi-sm with the other two potentially feeds the very anthropocentrism we’re supposed to be overcoming. In fact, one could argue that the more we ring our hands over the human cost to the environment, the more we draw attention to ourselves. So, in this sense, all we are indulging is a negative anthropocentrism. Maybe even nihilistic anthropocentrism. Also, when you think about it, calling a whole geological time period the ‘Anthropocene’ can seem like an extreme case of anthropocentrism: “Wow! We made it! We’ve finally put ourselves at the real centre. Well, at least, the centre of planet Earth.” Thankfully, there’s still a whole galaxy out there which knows absolutely nothing about a messed-up species of bipedal animals descended from apes.

REFERENCES

The Philippe Descola quote is from his essay ‘Human Natures’ in Quaderns (2011) 27, available on-line at: https://www.raco.cat/index.php/QuadernsICA/article/download/258367/351466

The Freya Mathews quote is from The Dao of Civilization. A Letter to China, published by Anthem Press, 2023. https://anthempress.com/on-the-dao-of-civilization-a-philosopher-s-letter-to-the-supreme-leader-pb

The Ecological Self is published by Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/The-Ecological-Self/Mathews/p/book/9780367705183

The stained-glass of Bourges Cathedral

Saint-Étienne Cathedral, Bourges.

Since July 11th I’ve been staying in my house in the northern Allier region of France. Obviously, it’s always quite a culture shock to come back here after months in Korea. But rather than try to grapple in this post with some of the thoughts crashing around in my head, I thought I’d introduce a wonderful masterpiece.

Just up the road from the village where we have our house is the city of Bourges which has a cathedral named after Saint Étienne. It was built in the late twelfth to early thirteenth century in the early Gothic style.  For me, the stained-glass windows around the ambulatory is one of the greatest works of art anywhere. Amazingly, 22 of the original 25 medieval windows have survived. Here are very inadequate photographs I took to give you some idea:

As the later windows one can see in Bourges’ Cathedral attest, the art of stained-glass was already extinct by the Renaissance, a salutary reminder that art media are closely related to wider cultural necessities. However hard modern artists have tried to make stained-glass for churches - Gerhard Richter’s window in Cologne Cathedral comes to mind, it is simply a fact that this medium is no longer potently contemporary. Here’s Richter’s work:

What I find especially satisfying in the Bourges’ stained-glass is that each window works on three distinct but interrelated levels. As you approach, you are first aware of the intricate and dazzling pattern produced by the tiny pieces of different coloured glass. Then, as you looks more consistently, you become aware of the division of the windows into symmetrical, geometric patterns. As you move up closer, you come to focus on the imagery and recognize (sometimes, anyway) the Biblical narratives narrated on each window.

This means you accumulate the contrasting aesthetic experiences of multicoloured and formless light and then the harmonious linear pattern. These experiences are then supplemented by the more discursive experience of reading the symbols and stories. But, of course, this transition doesn’t happen in strict linear succession, and you can flip back and forth between the levels as you move around in front of the stained-glass. That’s a pretty satisfying experiential ‘package’, one that spans a wide range of affective and cognitive skills.

*

I realize that I try to achieve something similar in my own Book-Paintings. Here are some recent works. A book in German of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry collection ‘Duiner Elegein’ and one in French of Albert Camus’ ‘La Peste’. They are both 46 x 38cn, acrylic on canvas. Ther text is built up into relief and painted a very slightly different tone to the ground. In these cases, it is copied from the title pages of the original books:

As you approach the paintings from a distance, you at first see just a single coloured rectangle. The colours can be drawn from the original cover of the book or from an association I feel between the colour and the content of the book. As you move in closer you can make out the letters on the surface, which because they are in relief, cast a shadow on the surface. The text connect the painting to a specific book from which I have copied the typography and layout. You then read the painting and make associations to a work of literature and historical context. This means you move from a primarily sensory experience to a more cerebral one.

The word ‘move’ is crucial, because what this implies an animated relationship to the painting, as is also the case in relation to the Bourges’ stained-glass. For me, this animation, in which experiencing a painting means also engaging with through physical movements, movements, allows one to shift back and forth between different levels of response, is really important, as it works against the static idea of detached contemplation, which separates one from the thing contemplated.

Here are some more recent works, photographed in my Korea studio, made for a forthcoming show in London. The source of the two nearest paintings are monographs on British artists from the 1940s, published by Penguin. I played with the fact that the original design bisected the surface horizontally. The smaller works are derived from a novel by Virginia Woolf - ‘To the Lighthouse’ - and by D.H. Lawrence - ‘Sons and Lovers’. As you can surmise, the theme of the show is ‘Modern British’ art and literature.

NOTES

The photo of the Richter window is a screen grab from: https://www.design-is-fine.org/post/68822009029/gerhard-richter-cologne-cathedral-window-2007

‘A Nation of Racist Dwarfs’

The title of today’s post is lifted from Christopher Hitchens’ essay from 2010 which I mentioned in my previous blog. Catchy isn’t it? And not a little racist, which is rather rich in that The Hitch makes a special point of describing North Korean as racist and xenophobic. He writes with authority that “a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean”, and goes on to invite us “to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.”

This data is shocking because while North Koreans got shorter, South Koreans got taller. But six inches (15.24 centimeters)? Are North Koreans (Hitchens doesn’t specify if he refers to a male or female) really that much shorter? The simple answer is no.

They are defintely shorter, but not nearly so much as Hitchens specifies. In 2002, the South Korean Research Institute of Standard and Science used United Nations survey data collected inside North Korea, and found that pre-school children raised in North Korea were up to 13 cm (5.1 inches) shorter and up to 7 kg lighter than children brought up in South Korea. Commentators put this down to the famine of the 1990s, which left one in every three children in North Korea chronically malnourished or 'stunted'.  In 2006, the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed the physical condition of 1,075 North Korean defectors ranging in age from 20 to 39, and found that the average height of North Korean males was 165.6 centimeters (5 feet 5 inches), and North Korean females 154.9 centimeters (5 feet 1 inches). By comparison, an average South Korean man was 172.5 centimeters (5 feet six inches) tall and a woman 159.1 centimeters (5 feet 2.5 inches).  The cause was clear: North Korea suffered from food shortages and the collapse of its public health and medical care system. In an essay from 2009 Professor Daniel Schwekendiek from Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul stated that North Korean adult men are, on average, between 3 to 8cm (1.2 to 3.1 inches) shorter than their South Korean counterparts. This is also the data on the BBC website (illustrated above) which says South Korean men are an average of 173.5 centimeters tall, and North Koreans are 3 to 8 centimeters shorter. But the most recent data I could find, at Wisevoter.com, puts the North Korean at 175 cm and a South Korean at 176cm. Just one centimeter apart! So, I really don’t know what the exact difference is!

So Hitchens was definitely exaggerating. But nevertheless, the height difference between North and South Korea is real and can only be put down to one thing: the political systems. In effect, the Korean peninsula is a tragic experiment in the impact on culture of biology.

This is what is called ‘epigenetic change’, which refers to environmental factors that impact on the human genome. The DNA sequence does not change but the organism's observable traits are modified. These epigenetic factors are typically described as external agents like heavy metals, pesticides, diesel exhaust, tobacco smoke, hormones, radioactivity, viruses and bacteria, or lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, stress, and sleep. One can also add political systems whose policies directly impact on what, how, when, and which people eat, what kind of medical care they receive, and what environmental agents people are or are not exposed to.

All these factors influence the expression of some genes, both positively and negatively. In the case of North Korea, mostly negatively. The variation of hieght is therefore graphic evidence on the most basic level of the regime’s abject failure. Maybe North Koreans are not ‘racist dwarfs’, but they certainly have paid a terrible physical price so that a vile clique can cling onto power.

To put the Korean statistics in perspective, here is some more data: an adult man in the UK is 178 cm average height, in the USA is 178 cm, and in France is 179cm (yes! taller on average that the Brits, which was shocking news to me, at least). The tallest human males in the world are Dutchmen at 184cm - an average 9 centimeters (3.5 inches) bigger than North Koreans.

*

Over the past two hundred years almost everyone in the world has been getting taller thanks to a better diet and medical care.   As in Europe before the modern period, during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) Koreans adults were significantly shorter on average than today’s Koreans - Northern and Southern. According to the first nationwide study into the height of Koreans, including Joseon era Koreans, average heights of both male have increased by 12.9 centimeters (5 inches) and female adults by 11.6 centimeters (4.5 inches) over the past century.

But just as on the Korean peninsular today, history also shows that the trajectory is not always continuously upwards. Here’s something interesting I found while surfing for this post at OSU.edu: Northern European men had actually lost an average of 6.3 centimeters (2.5 inches) of height by the 1700s , and this loss that was not fully recovered until the first half of the 20th century!

A variety of factors contributed to the drop – and subsequent regain – in average height during the last millennium. These factors include climate change; the growth of cities and the resulting spread of communicable diseases; changes in political structures; and changes in agricultural production.

"Average height is a good way to measure the availability and consumption of basic necessities such as food, clothing, shelter, medical care and exposure to disease," [Richard] Steckel said. "Height is also sensitive to the degree of inequality between populations."

"These brief periods of warming disguised the long-term trend of cooler temperatures, so people were less likely to move to warmer regions and were more likely to stick with traditional farming methods that ultimately failed," he said. "Climate change was likely to have imposed serious economic and health costs on northern Europeans, which in turn may have caused a downward trend in average height."

Urbanization and the growth of trade gained considerable momentum in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Both brought people together, which encouraged the spread of disease. And global exploration and trade led to the worldwide diffusion of many diseases into previously isolated areas.

"Height studies for the late 18th and early 19th centuries show that large cities were particularly hazardous for health," Steckel said. "Urban centers were reservoirs for the spread of communicable diseases."

Inequality in Europe grew considerably during the 16th century and stayed high until the 20th century – the rich grew richer from soaring land rents while the poor paid higher prices for food, housing and land.

"In poor countries, or among the poor in moderate-income nations, large numbers of people are biologically stressed or deprived, which can lead to stunted growth," Steckel said. "It's plausible that growing inequality could have increased stress in ways that reduced average heights in the centuries immediately following the Middle Ages."

Political changes and strife also brought people together as well as put demand on resources.

"Wars decreased population density, which could be credited with improving health, but at a large cost of disrupting production and spreading disease," Steckel said. "Also, urbanization and inequality put increasing pressure on resources, which may have helped lead to a smaller stature."

Exactly why average height began to increase during the 18th and 19th centuries isn't completely clear, but Steckel surmises that climate change as well as improvements in agriculture helped.

"Increased height may have been due partly to the retreat of the Little Ice Age, which would have contributed to higher yields in agriculture. Also, improvements in agricultural productivity that began in the 18th century made food more plentiful to more people.

And here to finish are some famous people’s heights:

Bonaparte = 168cm.

Hitler = 174 cm.

Kim Jong-eun =  168.9 cm.

Putin = 169cm.

Trump = 184cm.

Interestingly, Hitchens (who died in 2011) was 175 cm tall,. That is, the same height as an average North Korean male today.

NOTES

The image at the start of this post is from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41228181

Christopher Hitchens article is at: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/02/kim-jong-il-s-regime-is-even-weirder-and-more-despicable-than-you-thought.html

Daniel Schwekendiek essay is at: ttps://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial-science/article/abs/height-and-weight-differences-between-north-and-south-korea/2EED5360F62997E3007425258C04A45A

The epigentics diagram is from: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41440-019-0248-0

The data about Joseon era average heights is from: https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20120131000667

The quotation about average heights in Europe over the past three hundred years is at:  https://news.osu.edu/men-from-early-middle-ages-were-nearly-as-tall-as-modern-people/

My list of famous people’s heights is from: https://www.celebheights.com/s/Kim-Jong-Un-49758.html

Wisevoter.com data is at: https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/average-height-by-country/