‘North Korea: ‘a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right.’

This photograph (not taken by me, although I’ve been there) shows North Korean border guards strutting their stuff just a few miles from where I’m writing this post, at Panmunjom, the only place where the DMZ narrows and the two Koreas meet. The title of today’s post is a quotation from the British writer Christopher Hitchens, who in 2010 wrote about the North Korean system in a much commented upon article.   Hitchens began by recounting a visit to North Korea and how his minder had expressed racist views in such a way that it was obvious that these views were central to what for him was a quite normal and acceptable worldview. But his  article was specifically motivated by  reading the then recently published book by B. R. Myers entitled ‘The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters’. As Hitchens wrote, Myers described “the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian ‘military first’ mobilization, is maintained by slave labour, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.“ 

Since then, under Kim Jong-Ill’s successor, his son Kim Jong Un, things have only gotten worse in the DPRK, and many analysts would agree with Myers’ general prognosis. For example, it seems obvious that to persist in describing the country as ‘communist’ is very misleading, not least because the DPRK itself doesn’t use the word anymore! Ideologically, it prefers to refers to ‘Juche’ thought, which is usually translated as ‘self-reliance’ and is intended to be a specifically North Korean ideology - the one Myers’ set about describing. But it is interesting to consider how the term ‘communist’ was initially adopted and then discarded in the DPRK.

The North Korean regime was put in place by the Soviet Union, whose forces occupied the northern part of the peninsula at the end of World War Two. The first of the Kim dynasty, the former guerrilla fighter in China Kim Il-sung, was installed by Stalin as a counterpoint to the American candidate in the south, Syngman Rhee. This is an archive photograph from 1946 of people in Pyongyang parading with portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Kim Il Sung:

Subsequently, two rival Koreans came into being in 1948. In 1950, Stalin gave Kim the ‘green light’ to invade the Republic of Korea. By that time, China had also fallen to the Communists. After the failure of the invasion and the stalemate of the Korean War, the DPRK settled into being a client state of the Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent, China) until the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the abandonment of communism in Russia precipitated a humanitarian and ideological crisis in the DPRK. But by that time the country had already moved to established its own distinctly ‘Korean’ ideology of Juche. It is this ideology that Hitchens characterised as being on the far ‘right’ politically because its racist and xenophobic traits are not ones that could be associated with the far ‘’left’.

But to what extent is this ‘left’/’right’ polarity an accurate way of analyzing the reality of North Korea over the past thirty years?

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Following the French Revolution in 1789, when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the old order sat to the president's right and those of the revolution to the left, it became customary in the West (and then internationally) to described politics in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’. In the nineteenth century Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described  ‘communism’ ’as a radical politics of the ‘left’ that recognized the historical inevitability of class war within capitalist societies leading to a revolution after which all property would be publicly owned and each person’s labour paid for according to ability and needs. It was therefore specifically cast as the antithesis to the ‘right-wing’ ideologies of the industrailized capitalist societies in which property was privately owned and labour rewarded unevenly and in relation to entrenched inequalities rooted in class and race. ‘Communism’ thus became the portmanteau term of the twentieth century for ‘leftist’ radical politics directed towards revolution from below, which, after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia 1917, was monopolized by the Soviet Communist Party.  

But for post-colonial Korea, ‘communism’ meant something very different. It involved adopting one of the only two route maps towards modernization provided by the globally dominant West. Under the guidance of the United States the Republic of Korea had chosen the capitalist map, while the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea chose the communist one. It should be noted that neither map included democracy in Korea at this initial stage.

In relation to the communist road map, it is important to consider that Korea was also very far from being an industrialized economy against which a Korean ‘proletariat’ (the actually almost non-existent factory workers) - could be seen to be struggling for freedom against their capitalist overlords. In other words, as also, indeed, in Russia in 1917 and China in 1949, the ‘communists’ ostensibly took power in countries that Marx and Engels would have considered economically and socially distant from the ripe and predestined moment of violent revolutionary transition. Nevertheless, the communist road map was the only one handed to the North Koreans by the Soviets. But soon enough, as in Russia and China, ‘communism’ had morphed into a Korean-style totalitarianism of the ‘left’, as opposed to the totalitarianism characteristic of the ‘right’, aka fascism. That, at least, was how the story was told.

We still basically see politics today in terms of the binary ‘left’ and ‘right’, which is why Hitchens could imagine only a choice between seeing North Korea as on the extreme political ‘left’ ‘(communism) or extreme political ‘right’ (fascism) As racism and xenophobia were part of the fascist package, they placed North Korea on the ‘right.’ But this shoehorning into familiar political polarities risks losing sight of significant specific characteristics - but also characteristics of importance more generally beyond North Korea. For it is increasingly obvious that these polarities inherited from the European nineteenth century, never did fit the Korean situation, but also no longer suffice to describe the current political situation more generally - in both the global north and south.

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Back in the late 1940s some disenchanted former communists wrote a book entitled ‘The God That failed’, edited by the Englishman Richard Crossman (a former communist turned Labour Party Member of Parliament). Subtitled ‘A Confession’, it included the testimonies of, amongst others, the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, the French novelist André Gide, and the English poet and critic Stephen Spender. The book was a classic of the early Cold War. I remember that my father, a state school English teacher and life-long socialist and Labour Party voter, owned a copy of the English edition, and I read it as a teenager in the mid-1970s, and it probably helped me steer a moderate ideological course during the awful Thatcher years.

Koestler joined the Communist Party in  late 1931 and left in early 1938, and became a very vocal critic. He begins his contribution by writing: “A faith is not acquired by reasoning…..From the psychologist’s point of view, there is little difference between a revolutionary and a traditionalist faith. All true faith is uncompromising, radical, purist”.

Koestler’s analyses still seems spot on, because what we are witnessing today is an overwhelming tendency to adopt a position based not on reason but on ‘faith’, a position that is reassuringly ‘uncompromising, radical, purist”. We can see this trait on both the ostensible ‘left’ and ‘right’, and it suggest another polarity which offers a more accurate diagnosis of our current situation. The characteristics described by Koestler encompasses both extremes within our current ideological situation – ‘Woke’ radical race theory and nationalist populism - putting them not at opposite ends of a political binary of ‘left’ and ‘right’ but rather together within a binary comprised of ‘faith’ rather than ‘reason’ based politics. In this context, it’s not so much a problem of what one believes but whether such belief is ‘faith’ based intransigence – rooted in the desire to hold to the belief uncompromisingly, and so to adopt the most radical and pure possibility - or rooted in a reality that is recognized as inevitably ambiguous and uncertain.

Another work that made an impression on me as a teenager in the late 1970s – courtesy of my History teacher, Mr. Reid – was philosopher Karl Popper’s ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’. This two-volume study was written during Popper’s exile from the Nazis in New Zealand during the War and published in 1945. Popper’s discussion of the Western history of ‘closed’ societies from Plato to Hegel and Marx was way too sophisticated for my young mind, but his basic argument was one that I did understand, and also one that still seems to resonate. Popper wrote:

This book raises issues that might not be apparent from the table of contents. It sketches some of the difficulties faced by our civilization — a civilization which might be perhaps described as aiming at humanness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom; a civilization which is still in its infancy, as it were, and which continues to grow in spite of the fact that it has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind. It attempts to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or "enclosed society," with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man. It attempts to show that the shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism.

I recently read a fine book by the author and historian of ideas Johan Norberg called ‘Open. the Story of Human Progress’, which was published in 2020. Norberg credits Popper with defining a central class of values which he wishes to promote as a model for society today. He writes:

Openness created the modern world and propels it forwards, because the more open we are to ideas and innovations from where we don’t expect them, the more progress we will make. the philosopher Karl Popper called it the ‘open society’. It is the society that is open-ended, because it is not a organism, within one unifying idea, collective plan or utopian goal. The government’s role in an open society is to protect the search for better ideas, and people’s freedom to live by their individual plans and pursue their own goals, through a system of rules applied equally to all citizens. It is the government that abstains from ‘picking winners’ in culture, intellectual life, civil society and family life, as well as in business and technology. Instead, it gives everybody the right to experiment with new ideas and methods, and allows them to win if they fill a need, even if it threatens the incumbents. Therefore, the open society can never be finished. It is always a work in progress.

When read in the light of the regime now oppressing North Korea, what Popper and Norberg write provide useful insights. The regime is almost a caricature of the ‘closed’ society. But more broadly, they suggest that we should move on from the binary ‘left’ and ‘right’ and instead see the situation in terms of those who practice politics on the basis of ‘faith’ compared those doing it on the basis of ‘reason.’ Unfortunately, all too often a position based on dogmatic ‘faith’ is the more appealing option, as it means one doesn’t have to qualify one’s beliefs by taking into consideration conflicting attitudes, positions or information. In short, one can dispense with doubt. As Sam Harris puts it, ‘faith’ in this sense means ‘what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse - constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor.’ Harris was aiming to expose religious faith, but what he says could equally apply to extreme secular ideological faiths, too. Isn’t North Korea a system that has definitely achieved ‘escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse’?

Ultimately, what we should be striving for is a way of thinking about society that incorporates doubt and that turns away from the temptations offered by any models - religious or secular - that try to banish doubt and install certainty. The terms ‘open’ and ‘closed’ seem to me to be useful titles of more realistic road maps than ‘left’ and ‘right.’

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Norberg is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, an organization that is often described as a hotbed of neoliberalism, and you can see how Norbert’s paean to ‘openness’ (like Popper’s) could easily be construed as providing a green light for capitalist free trade globalist maximalism.  For Norberg’s optimistic version of the ‘open’ society seems wedded to an ideal of progress coupled to western style capitalism-driven globalization at a time when we recognize that it is precisely this ambition that has precipitated the dire global ecological crisis.

What would an ‘open’ society be like that isn’t founded on capitalist globalization and an obsession with progress in material terms, and instead was based on responding to what the philosopher Bruno Latour calls the ‘Terrestrial’, that is, on a kind of ‘openness’ to the planet as a whole, rather than just on narrow human needs and aspirations.

In 2018 the DPRK emitted 44.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gas, while the ROK emitted 758.1 million tonnes! So this particular ‘closed’ society is a far less brutal ecological force than the ostensibly ‘open’ one with which it shares the peninsula. But obviously, such a small carbon footprint has not been achieved by benign design, rather it came about by complete chance, and as a beneficial side-effect of being an unapologetically racist and xenophobic society. Ironic, isn’t it?

NOTES

The photo at the beginning of the post is a screen grab from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/north-korean-soldier-makes-midnight-dash-to-freedom-across-dmz/2019/08/01/69da5244-b412-11e9-acc8-1d847bacca73_story.html

The archive photograph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1946-05-01_평양의_5.1절_기념_행사%282%29.jpg

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

B. R. Myers book: https://www.amazon.com/Cleanest-Race-Koreans-Themselves-Matters-ebook/dp/B004EWETZW

Johan Noberg’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Open-Story-Progress-Johan-Norberg/dp/1786497182

Sam Harris’ book ‘The End of Faith’: https://www.amazon.com/End-Faith-Religion-Terror-Future/dp/0393327655

The carbon footprint statistics are from: https://www.unep.org/explore-topics/climate-action/what-we-do/climate-action-note/state-of-climate.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMInsbXo4ng_wIVU4nCCh2UwgDbEAAYASAAEgKAQPD_BwE

‘Keep yourself alive’

A glimpse into one of the many Box Photoism shops in Seoul

There’s a trend in Korea amongst young people to take sets of four passport-like photographic ‘selfies’ in shops that are  sprouting all over Seoul. One chain is called Photoism Box. The picture at the beginning of this post shows one such outlet near Anguk station. Apparently, this trend is yet to invade the west and is a specifically Korean phenomenon.

It began in 2017 with a company called Life4Cut. Here is what Lee Da-Eun of Korea JoongAng Daily says: ‘This analog manner of taking photos grew immensely popular with young Koreans, and numerous studios such as Photogray, Photoism, Harufilm, Selfix and more hopped on the photo strip trend, known in Korea as four-cut photos. Although there are distinct features for each type of photo booth, there are some common characteristics. All of these booths offer natural photoshop features, special seasonal photo frames, unique photo props to enhance the experience and QR codes that provide a digital copy of the photos taken. ‘

The writer suggests three reasons for the growing trend: first, it offers a relatively cheap way to capture lasting memories with friends and loved ones; second, it’s an optimal self-promotion tool to be used on social media.   The third reason is especially thought-provoking: ‘The photo booths also reflect Generation Z’s pursuit of a more “analog atmosphere” in contrast to their very digital lives. Gen Z, or people born between the mid-to-late 1990s to the early 2010s, are most likely immersed in digital culture and less familiar with analog photography. In Korea, however, the younger generation is increasingly interested in a more analog culture and atmosphere, as they pursue film photography and instant self-photo booths.’

Note the text on the window on the Photoism ‘Box’, at the bottom left of my photograph: “Keep yourself alive” (also note that it’s written in English, not Korean).  Interesting! The phrase made me wonder about what is really at stake not just in relation to selfies but in photography in general. What the slogan obviously means is that a photo print is a more tangible memory than a digital file. It’s something you can hold in your hands. And even though you will probably post them online! This is the analogue experience that young Koreans are apparently craving. But let’s dig a little deeper.

In English we say ‘to capture’ something when we take a photograph. We also say, ‘to take’ a photograph, which on the face of it seems less violent than ‘capture’. But etymologically, the two verbs are closely related. The Online Etymology Dictionary says for ‘to take’:  ‘"act of taking or seizing," 1540s, from French capture "a taking," from Latin captura "a taking" (especially of animals), from captus, past participle of capere "to take, hold, seize".’ In relation to ‘to take’ , the dictionary says the verb comes from ‘late Old English tacan "to take, seize," from a Scandinavian source (such as Old Norse taka "take, grasp, lay hold”)’.

These are very aggressive and predatory verbs being employed in relation to the act of using a mechanical optical imaging device to produce a representation of something.  I wondered if it’s the same in Korean. Do they also conceptualize this activity using belligerent metaphors?

It seems the normal way to say ‘take a photograph’ in Korean is  사진을 찍다 (sajin-eul jjigda). The word jikgda relates to the way of describing stamping something, like a document, or printing a book or picture.  The Korean is distantly related to the Chinese for a ‘seal’ on a document. But jikgda can also mean ‘hew’, ‘strike’, ‘chop’. So, there is also an albiet more attentuated belligerent connotation lurking in the Korean language.. But the verb also preserves a more overt link to the idea that a photograph is a stamp or print, that it is something tangible. This link is not necessarily carried over in the English convention of using the verbs  ‘take’ or ‘capture’, which rather imply that we have actually possessed the something we represent,  not just made a lasting impression of it.

In English we  in part employ the same vocabulary in relation to photographs as was used previously to talk about handmade image-making, such as painting. We say, the artist ‘captured a likeness of someone’ in their portrait. But we don’t  say to ‘take’ a painting. Rather, we say ‘make’, ‘produce’, or ‘create’. The choice of ‘take’ implies that the intermediary visualizing technology  provides a directly indexical copy of the source (the subject to be photographed), and suggests the absence of active intervention or proactive work by the one taking the photograph.  But either way, what is at stake is the underlying idea that an image somehow seizes its referent. It is not a gentle action. 

The idea of ‘keeping alive’ brings to mind the possibility that preserving memories like this really is a kind of capture or enslavement, and that the problem then is how to keep what one has photographed ‘alive’, how not to ‘kill’ it.. So, it really is a question of ‘keeping alive’, although, strictly speaking, it’s already too late. The image is already a corpse. For what we do when we document the world in images is simultaneously lose it. This is because reality is process,  and an image inevitably cuts into the process. It freezes, ‘enslaves’, or ‘kills’ it. In other words, if making an image is violent, then the likelihood is that, despite our best intentions, what we ‘capture’ is being enslaved and also in danger of dying.

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A consideration of the conditions experienced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors is helpful here, because evolutionary biologists have shown the extent to which we are 'haunted' by 'ghosts' of past evolutionary adaptions, that is, are hardwired to negotiate the world as it was experienced over tens of thousands of years, not just the mere hundreds of centuries of historical time. Hunter-gatherer societies are characterized by the  absence of direct human control over the reproduction of the species they exploit, and have little or no control over the behaviour and distribution of food resources within their environments. Foraging for food was a fundamental survival skill, and the basic need for food played a fundamental role in the progressive evolution of cognitive structures and functions that would make food available on a more reliable basis. Under such conditions, humans explored their environments with the purpose of discovering resources of sometimes limited availability. The term ‘epistemic foraging’ is used in cognitive neuroscience to describe goal-directed search processes that respond to the state of uncertainty, and describes human behaviour considered not only in relation to specific task-dependent goals, like foraging for food, but also wider responses to the environment. This context-dependent behavior applied not only to the physical space in which humans existed but also to the abstract context of thoughts and decision making that helped humans to deal with uncertainty.. Foraging for information was as vital as foraging for food, as exploration resolved uncertainty about a scene. This ‘epistemic foraging’ supplied the core abstract thinking that humans developed, and gave them an evolutionary edge.

We are primarily geared towards the reduction of uncertainty through increasing our control over the environment, and we use epistemological tools to ensure this. But as Hartmut Rosa writes in his excellent book 'The Uncontrollability of the World’,  human relationships to the world can be divided between on the one hand a stance of violent and aggressive action motivated by the will to mastery and control, to ‘capture’ and ‘take’,  and on the other, one of erotic desire or libidinal interplay which requires a more open and accepting attitude to the uncontrollability of the world.  Hunter-gatherer societies are characterised by the latter relationship, but within the culture of modernity, as Rosa writes, 'We are structurally compelled (from without) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things – segments of world – within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliably controlled.'  Rosa sees four dimensions to the modern obsession with guaranteeing maximum control: making the world visible and therefore knowable: expanding our knowledge of what is there, and making it physically reachable or accessible,  making it manageable, and making it useful. But this sense of mastery comes at a high price because it lead to alienation from the world - to a loss of what Rosa calls 'resonance', which 'ultimately cannot be reconciled with the idea of intellectual, technological, moral, and economic mastery of the world.' As a result, we exist mostly in a condition of profound alienation, inwardly disconnected from other people and the world. As Rosa writes: 'Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself.'

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Image-making is closely linked to the need to encode the results of epistemic foraging. But when seen in this light, a dual origin of image-making suggests itself. It  began as way of encoding a  libidinous and reciprocal relationship to the world,  but gradually shifted to become a way of encoding  the desire to enhance mastery and control.  This could be described as image-making as as a system of engendering versus image-making as a system of production.  This distinction is intended to contrasts two basic ways of being in the world: one in which representation encodes a world in in which we see the world as our dwelling place, and the other in which we are set apart in a position of aspiring (but inevitably futile) omnipotence. But image-making as engendering slowing gave way to image-making as production as we moved towards ‘modernity.’

What we humans fear most is uncertainty – being uncomfortably surprised. What we want most is to be in control.  But in what does ‘control’ lie? Metaphors of ‘taking/capturing’ that dominate European languages in relation to making images, and those prevalent in Korean, suggest a common  root in the idea of separation and aggressive domination and are infused with the aspiration towards control. But the western metaphors imply a far more aggressive relationship to the world than the Korea.  The desire for control, which os a primary means of reducing uncertainty through closure  is matched elsewhere by more open relationships to uncertainty.

The west seems especially inclined to the former. This can be seen in a very tangible way if we consider the evolution of  the European artist’s’ self-image. From the sixteenth century onwards, their posture in their studios was made to look like this:

The preference for this stance, recorded here in a late sixteenth century  Flemish print now in the British Museum, had much to do with the new social role-model then being adopted by artists, which was moving away from anonymous artisan or craftsman to being more like people on the next rank up in society: the knights.  But this stance can also be understood to reflect the emerging idea central to modernity, which is that humanity is primarily characterized by the ability to assert aggressive control over the world. It is interesting to consider that this physical stance coincides with the start of belligerent European colonising of the world. It is also interesting to note that it is not seen anywhere else in relation to the self-representation of the artist. It  certainly contrasts markedly with the self-image of the East Asian artist, who worked seated, poised over a horizontally oriented surface. This seems much more closely aligned metaphorically with someone sowing seeds in the earth - a farmer - that is, someone much more inclined to consider the world a dwelling place,  not as a place for violent conquest.

NOTES

The Korea JoongAng Daily article can be found at: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2023/01/03/national/kcampus/korea-photobooth-photodrink/20230103190906442.html 

Hartmut Rosa’s book, ‘The Uncontrollability of the World’ was published by Polity in 2020.

The illustrated print is an etching after Johannes Stradanus’ painting of van Eyck in his Studio, c.1590. It’s screen grab from the British Museum’s website.

Freeing the Mind, North Korea style

A North Korean with her smart phone.

Because I live so near to North Korea –  from my roof I can see its mountains on the other side of the DMZ - it’s difficult for me not to think often about that brutally repressive regime, a preoccupation reinforced by the fact that it is very skillful in keeping itself in the international news (most recently in relation to a failed attempt to launch a satellite).

One thing that especially interests me, and therefore has been the theme of several posts, is the extraordinary level of indoctrination the government of North Korea successfully engages in. The fundamental prerequisite for this success is the isolation of the nation.  This is both geographic and informational. Its closed physical and epistemological boundaries make possible a truly locally global control of the North Korean people’s minds.   

In this post I want to think some more about this mind control in the light of research coming from the neurosciences into the way we now believe the human brain works. This research draws attention to the astonishing - and not a little unsettling - fact  that our brains construct the perception we have of the self and of the world we inhabit. The success of the North Korean regime’s  crazy system of mind control is only possible because of something basic all humans all share.

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What the brain does is figure out the causes of the sensory data in order to get a grip on its environment.  As the  multi-disciplinary researcher Shamil Chandaria, a recent guest on Sam Harris’ wonderful Making Sense podcast, puts it:  ‘most people’s common sense view is that we are looking out at the world from little windows at the front of our heads.  But in fact, we are just receiving electrical signals, and the brain has never seen reality as it actually is.’ In other words, we make inferences about the world.   We learn from all the data coming in, and infer what is going on, then generate internal simulations in the brain.

We simulate a picture of reality.  ‘If I think I am seeing a tree, I then simulate the sensory data  as if it was a tree’, says Chandaria.  The result is that the past shapes our future because the simulation is based on prior experience. We make “top down” predictions about our sensory inputs based on a model of how they were created.

Aa a result, ‘conscious experience is like a tunnel’, writes the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger in his book The Ego Tunnel. The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (2010) :

Modern neuroscience had demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us. Our sensory organs are limited: They evolved for reasons of survival, not for depicting the enormous wealth and richness of reality in all its unfathomable depth. Therefore, the on-going process of conscious experience is not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through reality. 

This ‘ego tunnel’ is a result of the need to adapt to survive in complex environments which required that humans evolved to limit and restrict the range of potential points of view or emotions, thereby restraining the endless possibilities of the senses. In other words, ‘tunnel vision’ is an intrinsic part of ‘normal’ conscious experience.

From the point of view of evolutionary success, we need information about our place within the environment and the likely outcomes of our actions. The principal goal of the brain is therefore to maintain homeostasis  - stable equilibrium within its environment. The most valuable states in terms of optimizing evolutionary adaptive success are therefore states that minimize surprise. It is vital for humans as adaptive agents to reduce the informational ‘surprise’ that is inevitably associated with our complex sensory engagements with the world, and reducing it enables the brain to resist the natural tendency toward  chaotic disorder (entropy).

The level of the surprise we experience, and our ability to limit it through making predictions about our sensations, depends on the robustness of the brain’s internal generative model or simulation of the world. The discrepancy between ‘top-down’ predictions and the actuality and accuracy of ‘bottom-up’ sensations is  called by neurologists ‘prediction error.’  These errors are minimized by converting prior beliefs and expectations, and these include not just what we sample from the world but also how the world is sampled.

The mental states that minimize surprise are those we most expect to frequent, and they are constrained by the form of the generative model we are using. In the field of neuroscience interested in what is know as ‘active inference’ , elements of environmental surprise are known as ‘free energy’. We minimize this energy by changing predictions and/or the predicted sensory inputs so as to resist the chaotic entropic forces suffusing the surprising. We revise inferences in the light of experience, updating ‘priors’ - memories - to reality-aligned ‘posteriors’, optimizing the complexity of our generative model of the world. ‘Free energy’ is thereby converted into ‘bound energy’.

The process through which we simulate past experience and ensure posterior beliefs align with newly sampled data is  called in probability theory ‘Bayesian inference’ (after the theorem of eighteenth century statistician of that name). The ‘Bayesian brain’ is understood as an inference engine that aims to optimize probabilistic representations of what causes any given sensory input. Prediction error in relation to input is minimized by action and perception. Acting on the world reduces errors by selectively sampling sensations that are the least surprising. Perceptions are changed by belief updating, thereby changing  internal states. The results are more reality-consonant predictions. If they are not updated, our predictions will not be consonant with reality. On an individual level, this failure may be caused by some trauma, for example, and can then manifest pathologically.  But reality-dissonance can also happen on a group and societal level.

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In this context, the North Korean system of mind control can be understood as a pathological inferential system that has exploited the profoundly human desire for homeostasis – for minimizing surprise. It aims to massively limit or bind the flow of ‘free energy’. But this means the obviously orchestrated and systematic ‘derangement’ of the North Korea people is only a very extreme case of something that is basic to how all humans make individual and collective sense of the world. As Chandaria notes: ‘You want a simulation that is as close to what you would normally expect before seeing the sensory data’. In the case of North Korea, the simulation is biased towards what the people have been conditioned to expect by  the ‘top-down’ inferences disseminated by the regime’s total control of information.

When considered in this light, the recent Covid-19 pandemic was a ‘gift’ to the regime. It allowed it to greatly increase levels of isolation and restriction, closing off the country more than ever before. There has also been a major increase in crackdowns and punishments on foreign media consumption. For example, the 2020 anti-reactionary thought law has made watching foreign media punishable by 15 years in prison camp. But one can see why it is so vital that the regime keeps such a tight hold on the media. As a major conduit of ‘top-down’ information – ‘free energy’ -  it is a threat to the homeostasis that guarantees the regime’s survival, the feeling of security manipulated by the regime in order to main its grip on power. One could say that it aims to ensure that any ‘bottom-up’ sensory input coming from the environment is conformed to the priors which are tightly controlled by the regime.

The Kim regime will stay in power as long as it maintains this monopoly on information flow.  It is obvious, however, that this degree of global surveillance and control is quite simply impossible in a globalized and networked world. It is inevitable that the wall behind which the flow of ‘free energy’ is held will eventually be breached. And then what?  

NOTES

Thomas Metzinger’s book, The Ego Tunnel is published by Basic Books: https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/0465020690/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3OCZZB2OB1HAG&keywords=The+Ego+Tunnel&qid=1686294457&sprefix=the+ego+tunnel%2Caps%2C242&sr=8-1

Sam Harris’ podcast with Shamil Chandaria is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXs0uQ6M5ow

For more on active Inference, ‘free-energy’ and the Bayesian brain’ see: Karl J. Friston’s essay: https://www.uab.edu/medicine/cinl/images/KFriston_FreeEnergy_BrainTheory.pdf

For applications of ‘free energy’ and the ‘Bayesian brain’ to psychology see: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00592/full

The photo at the top of this post is from the Liberty in North Korea website: https://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org/blog/foreign-media-in-north-korea-how-kpop-is-challenging-the-regime?utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=LINK-Blog&gad=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw-IWkBhBTEiwA2exyOy0EHeTr-0GSGeyv5lme5qTpYicJtpGeILjqimauZJg53nMHkW4c1xoCdikQAvD_BwE

Roses, Spring 2023!

It’s May, so that means the roses are in bloom throughout the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere, including here in South Korea, and specifically, in my garden just a few miles from the DMZ.

Here are some pictures of roses in my garden. The first bloomer this year – on May 8th -   was the native species rose Rosa Rugosa, the ‘Rugged Rugosa’:

Rosa Rugosa in my garden in Korea. It’s is a native of these parts. The first rose to bloom this year.

As you can see, the species variety of this rose has flowers  that open wide to display five big purplish-red petals with bright yellow stamen. It repeats flowers, but each bloom only last a couple of days.  The cane is very prickly, and there are big showy hips throughout late summer and autumn. Rugosa means wrinkly in Latin, and  the terms refers to the characteristically corrugate leaves, which are dense and green, and turn golden yellow in late autumn.

The Rugosa is native to China, Korea, and Japan. In Chinese, the Rugosa is known simply as ‘meiguihua’ – simply, ‘rose’ – a sign of its predominance. In Japanese it is ‘hamanashi’ (‘Beach Aubergine’ – a reference to the large hips). Here in Korea they say ‘haedanghwa’ – (‘flower near the seashore’), a reference to the fact that the Rugosa can tolerate sandy soil and the salty air of the seaside. In Japan they were traditionally planted coastal areas to help stabilize beaches and dunes by retaining sand in the root cluster. Traditionally, it was used to make jam and various desserts, and as a pot-pourri. The Rugosa arrived in Europe from Japan in 1784, hence the primary association with that land, and the name ‘Ramanas’ seems to be a distortion of the Japanese name, which somehow metamorphised into ‘Hamanas’ and then into ‘Ramanas’. In the West, the Rugosa is also known colloquially as the ‘Letchberry’, ‘Beach Rose’, ‘Sea Rose’, ‘Salt-spray Rose’, ‘Japanese Rose’, ‘Ramanas Rose’, and, in the UK, the ‘Hedgehog Rose’ – on account of its thorniness. It is very useful as a hedging rose, and since its introduction in the West, has spread rampantly throughout Europe and North America, and in some regions is even considered an invasive pest.

There’s a wonderful poem by H. D.  (Hilda Doolittle) about the Rugosa, entitled ‘Sea Rose’:

Rose, harsh rose, 

marred and with stint of petals, 

meagre flower, thin, 

sparse of leaf, 

more precious 

than a wet rose 

single on a stem— 

you are caught in the drift. 

Stunted, with small leaf, 

you are flung on the sand, 

you are lifted 

in the crisp sand 

that drives in the wind. 

Can the spice-rose 

drip such acrid fragrance 

hardened in a leaf?

A couple of years ago we planted two specimens each of two Bourbon roses: ‘Louise Odier’ and ‘Variegata di Bologna’, which I was surprised to find on sale in a garden centre in south Seoul.  Both are mid-nineteenth century European creations.The Bourbon family of roses probably originally came into being by chance - as a ‘sport’ in the botanical terminology - on a small island in the Indian Ocean, the French colony named Île Bourbon, renamed Réunion by the Revolutionary government in 1793. Eventually, seeds found their way from Réunion to Paris, where Bourbons were introduced to commerce in the 1820s with great success. By mid-century there were dozens of varieties, including my two examples. The consensus is that ‘Parsons’ Pink China’ crossed with a Damask while growing in a hedge on the island. As such, the Bourbon can be considered the first natural cross in modern times between an eastern and western rose, which occurred  on ‘neutral’ territory, far from both.

The petals often make an almost perfect globe, and have an intense fragrance. is my ‘Variegata di Bologna’. As you can see, it gets it names from being bi-coloured (and being bred by an Italian):

‘Variegeta di Bologna’ in my garden.

Both my Bourbons can be purchased online from the British company David Austin Roses, the most famous rose breeders in the world today. Last year we planted one each of four different varieties of David Austin’s own ‘English roses’: ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, ‘Benjamin Britten’, ‘Generous Gardener’, and ‘Brother Cadfael’. 

The “English Rose’ called ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ growing in my garden. Note how different each bloom looks.

‘Benjamin Britten’

The stunning ‘Brother Cadfael.’

“Generous Gardener’ being generous in my garden.

As you can tell from the names Austin gives his roses, the goal is to conjure up something very British, redolent with noble heritage and high culture. Or, sort of. Gertrude Jekyll was the doyen of late Victorian and Edwardian gardening and a great exponent of the rose and the ‘cottage garden’. Benjamin Britten was an twentieth century English composer, who is most well known for his operas. But check out his amazing String Quartets (see the link below).   Brother Cadfael is a more contemporary, and at least for non-Brits or those too young to remember, more obscure , insofar as it’s named after a fictitious Welsh Benedictine monk living in western England in the twelfth century, the main character in a series of historical murder mysteries written during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and televised starring Derek Jacobi. The somewhat unappealing name ‘Generous Gardener’, was  apparently named for the National Gardens Scheme in the UK.  But it's a gorgeous rose. As The David Austin website writes, it ‘bears beautifully formed flowers, which nod gracefully on the stem. When the petals open they expose numerous stamens, providing an almost water lily-like effect. The flowers are a pale glowing pink and have a delicious fragrance with aspects of Old Rose, musk.’

What Austin succeeded in achieving was the merging of the best and nostalgic qualities of the old garden roses, like the Bourbons, Damasks, Albas, Noisettes, Musks, etc., with the best of the new, like the Hybrid Tea and Floribunda, so as to produce a wonderful new family of roses that are typically characterised, like the one’s in my garden, by big generous blossoms and lovely fragrances, but also the capacity to repeat bloom and face extremes of weather, pests, and diseases better than earlier bred roses.

In my book By Any Other Names. A Cultural History of the Rose I quote David Austin himself, writing in 1988:

An English Rose is, or should be, a Shrub Rose. According to variety, it may be considerably larger or even smaller than a Hybrid Tea. But whether large or small, the aim is that it should have a natural, shrubby growth. The flowers themselves are in the various forms of the Old Roses: deep or shallow cup shapes; rosette shapes; semi-double or single, or in any of the unlimited variations between these. They nearly always have a strong fragrance, no less than that of the Old Roses, and their colours often tend towards pastel shades, although there are deep pinks, crimsons, purples and rich yellows.. The aim has been to develop in them a delicacy of appearance that is too often lacking in so many of the roses of our time; to catch something of that unique charm which we associate with Old Roses. Furthermore, English Roses nearly all repeat flower well under suitable conditions.

In fact, these days many of  the ‘English Roses’ are not shrubs but climbers – both ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ and ‘Generous Gardner’ are, and in our garden at least, ‘Benjamin Britten’ seems to want to make its way up our trellis. But Austin has managed to revolutionize the rose for us contemporaries. In my book I call his rose ‘postmodern’, in the sense that Austin hybridised valued qualities of the old and the new.

Here’s a picture of another rose from my garden, the floribunda named ‘Simplicity’. This rose is a seriously promiscuous bloomer! I arranged some of its bounty in a bottle and put them in my studio. Recent paintings by me can be glimpsed behind.

As the website Ludwig’s Roses right observes, ‘The name ‘Simplicity’ refers not only to her clean, simplistic appearance but just as much to her simplistic growth habit – a very easy rose to grow.’

Incidentally, my book about the rose is about to be published in Korean, and I’ll write more about this when it’s available.

Notes

The H.D. poem can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48188/sea-rose

Britten’s String Quartets can be heard at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Szv5TEBhg&list=PLexwM939sM9bHQEEllxm3tv9OPZXLs60u

David Austin’s quote is from The Heritage of the Rose (London: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1988), p.176

 Ludwig’s Roses: https://www.ludwigsroses.co.za

Reflections on a photograph of a painting by Lee Ufan

Lee Ufan. Dialogue. 2014. Oil on canvas. 93 x 73 x 4cm. Courtesy Lisson Gallery.

I recently participated in a symposium at Art Sonje Center in Seoul  on the theme of ‘Painting in the Age of Digital Reproduction’. The symposium was part of a broader UK-Korea academic research project in which I’m involved which explores the materiality of painting  - especially minimal ‘abstract’ painting - in a age dominated by digital reproductions. This is particularly interesting to me because of the paintings I make, like my ‘Book Paintings’, such as this recent one, based on the first edition of  Freud’s ‘Future of an Illusion’:

Simon Morley, 'Freud.'Die Zukunft einer Illusion' (1928)', 2022, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 38cm.

As you can see, the painting is not easy to photograph! In fact, this inadequacy is intentional, because I want my paintings to be more about the intimate and tactile than the public and visual. Instead of a strong contrast between the text and the surface - as in the original book cover on which the painting is based - the colour is uniform and the contrast between text and surface is produced through small tonal difference and difference in texture.

Here is a version of part of the talk I gave in the symposium in which I discussed a painting by Lee Ufan, Dialogue(2014), which is illustrated at the start of this post. This painting featured in an exhibition we staged recently as part of the research project in London at the Korea Cultural Centre, called Transfer, in which a selection of Korean and British abstract paintings (including mine) were juxtaposed with video documents of the paintings. The digital ‘documents’ were specifically intended to avoid the obvious, ‘default’, kind of document which is a digital photograph like the of the Lee Ufan painting or mine shown above. The Lee painting is clearly very minimal indeed, and so it is all the more challenging to document photographically. Here it is as installed in the exhibition Transfer, alongside the video by the Belgian video and performance artist Rafaël, which was made as a decidedly unorthodox ‘document’ of the painting (more on the video below):

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A popular abbreviation online these days is ‘IRL’ – ‘In Real Life’ – which is used to distinguish between a relationship in the digital realm and one in the analogue, ‘off-line’, world. As more and more people spend their time online or on their smartphones, it is becoming an increasingly significant task to consider the differences between the former and the latter.  For while ICT (Information and Communication Technology) provides unprecedented possibilities for recording, copying, transferring, and disseminating data, and has far reaching and positive social implications, there are also obvious dangers. What interests me here is the fact that, as the philosopher Richard Kearney puts it in his book Touch, due to the digital revolution we are living in an ‘age of excarnation’, that is, an age in which the body is being removed from the human world. ‘No one can deny the extraordinary advantages of digital technology. The gains are too great to ignore out of some nostalgia for bygone times’, writes Kearney. But as he goes on to urge, we need ‘to remain sensitive to both cyber and carnal existence – to honour the vital human need for “double sensibility” : imagining and living in concert, touching and being touched in good measure.’ [1]   

What might the art of painting have to tell us about the ramifications of this contemporary ‘excarnation’? As our lives become more and more pervasively computational and digital, recognizing the role of painting as a material and transformational medium is more important than ever.  

On a basic level, the process of digital documentation entails the transfer of data from a source (a painting) to target medium (a digital image), a process that inevitably involves non-equivalence and incommensurability. But mediation between differences is especially problematic in relation to paintings that are non-representational and minimally composed, like Lee Ufan’s (or mine). A digital image of a work by a contemporary artist like David Hockney, for example, which is representational and has a visually complex composition, is far less deficient than a digital image of a typical painting by Lee Ufan, because in the case of the Hockney painting the transfer of data relatively accurately preserves the components of the representational image – a landscape setting with figures. 

We are culturally conditioned, indeed, obliged, to accept digital images like these as credibly accurate reproductions of the paintings they document. The art market requires such proxies, but so too does our basic wish to access, understand, debate, share, and celebrate great art. Indeed, our society strives to make ever more accurate technologically produced copies using ever more sophisticated vision machines. But it is obvious that within normative utilitarian, educational, managerial, and mercantile contexts, the protocols of the documentation of painting are radically circumscribed. 

We expect both an encounter with real paintings and with their digital documents to be meaningful. But it is obvious that the meanings derivable from real paintings are different in significant ways from those of the digital image of these paintings. Furthermore,  the very evident deficit in relation to Lee’s painting exposes a more general inadequacy of photographic technology, which is designed to record only optical data and therefore misses very significant dimensions of an actual encounter with not just abstract paintings like Lee’s but paintings in general.

Let’s start with some basic empirical facts.

Holding up a digital reproduction of Lee Ufan’s painting next to the original will immediately  demonstrate one obvious limitation of the former:   the image is very small compared to the actual painting, which is 93cm tall by 73cm wide. This miniaturization means it is difficult or impossible to perceive the details of the real painting. If one is viewing the image on a computer, and the file is of sufficiently large dpi, one can zoom in on areas of the painting. If one continues to zoom in, or only have access to a smaller size image file, a pixelated image will be delivered. This immediately destroys the illusion that one has access to the visual properties of the original.

More fundamentally, one cannot get a sense of scale from a digital image. You can’t feel how the real painting relates to the human body. If the photograph was cropped to include wall and floor space and included a human presence, or the painting was documented in a time-based medium like video, this crucial sense of scale could to some extent be conveyed. But what it actually feels like to be there, moving around in front of the painting in real time and space, is obviously unavailable.   

Mobile observations of the real painting by Lee will reveal that the support is quite deep – 4cm – which gives the work greater three-dimensionality than is common in relation to paintings - a tangible object-like presence. But this is inevitably lost in the immobile, flat, frontal, digital photograph. Again, a video will provide a greater sense of this quality, but unless it is interactive, provides a pre-determined sequence of movements. But even an interactive version depends on the vision provided by a lens attached to a machine not an eye embedded in a body.

You also won’t get much sense of the surface texture of Lee’s painting. He uses a relatively coarse grain linen canvas as his support, which is coated in several layers of gesso and oil paint. The small, solitary brush stroke that breaks the uniform off-white field of the painting, is quite thinly painted, and so in places the weave of the canvas beneath is visible. In a digital reproduction, in a book one sees the sheen of printer’s ink on paper,  or on a computer screen, a glossy glass surface, while here, in this talk, a projected image using a powerful electric light beam.

Because of the vast improvements in digital photography over analogue in terms of colour matching, to a much greater extent than in earlier periods, we are likely to be lured into believing that we are actually perceiving the same colours as in the original painting.  But a comparison between an image (still or moving) and the actual work by Lee will reveal that the former is not the same colours as the latter. This isn’t surprising. The pigment of Lee’s painting is suspended in oil and applied to linen with a brush, while the colour in a printed reproduction on paper is suspended in ink that has been mixed using the CMYK printing procedure. Viewing the image on a computer or monitor screen, meanwhile, involves perceiving colours generated by red-, green- and blue-coloured light. Each pixel of which the image is comprised contains three or four subpixels coated in phosphor, which are excited with UV light emitted by Xenon or Neon gas that turn to plasma state once an electric current is passed though.  It is also important to note that we are seeing only an approximation to the colours recorded at a specific moment in time, in a specific light, by the photographer, whereas the colour of Lee Ufan’s painting changes in relation to the ambient light in which it is bathed, and also depending on the direction and proximity from which you look at it.

On reflection, we can all surely agree that on this basic phenomenological level we are experiencing a nugatory approximation to Lee Ufan’s original painting.  We are only seeing what a single lens perpendicular to the painting attached to a machine controlled by a professional photographer who is focusing on a vertical surface, digital data that is subsequently manipulated on a computer by the photographer using software.

We can sum this all up by saying that while an encounter with the actual Lee Ufan is to a significant degree empirical - based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience – an encounter with its digital document will be nonempirical, abstract, or theoretical. By denuding a painting of its actual material properties and embeddedness in three-dimensional space, attention inevitably shifts to the non-sensory and mental. Because of the sensory deficits inherent in digital documentation, a viewer’s responses are inevitably biased towards intellectual consciousness. Attention is directed towards the kinds of mental processes that words can customarily encompass.  

As a result, a digital photograph will inevitably fail to provide a resonant experience of  the painting it documents. I use the term ‘resonance’ specifically, so as to refer to the recent sociological theory of Hartmut Rosa.  Rosa asserts that ‘human beings are first and foremost not creatures capable of language, reason, or sensation, but creatures capable of resonance’.[2] Resonance is inherently anti-structural, and it is precisely because of this property that it is so highly valued. For what is at stake is the loosening of the rigid and alienating boundaries that usually ground the subject firmly in time and space. Resonance brings the experience of intimate connectedness to a world freed from the usual strong and deadening awareness of divisions and boundaries. As such, a resonant experience is inherently unpredictable, and it can be constituent of a situation or can be wholly absent, regardless of any active desire we might have to experience it. Furthermore, and importantly, in Rosa’s analysis, a resonant relationship to the world is inevitably only a brief and uncontrollable release from the pervasive state of alienation within which modern humanity exists. 

The video ‘document’ in the exhibition Transfer is by the Belgian artist and Korean resident Rafaël featured ten Koreans standing in a row and responding to 4 questions about a digital photograph of the Lee Ufan painting, rather than the actual painting itself, which in the exhibition was hung a few meters away:

Rafaël. Lee Ufan, Dialogue (2014), oil on canvas. 2022. Colour, Stereo. 4 minutes

The questions appear on a blank screen, and then we see the camera trained on the 10 interviewees. We only see them responding to what they see, and their answers are heard simultaneously and therefore are mostly incomprehensible. The goal was to abandon the normative protocols of the digital document, to decisively upset the conventions.. The hope was that a less instrumental and more playful space might be opened up within which the relationship between the digital document and the painting that is the source can more fruitfully evolve.

If we want to ‘honour’ the ‘double sensibility’ of contemporary life to which Richard Kearney refers, we would surely do well to remind ourselves of the inadequacy of the paltry digital artefacts that masquerade as paintings. We need them, of course. They are indispensable documents. But we can also strive to maintain and encourage intimate acquaintances with works of art IRL. In real life.

 
NOTES

[1] Richard Kearney, Touch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 132

[2] Hartmut. Rosa, Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Translated by James C. Wagner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 36

Lee Ufan image courtesy of Lisson Gallery.

You can see some of my paintings, for example, at: https://www.galleryjj.org/simon-morley.

Or, at my website: simonmorley.com.

MBTI, Five Elements, Ketsueki-gata, and Urbanization in South Korea

The Chinese Five Element Model.

In a couple of previous blog posts I mentioned the way in which the personality profiling  typology MBTI is big in South Korea, and how it reflects a specific techno-managerial mindset that has been adopted as part of the Westernizing-modernizing ‘package’. What is also interesting about Korean people’s use of MBTI is how it fundamentally differs from the previous models through which they have sought to stabilize and order personality identification. This difference reflects basic changes in the human geography of the country, most especially, the urbanization of society.

In pre-modern Korea a dominant model called ohaeng (오행), which derived from Chinese Taoism and Confucianism,, dominated. Here, there are said to be 5 personality types based on the five element cycle - Wood, Fire, Metal, Water, Earth. These in turn relate to the cyclical changing of the seasons each year. The Five Element Theory is also the basis for the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac.  It was said that people can be classified according to the five elements. Their body structure, tendencies, temperaments, emotions, positive and negative behaviour, moods and illnesses can all be considered  in relation to them because the seasons correlate with human taste, emotion, internal organs, and parts of the body.  Therefore, the Five Element theory is the basis for ‘Oriental’ or ‘Chinese’ medicine. The general goal was to devise a system that reflected the relationship and interdependence of everything, and it considered that human well-being fundamentally depended on finding a balance within the dynamic on-going and unfolding process of existence.

Apparently, I am classed as ‘Earth’. Here is what the International College of Oriental Medicine website says about me:

Earth type people have a yellowish complexion, round faces and big heads, big abdomens, small hands and feet and plenty of muscles. They have a sing-song voice. They are calm in temperament, fond of helping people and like to be involved and needed.

They love to associate with other people, seek harmony and togetherness and insist upon loyalty, security and predictability. They have a dislike of power. The emotion associated with the Earth element is Rumination. When a person is overly pensive and contemplative, he/she can easily become fixated on worrisome thoughts and ideas.

Earth type people can therefore often be tormented by their over-concern for details and can become caught up in circular thinking from which there is no escape. Other people can depend on this type of person because they are reliable, sympathetic, and good caretakers.

Without the demands of work or responsibility to others, they can become inert, dropping back into the well-worn trails of their own mind. In this state, their energy becomes stagnant and leads to poor digestion, heaviness and flabbiness. They need to balance their devotion to relationships with solitude and self-expression, developing self-reliance as well as building community.

They have a tendency for excess eating and good living that leads to obesity, stomach ulcers and diabetes. They may suffer from disorders of the joints, particularly arthritis, and especially involving the wrists and ankles. Woman often have irregular menstruation with weight gain from cycle to cycle and men are prone to early prostatitis.

I don’t recall any Korean talking to me about ohaeng as a way of discerning my personality type, but I do remember being asked by several Koreans when I first met them for my blood group, something I didn’t actually recall -  a fact that dumbfounded them.  This is because they believe you can classify personality types according to blood type, like this:

This personality typology derived from Japan, where it is called  Ketsueki-gata. But its looks like the Blood Type model has now been superseded by MBTI, especially amongst young South Koreans.

What is especially striking about the evolution of personality typologies over the past one hundred years in Korea is that is reflects  the systematic removal of notions of human identity from being embedded in nature. Whereas the traditional Chinese derived typology linked humanity to the four seasons and the idea of existence as process, and the Japanese Blood Type model linked it to the body, what HBTI effectively does is sever any such conception of personality from the natural world, rendering human personality abstract and autonomous.

In other words, South Koreans are following the West in assuming there is a fundamental division between  the human and the non-human worlds – between ‘culture’ and ‘nature.’ The benefit of such dualism lie in the capacity it nurtures for a dominating and exploitative relationship to the non-human, a relationship in which humanity comes to see itself as standing apart from the rest of the world. This dualistic stance is fundamental to the techno-scientific mindset of modernization. As the philosopher and ecofeminist Val Plumwood noted of the rationalistic spirit that dominates Western culture: “Its ‘success-making’ characteristics, including its ruthlessness in dealing with the sphere it counts as ‘nature’, have allowed it to dominate both non-human nature and other peoples and cultures.”   

In practical terms, this shift in the conception of human personality reflects the wholesale migration of people from the land and dependence on agriculture to the city and factory and office employment. One of the most striking features of contemporary South Korea is its relentless urbanization: 20 percent of the population lives in Seoul. Greater Seoul encompassed more than 50 percent of the total population.  Over the past fifty years South Korea’s urbanization rate has exceeded 90 percent.  This is what the National Atlas of Korea, published online by the Seoul Institute, says:

 The government’s master plan for land development was put into action in the early 1960s. At that time, the government based its plan on the growth pole theory in order to maximize the development effect in as short a period of time as possible. Though wellintentioned, the growth pole approach only allowed for investment in the few central development areas that were most likely to succeed before development could be considered in other areas. This approach had the unfortunate result of causing both people and capital to flow to those few development centers. The resulting imbalance between those centers and all other areas in the country was later corrected with the implementation of a more balanced set of development policies. 

 …….

Urbanization has had major impacts on the country's demographics, its physical landscape, its socialbehavioral institutions, as well as the economy. Symbols that represented cities on the national map kept increasing, and as the number of cities increased, the population of rural areas declined, which also led to a decrease in the percentage of the population that was engaged in agriculture and fishery activities. New cities kept appearing on the national map as larger metropolitan areas continued to expand into rural land surrounding them.   The emergence of metropolitan centers is a major feature of development in Korea and resulted primarily from the rural-to-urban migrations, especially in the capital area. After the 1960s, rapid urbanization and industrialization attracted secondary and tertiary industries to cities as well. More jobs were created prompting further mass migrations from rural to urban areas. The urbanization rate, which indicates the ratio of urban population as a percentage of the total population, increased rapidly in Korea until the 1980s, but the pace has slowed since then. Between the 1970s and 1980s urbanization occurred at a much faster rate than in many other countries. As a result, rural areas suffered from the lack of a labor force, a decrease in the coefficient of land utilization, and the rapid aging of its population; these factors ultimately contributed to the failure to meet the minimum requirements for sustaining a rural community in many instances. And at the same time urban areas were confronted with the need to mitigate the challenges of overcrowding. Additionally, the heavy concentration of industrial activity within the metropolitan areas resulted serious social and environmental issues such as housing shortages, traffic congestion, poor air quality, and overall environmental degradation.

It seems to me that this basic transformation in the physical environment caused by rapid modernizing development, in addition to the concomitant transformation in mindset entailed in adopting the Western model of a culture/nature dualism, goes a long way to explaining Korean people’s shift from what is an essentially agricultural and process-oriented model of human personality to a mechanistic, abstract, and ‘managerial’ one. In this context, Ketseuki-gata seems like a transitional typology in which the seemingly Western ‘scientific’ criteria of blood types, with its underlying assumption of fixed and mechanistic principles, were melded with residual principles from the Chinese Five Elements model based on the alternative process-based vision that pervaded East Asia.

Ironically, Western thinkers are now shifting their mindset to embrace just such a process-based vision so as to better confront climate change…..More on this in a future post.

Sources:

The Five Element diagram is from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuxing_%28Chinese_philosophy%29

The International College of Oriental Medicine quote is from: https://orientalmed.ac.uk/the-five-personality-types-by-galit-hughes/

The Ketsueki-gata illustration is from: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-blood-type-personality-5191276

The Val Plumwood quote is from: Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, (Routledge, 2002), page 5

The quote from the National Atlas of Korea is from:  http://nationalatlas.ngii.go.kr/pages/page_592.php

Suicide in Korea

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

The death by suicide of a K-Pop star named Moonbin from the group Astro made headlines recently.  Reference was made to other Korean stars who have taken their own lives. Of course, we should bare in mind all the other K-Pop and K-movie stars that haven’t taken their lives – the vast majority. But celebrity suicides make good news.

Becoming a K-Pop star is certainly an arduous business, as I learned from watching a video about the girl group Black Pink. Here they are in action:

What a different model for pop music stardom to the one that developed in the 1950s and 1960s in the West! Think of the haphazard way in which The Beatles honed their skills, or Bob Dylan, or David Bowie. In South Korea a specific business model originally designed to sell products has been very successfully adapted to human beings.  

A potential young future K-Pop star is removed from normal life in order to be groomed for the job. The video tried to show that the four grils from Black Pink were actually quite ordinary - just like you and me. Without the sexy get-up they did actually look very ordinary looking. Two of the girls said that what they most regretted is that they had missed out on the memories possessed by ’normal’ young people. Obviously, they have memories, but these would certainly not be anything like those of their un-groomed peers. In other words, in becoming stars they were radically removed from the intimacy of the social group of their peers, which is why they seem so obsessively bound to the other members of Black Pink. They are all these poor youngsters have – apart, from their record company employees - and, of course, the millions of adoring fans. This is obviously not by any stretch of the imagination any basis for a healthy life for a young person. It’s actually remarkable that not more of these stars commit suicide! In fact, perhaps the bosses of the music studios should be accused of psychological abuse.

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The article on the BBC website about the stars suicide also noted that South Korea has a worryingly high suicide rate, and that it’s growing amongst young Koreans. Statistics from 2019 show that South Korea is Number 2 after the Russian Federation in rates of suicide amongst developed nation, and that suicide is something that afflicts men disproportionately:

This is what the rates of suicide looks like globally. Note the fact that in some countries suicide is still illegal, so we can’t trust the stats from these countries.

Albert Camus wrote that suicide was an especially significant problem for modern humanity because, unlike our ancestors, we confront the fundamental meaninglessness of existence – what Camus termed the ‘absurd’. He said this in the early 1940s, during a world war and from the incongruous setting of the French ‘Département’ of Algeria, but much of what he had to say still very much remains relevant. Above all, the problem of meaning.

“What is the nature of meaning?” asked the neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, published a few years after Camus, and another book that is still speaking to our dilemmas.. Frankl argued that we all experience an “existential vacuum” in which we sense that there is no inherent meaning or purpose in the universe. But this awareness is remedied by the actualizing of “values.” Frankl argued that the resulting investment of meaning is the result of a decision to bring three major classes of values into our lives: the creative, experiential, and attitudinal. The latter is the stance we take toward our suffering plights. Frankl wrote: “Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man, his courage and hope, or lack of them and the state of immunity of his body will understand that sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect”. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor, and referred to the high death rate in Auschwitz over the period of Christmas 1944 to New Year 1945, observing that so many prisoners died because they hoped to be home before Christmas, and when they realized this wouldn’t happen, they lost hope.

I think Frank’s observation is especially relevant in the context of modern South Korea, a nation that put is total faith in Westernizing modernization or development, undertaken at vertiginous speed. But the promise of development has not been delivered, or at least, not to the young people of Korea who do not benefit from it as their parents and grandparents have. The curve of development is now definitely downwards. It might even be catastrophically downwards because of humanly induced climate change or impending nuclear war. This closure of a hopeful Korean future must certainly be profoundly effecting young Koreans ability to find meaning in their lives.

This is especially exacerbated by the awesome competitiveness built into the system, which impacts on children from a young age. It is quite normal for school kids to go to regular school in the daytime and them to continue studies at ‘academies’ until midnight! In these places they are tutored in math, English, etc. in order to get an edge of their peers (who are also all going to the same academies), so that when they sit the university entrance exams at 18 they have a better chance of getting to one of the prestigious institutions and so graduate to a good career.

Now, all this grooming made sense when South Korea was on the up, when getting a university degree really did give one the edge in the buoyant career market. But the very success of Korea’s education system –  almost all Koreans get degrees of some sort - means that the currency of academic qualifications is debased. Plus, the job market is shrinking rapidly, and will further shrink with the introduction of AI. Add to this the unbelievable barrage of information being relayed to young Koreans via their smart phones, and especially the corrosive influence of social media, and you can see why more and more of them have trouble finding life intrinsically meaningful.

Poor Moonbin faced his own very particular existential problems. But young Koreans in general seem more vulnerable than most youngsters. Obviously, I’ve only scratched the surface here as to why suicide is a problem. It is interesting and sad to note that the other disproportionately large group prone to suicide in South Korea are old people.

References

Albert Camus’, The Myth of Sisyphus was originally published in 1942: https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Sisyphus-ALBERT-CAMUS/dp/B077NL81RC/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1682301131&sr=1-1

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was originally published in 1946: https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl-ebook/dp/B009U9S6FI

The image of Astro is from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65339082

Black Pink’s image is from: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/blackpink-how-you-like-that-dance-video/.

The Black Pink video can be watched on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmAOeLRiXhQ

The suicide statistics are from:  

https://www.statista.com/chart/15390/global-suicide-rates/

 https://landgeist.com/2021/04/01/suicide-rate/ 

Korean artists: No more Moon Jars, please!

One of the most beautiful expressions of the Korean spirit is the so-called moon jar. The name is self-explanatory: the round white porcelain  pot looks like a full moon.  They were made by throwing two separate bowls on the potter’s wheel and joining them in the middle. No moon jar is precisely round, which is what gives them their special charm. Nor are they ever perfectly smooth and white.

Actually, the name is not historical, and was first used in the early twentieth century. In the records of the Joseon period, these jars were called ‘wonho’, meaning ‘round jar’. They first appeared in the late seventeenth century and became very popular in the royal court in the first half of the eighteenth century. But by the end of the century, they’d gone out of fashion and disappeared.  No one knows just what the jars were used for. Some have inscriptions referring to the royal kitchen, and have residue of vegetable oil inside. So, they were probably used to store liquids or food. In other words, they weren’t meant to be sat up on a plinth to be admired for purely aesthetic value. Like all pottery, a moon jar had a functional purpose as well as an aesthetic one.

As  British person, I was already vaguely familiar with the moon jar before first coming to Korea because there is a fabulous example in the British Museum. This is the one illustrated at the start of this post.

The story of how the jar ended up in central London is interesting. The great English potter Bernard Leach (1887 – 1979) purchased the jar on a visit to Seoul, then called Keijo, capital of the Japanese colony, Chōson. Leach had come to Seoul from Japan, where he spent a good deal of time, with his Japanese friend, the art historian Yanagi Muneyoshi (1889 - 1961). Muneyoshi was a great exponent of Korean ceramic ware. In his book Joseon and its Art, he wrote: “Regardless of the East and the West, if the times are advanced, techniques become more and more complex. We can find an interesting exception from Joseon’s ceramic art, though. Its beauty is in its return to simplicity.... Isn’t trust of nature the astonishing distinction of Joseon’s art?” Leach said that the jar was like ‘carrying a piece of happiness’. He asked the potter Lucie Rie  (1902 – 95) to care of it for the duration of the war, and Leach decided it should stay with her after the war ended. After Rie’s death, it was bequeathed to Leach’s widow, and the British Museum acquired it from the Leach estate in 1999. In other words, it hasn’t been there very long when I first saw it, some time in the early 2000s.

Many have described the moon jar as the quintessence of traditional ‘koreanness.’  They are understood to exemplify the Neo-Confucian ideals of purity and integrity.  Kim Whanki (1913 – 1974), the first internationally fêted modern artist from Korea, loved and collected moon jars. He also painted them. Like this one, ‘Moon Jar’ (1958), oil on canvas, 61.4x38.3cm:

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The moon jar is also painted by many contemporary Korean artists, as I saw when I visited this year’s  Galleries Art Fair at COEX in Seoul. I was there primarily because I was one of the exhibiting artists, showing work with the Seoul-based Gallery JJ. Here I am with my paintings:

And here are a couple of close-ups. They are examples of my Book-Paintings, which look at first like monochromes but are actually based on the covers or title pages of books from the twentieth century:

This one is based on a French book about Kim Whanki from 1984.. Acrylic on canvas, 73x60.5cm.

This one is based on a translation of a famous book by Carl Jung, ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul’, published in 1933. Acrylic on canvas, 45x38cm.

And here is a photo tour of some of the Fair’s rich crop of moon jar paintings:

It’s inevitable that a cultural icon quickly becomes a cliché. In my humble opinion, it’s high time to propose a ban on moon jar paintings! What do you think?

 Image Credits:

The moon jar : https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1999-0302-1

The Kim Whanki painting: https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Moon-and-Jar/4DF815ED795D95E4

MBTI. Some more thoughts

A screen-grab from the website ‘16Personalities’ - one of the most popular in South Korea for learning about MBTI.

In the previous post I discussed young Korean people’s enthusiasm for MBTI personality profiling and argued that one of the reasons why MBTI has become so popular here is that it provides the possibility of organizing the messy reality of human identity in an efficient manner that draws attention only to positive character traits.

In this post I want to dwell on the word ‘efficiency’ and its role in Korean society.  I think there’s no doubt that visitors to the Republic of Korea are likely to be struck by the feeling that this country is highly efficient. I don’t think I’ve ever waited for a subway or mainline train because it’s late. The country has the fastest broadband internet connection.  When Koreans decide to emulate something foreign they always seem to do it with greater efficiency.

The contrast between the contemporary inefficiency of Western European societies (the ‘Wild West’, as I like to call it nowadays) and the ROK’s obvious efficiency was especially striking during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the recognition has stayed with me even after things are moving back to some kind of ‘normal’.

This ‘efficiency’ is all the more striking because in the early days of  contact with the West and the initiation of modernization first under the Japanese, and then under the watchful eyes of the military government between the 1960s and 1980s, it was precisely the nation’s inefficiency that was criticized – both by foreigners and by Korean modernizers. Ahn Sang-ho (1878 – 1938), a prominent politician and independence activist under Japanese colonial rule, one of the first Koreans to emigrate to the United States who then in 1926 returned to Korea and engaged in anti-Japanese activism for which he was imprisoned - an experience that led to the ill health that caused his death - deplored Koreans’ parochialism, depravity, laziness, and dependence.

Ahn called for a radical reform of social behaviour through education and self-cultivation, but the spirit of modernization he admired in the West, which had led to the exponential expansion of the West’s wealth, power and influence, and the establishment of a democratic political system, was also fundamentally driven by what the German sociologist Max Weber (1864 – 1920) termed ‘bureaucratization’.  This  involved the organization of Western society around functional, formal, rational systems with well-defined rules and procedures. It required hierarchy, specialization, training, impartiality and managerial loyalty. A society moved through rationalization towards greater efficiency and effectiveness, and this in its turn meant that the citizens would reap the benefits in terms of greater security and wealth. But Weber warned that excessive reliance on and adherence to rules and regulations also inhibited initiative and growth. The tendency is for a managerial-bureaucratic society to treat people as machines rather than individuals. In other words, the system is de-humanizing. There is the danger that emotions and feelings are not incorporated into the way a bureaucratic society is run. The impersonal approach to the organization of a society shunts these dimensions of human existence to the margins, dismissing them as obstacles to social efficiency. For Weber, the systematic ‘dis-enchantment’ of the world was the price of rationalization. Technological expertise  replaced priestly vision, and rationality and efficiency replaced mystery and magic.

Is it too much to say that in its avid desire to join the ranks of modernized nations, the ROK adopted a version of the Western  bureaucratic model, one that from the 1970s onwards proved to meld very effectively with elements of pre-modern Confucianism, such as social hierarchy and the sense of the community as a collective rather than made up of individuals? Is it too much to suggest that young Korean’s weakness for MBTI today is a side-effect of the excessively bureaucratic version of capitalist modernization adopted by the ROK, manifested on the level of questions pertaining to personal identity?

Another screen-grab from 16Personalities.

*

In the previous post I mentioned the cultural theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, members of the so-called Frankfurt School and exponents of ‘critical theory’ – critical’ being the key word. For these left-leaning German Jews, writing in the wake of Hitler’s rise in Germany and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, its seemed that modernization in general was fundamentally unhinged. They believed the seemingly ‘open’ and democratic United States was simply more insidiously ‘fascistic’ than the obvious culprits. Capitalist modernity was synonymous with the degradation of human life to a level where the experience of alienation from the world and from each other was pervasive. Building on the social theory of Weber and others, they diagnosed modern society as having shrugged off one metaphysical system for another – religion for rationality. 

In the more recent writings of the Frankfurt School sociologist Hartmut Rosa, which I  have also mentioned in an earlier post, the uncompromisingly bleak prognosis of Adorno and Horkheimer cedes to a more nuanced perspective on the price of modernization. Alienation is still the norm, but Rosa stresses that modernization is also unique in seeking multiple remedies for alienation. One such remedy is art. Others include pop music and getting drunk or high -  anything that can perhaps deliver the antithesis of alienation, which Rosa calls the experience of  ‘resonance’. This benign world-relating to which Rosa refers is fugitive, structureless, and inherently invisible. “[R]esonance is not an echo, but a responsive relationship, requiring that both sides speak with their own voice”, Rosa writes in Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (2019). It is precisely because of the anti-structural properties of resonance that it is so highly valued and desired, because ultimately what is at stake is our profound yearning for a relationship to the world that is without hierarchy, divisions, and boundaries,  in which we feel a deep sense of sharing, intimacy and harmony, and where all people and things are equal.  Rosa’s choice of the term ‘resonance’ is largely determined by its anti-structural nature, and indicates that benign relationships with the world involve responsiveness on both sides – of the subject and the world. For Rosa argues that “resonance appears not as something that first develops between a self-conscious subject and a ‘premade’ world, but as the event through which both commence”.  The experience of resonance can therefore only potentially occur when there is “a relation between two bodies that are at once open enough for a relationship while at the same time remaining sufficiently stable and closed so as to ‘sound’ at their own frequency or ‘speak with their own voice’.”  

Rosa sees all people in developed countries as living lives mainly of alienation, and considers this to be primarily because modernity is inherently about aggressive control. As Rosa puts it in his most recent work to be translated into English,  The Uncontrollability of the World (2020): “Modernity has lost its ability to be called, to be reached” becausewithin in it “[w]e are structurally compelled (from without) and culturally driven (from within) to turn the world into a point of aggression. It appears to us as something to be known, exploited, attained, appropriated, mastered, and controlled. And often this is not just about bringing things – segments of world – within reach, but about making them faster, easier, cheaper, more efficient, less resistant, more reliably controlled.”  Rosa sees four dimensions to modernity’s obsession with guaranteeing maximum control which thwart the possibility of achieving resonance: the world is made visible and therefore knowable by “expanding our knowledge of what is there”, the world is made physically reachable or accessible, manageable, and the world is made useful. As a result, the price of achieving a historically unprecedented degree of control is that the modern subject exists mostly in a condition of profound alienation, inwardly disconnected from other people and from the world.  

It seems to me that the contemporary Republic of Korea is especially prone to this rage for control, and that the craze for MBTI is one manifestation of this overwhelming tendency which is an intrinsic part of the modernization process through which the ROK has gone at breakneck speed. As Rosa writes: “Modernity stands at risk of no longer hearing the world and, for this very reason, losing its sense of itself.”  

In a future post I will consider how MBTI can also be understood within a broader Korean historical and cultural context that predates Westernization. I  will also explore how in the West the alientation of which Rosa writes plays out in terms of a lack of the very secure identity sign-posts that MBTI provides Koreans, and  is causing so much trouble. Perhaps the South Koreans may be recognizing something important we in the West are not…...

References

The image at the beginning of today’s blog is from: https://www.16personalities.com/country-profiles/republic-of-korea 

Max Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy was described in Economy and Society, published in 1921. 

Hartmut Rosa’s books are Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, translated by  James C. Wagner, and published by Polity Press in 2019, and The Uncontrollability of the World, also translated by  James C. Wagner, and published by Polity Press in 2020..

Korea goes crazy for MBTI

Last week in class, one of my students mentioned how Koreans her age (the so-called MZ Generation) are seriously into MBTI – the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality assessment test. As I soon discovered on trawling the Internet, MBTI is practically an obsession amongst the young here in Korea.

So, what is MBTI? It was devised in 1943 in the United States by a mother-daugher team, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs-Myers.   They were inspired by Carl Jung’s analytic psychology, but neither had professional training in psychology. This didn’t stop their personality assessment questionnaire taking off. It appealed to anyone who wanted simple answers to very complex questions, a clear map to the wilderness of the human mind.  MBTI was therefore appealing to huge corporations and confused teenagers.  

These are the basics personalities you can choose from:

The eight basic types combine to produce 16 composites, ranging from ISFP (Introvert-Sensing-Feeling-Perceiving) which make you kind, spontaneous, and accommodating,  to ENTJ (Extravert-INtuitive-Thinking-Judging), which means you are confident, innovative, and logical.   Of the latter, the website Truity, which has the by-line ‘Understand who you truly are’,  says that it ‘indicates a person who is energized by time spent with others (Extraverted), who focuses on ideas and concepts rather than facts and details (iNtuitive), who makes decisions based on logic and reason (Thinking) and who prefers to be planned and organized rather than spontaneous and flexible (Judging). ENTJs are sometimes referred to as Commander personalities because of their innate drive to lead others.’

Here is the full menu:

If only it was so damn simple! Jung must be turning in his grave.  He is on record as saying that MBTI profoundly misunderstood his analysis of personality. First of all, the assumption of MBTI is that you have a stable, fixed personality that is fully accessible to conscious self-reflection, that we are objective in our appraisal of our own personality traits. Secondly, you will note that according to Myers-Briggs, everyone’s personality is basically comprised of positive traits. This is very far from the thinking of the man who urged us to descend deep into the murky darkness of our consciousness, where we must face our ‘shadow’. As Jung wrote: ‘Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself to wants to be.’  It is also obviously very different from the prognosis of Jung’s mentor and then rival, Sigmund Freud, concerning human nature (think, Oedipus Complex, the ID, and the Death Instinct).

MBTI is a sanitized, feel-good bowdlerization of very complex modern, but now dated, insights into the human psyche. In fact, if it wasn’t such an influential test, one might dismiss it as innocent fun, like astrology.  And now, eighty years after it was first devised, and on the other side of the world, MBTI has been especially adopted by South Koreans. They are far and away the most avid adopters of the test, and the MBTI categories are routinely used in formal and informal social situations, and as a dating tool.  Why?

There are several obvious reasons. Above all, perhaps, there is the influence of Korea’s collectivist social structure.  This inclines individuals to seek to identify themselves not as independent, unique, selves but as members of clearly defined groups. In other words, as I noted in a previous post, when considering their identity, Koreans tend to struggle to associate their private self with a publicly recognizable self. But MBTI facilitates this by providing sixteen clear personality types. As Sarah Chea writes in the Korea JoongAng Daily: ‘Koreans tend to easily feel anxious when they think they don’t belong to any groups, so they push themselves to be involved so they can belong somewhere. They like to feel the sense of community from being with others in the same group, and feel relief when they feel they are not alone.’   

Then there is the fact that Covid-19 pandemic accentuated people’s sense of isolation, making young Koreans even more desirous of connecting with others through explicit shared criteria concerning identity.  Social media made this possible, but also required radical simplification.  It’s much, much easier to say ‘I’m ESFJ’ than to struggle with the vague and shifting reality of one’s personality. But only, of course, if one is confident whoever is reading knows what you mean. MBTI therefore also serves to establish clear in-group/out-group boundaries not just within the 16 different personality types but in relation to assessing people in terms of those who have adopted the MBTI vision as a whole and those who have not.

This desire to share one’s personality with others is surely motivated by the need to feel less alone, but also by the fact that we now live in a culture in which self-realization is highly valued. The era we are now living through has radically altered how we think about ourselves, making the private self a ‘bankable’ commodity. But as the philosopher Han Byung-Chul notes, the deepest problem for people in the developed world is excessively positive attitudes  which lead to a pervasive failure to manage negative experiences. This is surely another reason why MBTI is appealing. It allows us to gesture towards the interiority required of the fully contemporary identity while seeing ourselves only in relation to positive personality traits.

If we look at MBTI historically, we can recognize that it was born during a period in the United States when there was a drive towards the instrumentalization and rationalization of society in the service of the bureaucratic thinking central to a managerial capitalism, and tied to the immediate need to optimize efficiency for the war effort.  As noted by the Frankfurt School thinkers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer  – who when Myers and Briggs-Myers devised MBTI were living in the United States in exile from Nazi Germany – instrumental reason privileges the objective at the expense of the subjective, and obscures the fact that so-called ‘reason’ is always a mix of the rational and the irrational, the subjective and the objective. As a result, the objective is viewed as unchanging, eternal, and universal.

This is precisely what MBTI does in relation to personality and identity. Which means Koreans are placing the need for ‘efficiency ‘ in relation to achieving their ends above all other possible motives and desires. They are coping with the hyper-novelty, stresses and strains of accelerated modernization and westernization in their country by resorting to a blatant example of objective, instrumental reason, deployed in relation to the intimate and vulnerable region of their inner experiences - their personalities where, in reality, subjective experience reigns. This will surely inhibit any genuine exploration of identity. As Jung wrote: ‘The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams.’

By channeling the desire to present one’s private self in public without risk, through sanitized publicly accessible categories, MBTI is certainly a useful tool of social conformity. It is a million miles away from the profound crisis of identity evident in the West’s preoccupation with gender dysphoria. So, perhaps I am being too negative. In this cultural light, perhaps MBTI is a valid means of ensuring social stability.

Or perhaps most young Koreans think of MBTI as just a fun way of referring to each other, a game, and take it all with a big pinch of salt.

SOURCES:

The MBTI tables are from: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/22/asia/south-korea-mbti-personality-test-dating-briggs-myers-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

Truity quote: https://www.truity.com/personality-type/ENTJ

Korea JoongAng Daily quote: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2022/04/16/why/korea-mbti-blood-types/20220416070206510.html

Han Byung-Chul’s views can be found, for example, in The Burnout Society (Stanford University Press, 2013)

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s ideas concerning ‘instrumental reason’ can be found in Critique of Instrumental Reason (Verso, 2013)

Carl Jung’s writings are voluminous. A good place to start is Modern Man in Search of A Soul (1936) which is available in a new edition from Routledge. The Amazon blurb is telling: ‘One of his most famous books, it perfectly captures the feelings of confusion that many sense today. Generation X might be a recent concept, but Jung spotted its forerunner over half a century ago. For anyone seeking meaning in today's world, Modern Man in Search of a Soul is a must.’

Honour the dead and protect the living

Spring has arrived here in Korea! One of the loveliest signs of its arrival is the flowering of azalea  or Korean rhododendron blossom on the hillsides. The azalea is a very inconspicuous shrub that merits no attention for all of the year except during a few weeks in March and early April when across the wooded hillsides the deep pink blossoms emerge in scattered profusion.

Here I am with our dog, Bomi, posing with one example:

 And here is a detail. The flower is extraordinarily delicate, and it’s hard not to feel joyful when looking at it.

What you don’t see in the photo of me and Bomi are the nearby pill box and trench. But I can’t show these, because of the security regulations near to the DMZ. Taking photographs of military installations can land one a hefty fine or a stretch in jail, and recently, I’ve noticed more signs have been going up blocking entrances to some of the more ‘scenic’ and accessible places where such installations exist.

As I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, one of the  unsettling dimensions of living near the border with North Korea is the fact that everywhere around here is defensively fortified. Now this might seem anomalous, a tragic deviation from the norms of civil society, but actually, I think that what the presence of all this overt military infrastructure does is remind one that any place that enjoys peace and is relatively free,  depends on such defenses. It just that you don’t see them so overtly like you do here.  

The distressing truth - painfully obvious in Ukraine nowadays - is that sometimes you have to defend and be ready to fight for freedom. This is for the simple reason that there will always be bad agents seeking to steal or suppress it, a truth that is a major problem for pacifists, who, quite rightly, deplore war.

Another bizarre feature of the environment around here is that one often comes across grave plots right next to military emplacements.

One day, a couple of years back, we happened to be passing these graves when the families of the deceased were paying their annual respects during Chuseok, the mid-autumn harvest festival when families visit their home towns and the graves of ancestors. This particular family’s home town is Kaesong, which lies across the DMZ and was once a major city, and where for a while there was a joint North-South industrial zone. This means these graves are sited as as near as the families can get to where their ancestors come from. In fact, this is why there are so many graves around us on the hillsides. They belong to North Korean families who fled south before or during the Korean War.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the graves are always located in auspicious locations – auspicious in terms of Pungsu-Jiri, the Korean equivalent of the ancient Chinese system of geomancy, Feng-Shui  - which literally means ‘wind-water-earth-principles-theory’, and is all about receiving positive gi - in Chinese, qi (sometimes written ch’i) energy – the vital life force suffusing everything. There are two forms of Feng-Shui – Yin (negative energy) and Yang (positive energy) Feng-Shui. Yin characteristics are the feminine, passivity, negativity, darkness, the earth, the moon, the night, clouds, water, moisture, softness, slowness, and coldness. Geographically, Yin is present in north-facing slopes. Yang is the masculine, activity, positivity, brightness, heaven, the sun, the day, heat, fire, hardness, dryness, restlessness, production. Geographically, it is present in south-facing  slopes. Koreans, like the Chinese and Japanese, depend on Yin Feng-Shui to ensure their ancestors’ tombs are located in auspicious sites. This is important because the location affects the wellbeing not just the dead but also the living descendants – for example, in relation to the wellbeing of offspring. The goal is to balance gi so as to  provide a restful site for one’s ancestors, so it is literally a last resting place.

Ironically, around here, the military is also interested in the kind of sites that have auspicious gi energy, but for very different reasons. These locations are often places with very open and wide prospects, characteristics that are obviously important strategically because they function as points of observation and/or as potential strongholds. They are both prosects and refuges. Evolutionary speaking, the ability to see without being seen was a crucial  intermediate step towards the satisfaction of many basic  biological needs, and such geographical sites remains vital today for the same reasons, only now mediated by complex social conventions that often conceal their origins in deep human history.

It seems to me that when one sees an army pill-box nearby a grave, one is witnessing in very concrete terms the two pillars upon which all human societies are founded: respect for the dead and protection for the living. These values arise from the fact that the living  will always have an overwhelming interest in what happens to their dead bodies. Respecting the dead therefore also entails protecting the living. This is basic anthropology and sociology made manifest here next to the DMZ.

Police State?

A fresco painting from Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan’s exhibition, ‘Tulips’, Art Now, Tate Britain.

While I was in London I visited Tate Britain and saw an exhibition of recent fresco paintings by Rose Hastings and Hannah Quinlan. The works were pretty good, but I was put off when I read on a wall label that they were justified by the duo of artists as a reaction to living in Britain’s ‘police state’.

Really?  Britain is most certainly very far from paradise, but it is absurd to describe it as a ‘police state’.  The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, whose hazy mountains I glimpse in the distance as I walk my dog in the morning, is a ‘police state’. Do these feted British artists think the masters of a real ‘police state’ would permit them to show their work in a public institution and have it discussed in the media?  Of course not. Britain is a ‘police state’ only for those who has a very melodramatic sense of the dysfunctional nature of their local social reality.   Britain is a fuck-up in many ways – not least because of Brexit and increased policing powers -   but it’s also an extraordinary place in which people have a degree of freedom that is the envy of millions in less fortunate nations.

I also saw the wonderful Alice Neel exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery. Here is one of her works:

Alice Neel, ‘Rita and Herbert’ (1954).

I didn’t know much about Neel beforehand, and was surprised to discover that she was a paid up member of the American Communist Party.  In 1981 she was the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union, and in an interview in 1983 said,  ‘the whole 20th century has been a struggle between communism and capitalism’. Neel was a fantastically penetrating and empathetic portraitist but was clearly ideologically myopic. In this, of course, she was very far from alone amongst artists and writers.

This is what Picasso wrote in 1944, after having recently joined the French Communist Party:

I would have liked better to have replied to you by means of a picture’, he told us; ‘I am not a writer, but since it is not very easy to send my colours by cable, I am going to try to tell you.’ ‘My membership of the Communist Party is the logical consequence of my whole life, of my whole work. For, I am proud to say, I have never considered painting as an art of simple amusement, of recreation; I have wished, by drawing and by colour, since those are my weapons, to reach ever further into an understanding of the world and of men, in order that this understanding might bring us each day an increase in liberation; I have tried to say, in my own way, that which I considered to be truest, most accurate, best, and this was naturally always the most beautiful, as the greatest artists know well. Yes, I am aware of having always struggled by means of my painting, like a genuine revolutionary. But I have come to understand, now, that that alone is not enough; these years of terrible oppression have shown me that I must fight not only through my art, but with all of myself. And so, I have come to the Communist Party without the least hesitation, since in reality I was with it all along. Aragon, Eluard, Cassou, Fougeron, all my friends know well; if I have not joined officially before now, it has been through ‘innocence’ of a sort, because I believed that my work and my membership at heart were sufficient; but it was already my Party. Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world, to render the men of today and tomorrow clearer-headed, freer, happier? Is it not the Communists who have been the most courageous in France as in the USSR or in my own Spain? How could I have hesitated? For fear of committing myself? But on the contrary I have never felt freer, more complete! And then I was in such a hurry to rediscover a home country: I have always been an exile, now I am one no longer; until the time when Spain may finally receive me, the French Communist Party has opened its arms to me; there I have found all that which I most value: the greatest scholars, the greatest poets, and all those beautiful faces of Parisian insurgents. (1)

Wow! Poor old Picasso. ‘Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world, to render the men of today and tomorrow clearer-headed, freer, happier?’ What a dupe!  We should probably re-write this as: ‘Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world, to render the men of today and tomorrow  less clearer-headed, less free, despairing?’ But Picasso was very far from alone in his delusion, as he himself noted.

I’m sure this essentially emotional response to injustice and the belief that the most powerful force struggling against this injustice was communism was also what lay behind Alice Neel’s commitment, which went back to the 1930s. It certainly wasn’t obvious in 1944, and still wasn’t in 1983, prior to the end of the Cold War, that the struggle that Picasso saw as between revolution and reaction, and Neel as between communism and capitalism was actually between the utopians who wanted change now, and the pragmatic social reformers who saw change as occurring one small step at a time. Of course, the former types seem much more glamorous and  dynamic. Slow social reform is so very dull. So very bourgeois.

If you reflect on the history of modern art, you soon get the impression that the artists we nominate as the progressive voices of our times are mostly in the revolutionary  ‘change now’ camp. They wanted things to get better immediately. This isn’t surprising, as there’s so much wrong in past and present society that the visceral response of any sensitive soul is bound to be one of deep disgust and the desire to right wrongs without delay. But the sad fact is that history shows that revolutionary radicalism never works in practice. In fact, it tends to make things worse not better, because it alienates so many people – for instance, all those justifiably anxious about the new, the unknown, the untested.  

As time went by, being a communist required more and more self-deception. Maybe being a communist before the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of 1939 was possible on the basis of a sound appraisal of available evidence. Maybe in 1944 it was possible because of the central role played by European communist parties in the struggle against Nazism. But after the Korean War of 1950 -53, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968? To still be a communist in the 1980s required a very high level of dissemblance, of ignoring many awkward facts.   But where faith is concerned, facts are of small importance.

NOTES
(1) Published in L’Humanité, 29-30 October 1944. https://theoria.art-zoo.com/why-i-joined-the-communist-party-pablo-picasso/

Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan, ‘Tulips’ is at Art Now, Tate Britain, 24 Sep 2022-7 May 2023. Image courtesy of Tate. https://www.newexhibitions.com/e/60066

Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is at Barbican Art Gallery, 16 February - 21 May 2023. Alice Neel image courtesy of The The Estate of Alice Neel.

https://www.barbican.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/2023-02/Alice%20Neel%20Hot%20Off%20The%20Griddle_Pre-installation%20image%20sheet_Feb%2023_0.pdf

The Public and Private

After my stay in my house in France I was in London for ten days. The main purpose of my visit was to install an exhibition I helped curate and in which I exhibited. It’s called TRANSFER and is at the Korean Cultural Centre UK until April 15th. The picture at the head of this post is of me at the Opening. If you’d like more information, here is a link: https://kccuk.org.uk/en/programmes/partnership-programme/transfer/

But in this post, I want to go back to something I promised not to mention again: face masks. I apologize for breaking my promise but hope you will find what I have to say adds something interesting to my on-going exploration of cultural differences between the West and Korea.

*

It’s always a massive culture shock to be back in Europe after months in Korea, especially since the pandemic. Now that Covid-19 is far less threatening, life in Europe looks like it’s trying to go back to the familiar old pre-pandemic ways. In Korea, however, we are not permitted to forget so easily the virus’ continued presence in our midst.   

The most obvious contrast is, as I already noted (more than once), in the attitude to face masks. Almost no one wears them anymore in Europe, not even on the crowded Metro or Tube, whereas in Korea they are still everywhere. The persistence in masking-up outside was bizarre to me because the Korean government decreed in May 2022 that it was no longer mandatory to wear them outside, and yet the Koreans went on doing so. The only Koreans you saw not wearing masks on the city street were foreigners on visits, and some younger Koreans who, I assumed, were sufficiently ‘Westernized’ to consider breaking ranks with their compatriots. This put me in an interesting cultural dilemma: did I do what my fellow Westerners were doing, or my fellow Koreans? I tended to side with the Koreans out of the belief that one should try to respect the norms of the place one is in. But evidently, the Westerners who went mask-free were not troubled by this obligation, and only wore their masks when they knew it was legally required.

It’s still necessary to wear a mask on public transport. But on my return in early March, I find that many more Koreans are now walking mask-free. In late January, the indoor mask mandate was also finally lifted.  But far from jumping at the chance to throw off their masks, Koreans still seem reluctant to comply with this freedom.  

Whenever I mentioned the fact that Koreans were voluntarily wearing masks  to people during my visit to France and Britain, they said the exact same thing: “Oh, the Koreans are used to wearing mask.” That is, they wore them pre-Covid because of pollution or because they were sensitive to the risk of contagion when they were sick with a cold or flu. This is certainly true. But I can’t help thinking that much deeper factors are involved.

I now see the face mask issue in term of the relationship between the public and private realm – of the relationship between the self as a public and private entity.  There seems to be a fundamental difference in the way these two realms relate to each other between Korea and the West.

By ‘private’ self I mean the one that loves and hates, fears and desires. This is a self that is essentially invisible to the world. It is the subject’s consciousness.  By ‘public’, I mean the self that one presents to the world, that performs duties within society, the one that is visible to others, and is characterized by specific social signifiers. The level where private and public intersect is what we call ‘identity.’ Here is a typical diagram of how this works: 

Historically, a society’s stability rested on the strict policing of the boundary between these two realms, so that people’s identity remained stable, and so did society’s. But with the advent of modernity, the boundary began to become much more flexible or permeable. The ideal of the free private individual seeking their ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ identity supplanted that of subordination to the collective, with the result that the private realm took on more and more public importance. This was especially the case once capitalism moved from its productivist to consumerist phase. When one is a producer, one is primarily a social self, but once one becomes a consumer the private self is increasingly implicated. This is because consumerism is based on desire.

In the West  today the public and private are all mixed up – and are becoming ever more so. Here in Korea, by contrast, the division between public and private selves is still much more strictly demarcated, but also under threat.

We are already familiar with the tendency of Westerners to dress in ways that visually mark them out their identity from others – sometimes in extreme ways, especially amongst the young, who are experiencing the tensions between their public and private selves especially strongly. The fashion for tattoos is in this light an attempt to wear your private self on your skin – to share it with the outside (which is maybe one subliminal reason why tattoos are always pixelled out on Korean television). The whole gender fluidity issue in the West can also be discussed in these terms: it’s about people struggling to fit their private selves comfortably within their public selves in a society where the public/private binary is no longer firmly established, where no one is quite sure where on begins and the other ends, or what constitutes one’s identity.

Another dimension relates to multiculturalism. When people began living together who look very different from each other, it was obvious that this visible sign of difference correlated to differences in the hidden private realm. Korea has no such diversity. More or less everyone in Korea is ethnically Korea. They have the same colour hair, the same colour eyes, the same colour skin. Of course, there are differences. Koreans are not clones. But compared to London, Seoul  definitely looks mono-ethnic. This makes policing the private/public realms much easier. There are  no visceral triggers signalling the ‘irruption’ of identity via the private into the public. Instead, one can go through one’s day without any strong awareness of one’s distinctly divergent status as part of a poly-ethnic society, and instead can comfortably assume one’s unity with others. This also means that it is much easier to consider oneself in terms of a public self – which is ‘public’ precisely because it is like all the other public selves – rather than, as in the West, constantly being reminded that the public realm is made up of private individuals.

*

While I was lying awake unable to sleep because of jet lag back here in Korea, and also suffering from a cold that I caught somewhere in London, it struck me that the willingness of Koreans to wear face masks is subliminally a collective re-instating of the public/private binary in the face of the threat to this boundary due to Westernization.  By donning a mask one effaces to a considerable extent the external signs of one’s individuality –  the private self visible to the outside world  – and makes oneself part of an  anonymous  homogeneous group.  As a Westerner, I find this tendency very unsettling, even ‘inhuman’.

It’s interesting that on Korean current affairs television  programmes  one often sees members of the public with their faces obfuscated, fogged, or pixelled out, to conform with privacy laws, or ‘portrait rights’, which mean you're not allowed to post or film other people's faces on media without explicit permission. The result can be really rather surreal or comical.  Sometimes, it seems that every living thing on the screen is a mass of pulsing pixels. Or the tv cameraman is obliged to shoot at a weird angle so they don’t inadvertently get people in the frame and infringe their privacy.

I think in this context the face mask can be described as functioning as analogue fogging or pixelating. Of course, it is ostensibly intended to safeguard private and public health, but unintentionally, what happens is a radical delimiting within the public sphere of the visual attributes of the private. The mask has become a way of suppressing the expression of individual identity by serving as a wall between the private and the public realm.

The result is social conformity and stability. But I find it hard to believe this can be altogether healthy.

Image source:  

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Private-self-identities-and-public-self-as-different-layers-of-the-self-concept-adapted_fig5_298195355

Notes from Central France

A view of the Forêt de Tronçais, about 5 kilometers south from our house. The forest is famous for its tall, straight oak trees.

I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been staying in my house in central France – in the far north of the Department of the Allier, trying to keep warm, as I coincided my stay with a decidedly cold snap. A few days after my arrival, one of my ‘prize’ rose – Madame Alfred Carrière – a lovely white climber, came crashing down under the weight of ten centimeters of snow. I had to prune her right back and hope she will survive.

An early morning view from the back window of our house in Ainay-Le-Château, overlooking the garden and the river. ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ used to climb up to this window. The overgrown ruins across the stream are an old tannery. Note the mallard ducks.

Just down the road from the house spreads the immense Forêt de Tronçais, which, at 26,000 acres, is one of the largest stands of oak in western Europe. The forest’s name derives from the old French for the sessile oak (Quercus petraea) – tronce. Although there was a natural forest here for millennia, in the seventeenth century it was established as a Royal Forest expressly to grow very tall and straight oak trees for the French navy. Today, the forest is still a ‘working’ one, actively managed to generate revenue, and is celebrated for supplying timber for wine and brandy barrels (almost all great wines – red or white – are aged in oak, and quite possibly oak from the Forest of Tronçais). In 2021, twenty-six of its more than 200 years old oaks were chosen for the reconstruction of the spire of the fire-devastated cathedral of Notre-Dames de Paris. 

My favourite oak.' ‘La Sentinelle’. Born about 1560! It won’t last much longer, alas.

*

As I noted in a previous post, I’m thinking a lot about oak trees these day. I’m writing a ‘biography’ - a cultural history of the oak tree.

Of course, only we humans construct narratives of this history, and it means absolutely nothing to the oak tree, or any non-human species, flora or fauna. But then again, what Homo sapiens has done to the Earth system over the few dozen millennia of its existence on Earth, has impacted more and more forcibly over time on the lives of the oak tree in ways comparable to the five dimensions of its ecosystem: the geosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. The congeries of events that comprise the human historical narrative have become part-and-parcel of a sixth ecosystem: the ‘anthroposphere’, which is part-and-parcel of the Anthropocene,  humanity’s sphere of life involving a complex technical system of energy, material, and information.[1]

So, I thought it would be interesting to imagine what our history would be like if considered from the  point of view of the oak  -  say, from the perspective of the sessile and pendunculate oaks that are the main species in northern Europe:

After 56 million years of evolution, these oaks emerged from their Ice Age refuges  around 12,000 years ago, and they would have observed Homo sapiens moving out of Africa alongside them, as they both sought to colonize new terrain as the ice melted, and the landscape of our familiar world emerged.

They would soon (a mere handful of thousand years later) have observed that  the numbers of the human species had multiplied and their social lives become more complex, and  most importantly, that they were now predominantly sedentary. This development obliged the humans to fell more and more trees to make room for the fields they needed for planting crops and grazing animals.

From being one animal species struggling amongst many others, the oaks would have noted that this particular animal had very quickly become the dominant species wherever it colonized. Let’s imagine that the oaks  recognized that this success was because, although compared to them, humans lived very short and vulnerable existences, they overcame this weakness through the development of languages and the creation of sophisticated systems of belief, so could make reference to things beyond the here-and-now, and possessed the ability to discuss possible outcomes in the future.  This allowed them to pass useful knowledge on from one generation to the next.

The oaks would have perceived from interactions with these increasingly confident animals, that they had ceased to treat non-humans as kin, and instead categorised them in two very different ways:  ‘enemies’ or ‘friends’. Unwanted vegetal ‘enemies’ were described as weeds (in French, the word  is mauvaise herbe, which literally means ‘bad plant’, which conveys  more of the anthropocentric character of this distinction). If a plant was cast as an ‘enemy’, humans would consider it waste and seek to   decrease its abundance and impact on their environment. The oaks would have realized that they were usually treated as ‘friends’ by humans because they were useful natural resources. Humans used them as building material, fuel, shade, shelter, lookouts, food, and medicine. Because of this utility, they were afforded protection and respect, which manifested itself in the roles the oak played in human symbolism, ritual, and aesthetic appreciation.

This companionable behaviour obviously benefited the oaks.  Human history seemed to tell a story of protection and increasing abundance, productivity, and stability for the oaks. But they would also have noted that the vegetal ‘enemies’ and ‘friends’ of humans were not always mutually exclusive. Sometimes, they were cast as a vegetal ‘enemies’, as when humans were more interested in cutting down the forests they grew in to make room for fields or habitations. This meant contact with humans had both benefits and costs, depending on the time or the context in which interactions occurred. One could say that the oak was the humans’ ‘frenemy’.

As time went by, the oaks would have seen that something fundamental was changing in their relationship with humans, and that as a result the shape of history was also being transformed. As the oaks were considered by humans as nothing more than a resource to be maximally exploited, the relationship became less and less reciprocal and flexible. The vast oak forests that once covered the Eurasian continent and north and central America were systematically reduced to small, restricted enclaves.   In some regions, oaks were organized into plantations because they were valuable economic resources, and were domesticated like cereals and farm animals. The oaks were now not so much cast as ‘friends’, or even ‘frenemies’ to humanity,  but were their ‘chattel’.

The oaks also noticed that the humans had little concern for the sustainability of the resource they were exploiting, and that as the primordial forests were destroyed, no new ones were being encouraged.  The oaks would have noticed that history had become the story of humans putting immense strain on the Earth’s biocapacity, that the story was one of rash and selfish interventions that overused ecological resources and ran down the potential of every ecosystem humans encountered. But the oaks would also have noticed how humans temporarily avoided the inevitable crises caused by this abuse through the application of science and technology, and that as the modern period developed, were allaying  its negative impact through the harnessing the power of fossil fuels, which permitted them to increase the productivity of land and labour even as they exhausted the resources of the ecosystem. 

But very recently – in the past forty years or so -  the oaks will have noticed a new phase  in human history commencing, one that has been initiated by the depletion of the non-renewable fossil fuels that were exploited for two centuries, and by the consequent emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which was causing a dangerous heating up of the planet.

Like everything else in the Earth system, the oaks were suffering the consequences of this ecological disaster. But they also sensed that the humans wanted to be ‘friends’ again. They needed the oaks, and all the other trees, to help save the planet, because the humans had realized that trees function as carbon reservoirs.  As a result, oaks discovered they were to play a salvific role in human history. But considering what had gone before, one can forgive them for being suspicious about this new overture of friendship!

This is an interesting oak in the forest. It used to be the “Marshal Petain Oak’, named after the leader of Vichy France in 1940. But in February 1944 three foresters took down the plaque and replaced it by one saying “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. The rebellious intervention didn’t last long, of course, and it actually took until 1982 for the tree to be officially renamed the ‘Chêne de la Résistance. En Souvenir de l‘acte de 13 Février 1944’. By coincidence, I am writing these lines one day short of exactly 79 years later, and am pleased to say that this oak is still alive and well,  but ‘resisting’ a new enemy: climate change

[1] See:  ‘The Anthroposphere’, The Aspen Global  Change Institute,   https://www.agci.org/earth-systems/anthroposphere. Also: Peter Baccini and Paul H, Brunner, Metabolism of the Antroposphere. Analysis, Evaluation, Design, The MIT Press, Second Edition, 2012.

The map and the territory

A trench line near my house.

These days, as I take my morning walk with the dog and traverse hills criss-crossed by trench lines and defended with bunkers and gun emplacements, my thoughts inevitably go to similar but much more deadly defenses that now exist in eastern Ukraine. The ones I pass have never seen active service, unless they have been maintained since the Korean War. 

Along with this sobering thought comes into my mind the Latin maxim I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion: Si vis pacem, para bellum – ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’ I used to think this argument was too cynical, but now I don’t. Living near the DMZ and reading about Ukraine makes being a pacifist  seem much too dangerous. Then again, I can see we need pacifists to temper the bellicosity of human society, just as long as these pacifists recognize that its the people who are preparing to defend their country against belligerent neighbors who are giving them the peaceful luxury of being pacifists.

I’ve also been thinking about lying. One of the obvious differences between a democracy and a totalitarian regime is the power of the lie. In the latter, lying is perennial and efficacious,, while in the former, it is also perennial but will quite quickly be exposed. This is because in a democracy no one can monopolize the flow of information.

I’m thinking about lying because it seems the Russian people are, on the whole, behind or as least agnostic about the ‘Special Military Operation’. This seems remarkable, doesn’t it?  On the other hand, armed with the intellectual rigour provided by my readings in modern thought, and my copious experiences of mendacity in public and private life, I can counter that, actually, those in support of Ukraine are just as much buying into  propaganda – the stuff spun by the United States. As George Orwell wrote: ‘Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’

In other words, it is tempting to demonstrate one’s intellectual robustness and worldliness by claiming there is basically equivalence between the two sides, that ethical relativism means both sides are constructing narratives.

But this is not at all what Orwell means, and to think it is is a terrible mistake. It is true that the ‘map’ is not the ‘territory’, that the language we use is not a reflection of reality but a sign-system we fabricate in order to make sense of the world. But there is a huge difference between recognizing that the map (language) is not the territory (the world) and claiming there is no access to the latter, which is what some influential contemporary thinkers seem to believe. 

There are objective facts, that is, what can be proved true or false, or can be known to have happened. A fact is the result of consensus, of  cooperation with others. Facts are the hard won consequences of moulding language so it points to  what has been  cooperatively ascertained as constitutive of the world.

This is why, as Sam Harris, perhaps the sanest man on the Internet , in his book Lying writes:, “Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.” The act of lying makes it clear that although language does not correlate exactly with what it refers to, that there is a significant bridge between the two, that the map isn’t a complete fabrication but can serve as a workable - that is to say, fulfilling - guide to the world. But that is precisely why lies are necessary.

Harris, again : “People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie.”  

Lying  is official state policy in places like North Korea and China, and, as it now seems obvious, in Russia. These regimes are not interested in cooperation amongst its citizens to create a useable map. Far from it.   Their top-down models of governance require that only a small cadre are involved in making the map, and as a result, what they produce is not factual but blatantly sectarian. You could call a totalitarian regime’s relationship to fact as based on ‘performative truth’, in the sense that any information’s value lies not in being factual but in being useful to the regime.  It is based on the illusion of total control, that the ruling cabal is in charge.

Lying is necessary if a state believes that it can produce a map in which everything  about the territory is knowable, reachable, manageable, and useful. But that’s impossible.  China’s chaotic and dangerous  volte face concerning its  ‘zero-Covid’ policy, in the present context, can be seen as founded on the failure to recognize that uncontrollability is the nature of the ‘territory’, and that therefore, adaptive transformations in relation to these changes while making the ‘map’ are essential. But the Chinese Communist Party’s map to the social control of Covid was laughably at odds with the territory.

A liar believes that they can control the world through their fabrications, manipulating people so they satisfy their own needs and desires. But the desires of those they seek to hoodwink cannot be controlled, and events always run out of control. This is why big lies will always eventually be exposed. Sooner or later, people begin to notice that the diagrammatic  representation of the world they inhabit is misleading, that the wide straight highway they see on the only map they have access to is leading them - or, more likely, has already led them - over a precipice.  

The inevitability of change means a lie has a short shelf life, and once it is exposed, it will quickly undermine the rest of the epistemological edifice within which it has been nested because people will come to suspect more lies everywhere, even where there aren’t any. This is why totalitarian regime  desperately hold onto their big lies. They have to insist that their ‘map is the only map.

Orwell said: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ Unfortunately, it is also evident that people often want to hear only what brings comfort and a sense of security, and above all, what does not risk puncturing their convictions about themselves. A friend of mine spent the Christmas/New Year period in Thailand, and for a few days she was staying in a hotel next door to a young Russian woman. When my friend broached the Ukraine crisis, the Russian replied that it wasn’t her ‘fault.’

That’s true. But then, no one would want to claim that she, personally, is in any way directly responsible for the brutal invasion. However, we can justifiably argue that her unwillingness to hear what she doesn’t want to hear, to remain within a bubble of self-esteem, should certainly be criticized. Actually, I suspect she probably doesn’t believe Putin’s lies, but rather easily assimilates this recognition because she believes that the ‘West’ is also lying.

It is. But the lies are of a whole different order of magnitude.

 NOTES

Sam Harris, Lying (Four Elephants Press, 2013)

George Orwell, Orwell on Truth (Penguin Books, 2017)

 

 

The South Korean tree-planting ‘miracle’

As a result of the recognition of the role of trees in controlling climate change, at the recent COP27 more than 25 countries agreed to hold each other accountable for a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. The talk was not just about ‘net-zero’ but about ‘nature-positive’.

But arresting deforestation must also be matched by ambitious global programmes of reforestation. One of the most inspiring, and also least known, took place here in the Republic of Korea.  

As in many other places, the degradation of forests on the Korean peninsula was already a problem as long ago as the eighteenth century, but it had reached crisis proportions by the period of Japanese colonization (1910 – 1945).  The Korean War (1950 – 1953) destroyed almost half of the remaining forested land, and by the 1960s deforestation had become  a serious problem, not just in relation a lack of lumber and firewood but because the erosion control provided by trees had also been destroyed, and heavy rainfalls during the summer monsoon season regularly caused major damage.

Regions of South Korea before the reforestation campaign.

From 1962-1987 the Republic of Korea’s National Reforestation Programme was responsible for remedying this dire situation through organizing the systematic planting of huge numbers of seedlings sourced from government-owned nurseries, forest co-ops, and locally grown  in villages. 

My wife, Eungbok, tells me that every year in springtime during her high school years she would head for the hills with her classmates on designated tree planting duties. The results are plain to see by looking at photographs of the same landscape as it was prior to the Programme and then today. South Korea is a reforestation success story. 

Before and after.

This means, however, there are almost no old-growth forests in Korea. All the species of tree around where we live are no more than about forty of fifty years old. Also, the reforestation campaign made some mistakes: it relied too heavily on planting rapidly growing coniferous trees, and reliance on a limited number of tree species made the new forests susceptible to pests and disease, something that subsequent global reforestation programmes have learned from. And unfortunately, despite this amazing feat of forestation South Korea remains a major importer of timber, including from countries most heavily implicated in illegal logging.

NOTES

For today’s post I referred to Lessons learned from the Republic of Korea’s National Reforestation Programme, published by the Korea Forest Service. https://www.cbd.int/ecorestoration/doc/Korean-Study_Final-Version-20150106.pdf. The images accompanying this post are from this source.

Eating dog is wrong. Right?

One of the very few things I knew about Korea before I came here for the first time on an art residency in 2008 is that they eat dog.  This was one of the ‘exotic’ facts that served to set the Koreans apart from us westerners, and, of course, below us in terms of civilization. After all, what kind of civilized people eat dog, ‘man’s best friend’?

For westerners like me, a dog is a pet. But it is also commonly used as an ‘organic’ property alarm and deterrent. In Korea, the dog is also meat. But far fewer South Koreans than once upon a time consume dog nowadays.. 84% of the Korean population reported never having consumed dog meat nor having plans to ever do In a 2020 survey. (1) The dog as a pet is a growing trend here, imported from the west. The Covid-19 pandemic gave it a big boost because people were lonely, as also has the reluctance of young couples to have children - a dog becomes a substitute. Near us, a ‘dog café’ recently opened where city folks can bring their dogs for a safe run-around. Treacly pop music plays within the compound, so the visitors don’t get spooked by the silence, I suppose. None of them seem to consider that they could walk their dog on the delightful adjacent hill.

We have a pet dog named Bomi. It happened by chance. One day we were walking on the track beside this very same wooded hillside near the new dog cafe when we spotted a tiny black and white puppy hiding behind a tree. The picture at the start of today’s post is of Bomi just after we found her. Cute, or what?! As you can imagine, it was impossible to ignore the poor little thing. So, we took her home and adopted her. She’s now very much part of the family.  We’re not sure what mix of breeds make her the mongrel she is. Perhaps border collie and corgi. She looks like a border collie except she has very short legs. Everybody smiles when they see her out for our daily walks. Here is a photo of Bomi more recently, visiting nearby fortifications:

On our walks we pass several guard-dogs, some of which bark very aggressively, some not so much. We also pass what I think is a ‘dog-farm’. The dogs are mostly Jindo, the most characteristic breed of Korean dog, and they never seem to get much past young adult stage before being replaced. It’s obviously very small-scale business, and I suppose you could call it a ‘humane’ kind of place, as it’s in the open air. Other dogs-for-meat are simply kept in cages. Here is this open-air one:

Before we luxuriate in our cultural superiority, however, it is worth considering the fact that meat consumption in general has risen in Korea because more Koreans are now Christians (29%).  Buddhism, which was once the state religion of Korea and is still practiced by 23%, is a vegetarian religion.

Why stop our indignation with eating dog?  What about all the other animals that are slaughtered for our culinary pleasure? The answer is obvious: because we think the dog is a domestic animal whose role is to be a pet or a guardian (or both), and so it is in a different category to all the other domesticated animals which are bred for consumption.

I was shocked by an essay I read recently in which the author discussed the modern-day broiler chicken – the kind we eat so voraciously that it has become by far the most numerous bird globally: it has a standing stock of about 23 billion! As the author notes, the sparrow population is about half a billion and the pigeon about 400 million.  In fact, the broiler chicken outweighs all other birds in the world combined by more than twice. . This chicken, which has been bred to provide our dinner, is also a  very different shape bird from its  wild ancestor: it is three or four times bigger (2).  

South Korea is also famous for its consumption of broiler chickens, mostly in the form of barbecued varieties. Restaurants are everywhere. Logically, ethically, we should surely also be contemplating stopping eating these chickens. Right? especially as they live their short lives in the most appalling conditions.

Back in the late 1970s before I went to university, I went to work for three months on a kibbutz in northern Israel (Israel were the ‘good guys’ back then and it was a late hippy kind of thing to do). This kibbutz had (probably still has) a broiler chicken farm, and as you can imagine, chicken was often on the menu. A couple of times, I was timetabled to work in the chicken shed. The job was carrying live chickens upside down by the legs so they could be stuffed into cages stacked on the back of a lorry, which would then transport them down the road to the slaughter-house. The huge shed in which the chickens were housed was horrible. The noise was deafening. The smell was noxious. The evident fear of the chickens, was palpable. After working the shift I stopped eating chicken…..for a couple of days.

My sister and niece are vegetarians. Meat is murder, that’s for sure. But it’s the kind of murder we are culturally conditioned to accept without moral qualms - or most of us, anyway. So, while we should definitely condemn dog-eaters, we might also make such criticism the occasion for some wider reflection on our own unexamined customs.

 Notes

1.     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat_consumption_in_South_Korea

2.     Jan Zalasiewicz, “Science: Old and New Patterns of the Anthropocene’ in Julia Adeney Thomas, editor, Altered Earth. Getting the Anthropocene Right. Cambridge University Press, 2022) pp.38-40.

Axe Murder at the DMZ!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, 

  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, 

  All felled, felled, are all felled; 

    Of a fresh and following folded rank 

                Not spared, not one 

                That dandled a sandalled 

         Shadow that swam or sank 

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

  O if we but knew what we do 

         When we delve or hew — 

     Hack and rack the growing green! 

          Since country is so tender 

     To touch, her being só slender, 

     That, like this sleek and seeing ball 

     But a prick will make no eye at all, 

     Where we, even where we mean 

                 To mend her we end her, 

            When we hew or delve: 

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. 

  Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve 

     Strokes of havoc unselve 

           The sweet especial scene, 

     Rural scene, a rural scene, 

     Sweet especial rural scene.

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

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

Image sources:

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

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

Some thoughts after the Itaewon Halloween’s Day tragedy

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

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

I was eight years old.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

Image and Text Sources:

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

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

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

Acorn for Dinner!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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