You wrote this:
“How could you claim “jung” — some deep, humanizing connection between Koreans, when many of your own are starving to death and eating dirt just …”

You’ve fucked it up. Either you get ‘jung’, which is not a hard concept, and mis-explained it, or .. you’re wrong. Based on the rest of your writing, I’d say the first one.

Jung is a deep humanizing connection between two anybodies. Being Korean is not part of it. You are right to say that the knee-jerk “foreigners can’t understand this” is bullshit, but the fact I have experienced is that Koreans will declare a friendship is ‘jung’ with no hesitation and for the same reasons as they consider a this way to a fellow Korean.

Weirdly, I think you’re overlooking a point about the plasticity of individuals. I figure that, regardless of where your grandparents come from (and how much of the urban coping mechanisms they’d acquired in Ireland), they entered a New York City that had been urban for a long time — long enough to develop a routine toolkit of such coping mechanisms, even without the legacy systems imported from the Old Country’s urban centers. (Some of which, I imagine, had been shipped to small centers via literary depictions of cities and so on.)

Cultures change very slowly — at the speed of death, as I said — but individuals change at, say, at least half the speed of immigration, or at worst at the speed of reproduction… or, often, faster. In other words, people adapt, and as you’ve done in Korea, to some degree they adopt enough of the general operating system (or a dual boot setup, or a virtual emulator application) of the society into which they immigrate in order to interface with others relatively successfully. (Or, failing to adapt, they don’t thrive there, but nonetheless, if they remain, their offspring tend largely to adapt the locally available software from peers anyway. Like language, actually… a lot like language.)

So I guess I’m saying that what we could call “urban etiquette,” much like “modern urban planning,” is something that has only very tentatively begun to develop and be applied in Korea. People (especially younger ones) emigrating from, say, Gochang to Seoul are likely to behave the way most Seoulites behave after ten years here — which is, in many ways, like people immigrating from Gochang to Seoul. However, I’d expect (young) people (or at worst their offspring) from Gochang who emigrate to, say, Seattle or Edmonton not to behave like Seoulites at all, but rather more like Seattleites or Edmontonians. (Provided they are routinely exposed to the local urban culture, and not just some ethnic enclave.)

I think it has more to do with the ideas underlying the society wherever that society happens to be taking place.

That’s possible. The thing that makes me think otherwise, though, is that I think a lot of this is in slow transition too. My fiancée finds a lot of public behaviour by Koreans quite inconsiderate, for example — the story she told me after traveling with a friend to Thailand was that she was quite put off by the Koreans in the airport, and also found odd some of her friend’s “Korean” habits of mind and behaviour — like not returning a polite and friendly hello to a hotel employee, for example, or not tipping anyone, ever. (Living abroad for a year might count towards the difference, of course, but I wonder how much of a role it had for her.) Meanwhile, I’ve heard many students complain about the behaviours of older Koreans, and when one ventured a snickering notion of putting up with it until they can behave badly too, the laughter seemed to me quite nervous. I don’t think the prospect of becoming a subway-seat-pouncing, cell-phone-hollering, curly-haired, visor-wearing ajumma appeals to most of the students I know, especially those who’ve grown up in the city.

I feel like in Korea, a lot of things have neither an external system of regulation nor really internalized rules governing behaviour, and it’s by looking at how those things gel during periods of apparently radical cultural transition that I think we can explain this.

Yeah, but I think what you’re feeling is the absence of an established order specific to the situations you’re thinking of. What takes over is the underlying order of ‘let’s agree to not be people to each other.’

Right, but for many types of situations, we have that same essential practice in most Western cities. Living in cities is, for people not used to it, quite a traumatic shift precisely because people have to learn to tune out the vast majority of stimulus, including people all around them.

But here’s where we get into what I’m planning to examine in those Gin-and-Soju posts — the borderline between software and hardware: the built-in size and complexity limits of human social networks (and thus limits of inbuilt algorithms for altruism), and how the societal trauma of having cultural software that is incompatible with the network environment.

To run with that “wet robots” notion of yours, that is.

Gord,
This is why I’m glad I let go of my inhibitions and decided to tie all my crackpot theories together. It draws out everyone else’s interesting way of looking at the question.

Generalizations, yes, absolutely.

I hadn’t really thought of the question in terms of societal change. In my mind it could go either way. Balki Bartokamous didn’t bum-rush the ‘L’. I don’t think that my grandparents, who were born in thatched cottages in rural Ireland, were particularly uncaring or rude, despite living in New York City. I think it has more to do with the ideas underlying the society wherever that society happens to be taking place.

I feel like in Korea, a lot of things have neither an external system of regulation nor really internalized rules governing behaviour, and it’s by looking at how those things gel during periods of apparently radical cultural transition that I think we can explain this.

Yeah, but I think what you’re feeling is the absence of an established order specific to the situations you’re thinking of. What takes over is the underlying order of ‘let’s agree to not be people to each other.’

I’m as leery as any properly educated person about universalizing patterns, claiming every culture goes through the same 3 stages, and so on. I see parallels, not sameness, between 17th century English culture’s relationship to gin consumption and soju in Korea today. Big differences, too.

But I feel like in Korea, a lot of things have neither an external system of regulation nor really internalized rules governing behaviour, and it’s by looking at how those things gel during periods of apparently radical cultural transition that I think we can explain this. I’m thinking a lot of the things that are necessary for being a civilized human being in a city are less necessary in a village: not that village people are uncivilized — except the musical group by that name, damn them — but that the specifics of city life necessitate a whole new repertoire of behaviours, etiquettes, and attitudes that would be unnecessary in less-crowded, less-bottlenecked settings like villages and small towns.

More later.