Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

It’s been a whirlwind week.  In discussing the Korean concept of jung, we’ve looked at culture from a number of different points of view and touched on cultural transmission, another favorite topic of mine.  Today we’ll bring it all to a close in this, the final entry in the series.

So we already know that jung is the distinctly Korean way to describe a feeling that non-Koreans have like, all the time.  Koreans will claim that the word is untranslatable, but you will never find a single aspect in which the meaning of the word jung diverges from the meaning of the English word ‘warmth’.  Jung, for all intents and purposes, is warmth felt by cold people.

So rather than being a good thing, jung is more like the occasional burst of steam from a pressure cooker that keeps the lid from exploding off.  It’s a little taste of kindness in a miserable, unfeeling world of morbidly mugging mannequins (and one alliterating ass).

Therefore our major concern should be the following.  What would have to happen to Korea to turn jung from an anomaly to the norm?

You may not like the answer.  Just so you know.

The thing that allows Korea to persist as a nation without civility to speak of is the persistence of a mindset based on amoral familism.  The mantra of amoral familism is essentially ‘Do what you think is best for your family.’

You will find, when living in a state of amoral familism, that there is little empathy involved.  People often fail to identify what their in-group members actually want or need.  For example, people will tend to constantly point out family and friends’ weak points under the assumption that they are motivating them to improve or some such nonsense, when in fact all they’re doing is hurting feelings.

It might be nice to give some careful consideration to what would be best for your in-group members.  Unfortunately, amoral familism does not an intuitive feeler make.  I have perhaps discussed this before on the blog, but it never hurts to reiterate the fact that, like jung, another ‘distinctly Korean concept’, nunchi (눈치, also often translated by Koreans as ’sense’) is harped upon by Koreans because it is the exception rather than the rule.  Koreans frequently discuss the concept of nunchi, saying that Koreans have a special ’sense’ of determining what someone is really thinking without saying so.  The truth is that the reason the concept is so attractive to people in Korea is because many Koreans are incapable of correctly imagining what anyone else is thinking or feeling, mostly because they don’t have any practice doing so.

So here you have two ‘Korean concepts’, jung and nunchi, which are in fact pretty non-Korean in nature and defined more by the breach than the observance.  What’s worse, you have a mindset that makes people incapable of feeling what those around them feel.  What kind of conceptual mind bomb could ever be dropped on such people to teach them to feel (in the same way that they taught me not to feel)?

On Monday we talked about the out-sourcing of social functions.  Maybe morals are a candidate for out-sourcing and maybe they’re not.  I tend to think that Korea has done its best to put a band-aid on the bullet wound that is Korean-on-Korean inhumanity by installing things like cutmen and rules for riding escalators, and they have really done little to make this a kinder, gentler place.  That said, we’d better find a way to make Korean people actually consider the way others feel.

Let’s see, is there any system set up already that teaches people to think about how other people would like to be treated?

And has organs established to communicate those ideas to people?

Well, I just checked Wikipedia and it turns out that such an organization exists.  It’s called Christianity.

You may find this hard to believe if you’ve ever run into one of those crazy Korean church ladies on the street who try to convert you even though they don’t speak your language, but one of the prime missions of all those churches in Korea is to teach people how to feel empathy for others.  While the message clearly didn’t get across to those obnoxious ladies who stand around subway stations trying to spread the good word in the most self-aggrandizing, ineffective way possible, it will in time permeate Korean society.

Korean churches (I am only talking about the normal ones with which I have experience, Catholic and Presbyterian) are bastions of kindness in a sea of soullessness.  The only major problem is that they run the risk of merely enlarging people’s in-groups but maintaining the whole in-versus-out dichotomy.  When they do their job, they teach people here the joy of not turning off your power to feel.  Korea’s churches have been at the forefront of the drive to establish charities and a viable civil society in Korea since they arrived.

Now maybe you see what I am getting at.  Korean culture has several good and several poisonous aspects.  Most if not all of the worst aspects of Korean culture come from an unwillingness to extend consideration to the feelings of others.  Christianity provides a ready-made, on-the-whole positive counterpoint to the standing order in Korea, and more importantly teaches people empathy.

Now it is likely that, had I never come to Korea, it never would have occurred to me that it is important for people to learn to empathize with others, but it has been repeatedly underscored for me in my time here that the unwillingness (which eventually begets inability) to feel the pain of others is the root of all that we foreigners consider to be Korean evil.

Should all Koreans be Christians?  No, probably not.  Would it be a better place if they were?

You tell me.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

On Monday we talked about out-sourcing social functions.  Tuesday morning we went into why there’s always a best way to do anything.  On Wednesday I showed you how Koreans make a big deal out of jung because it is their essential humanity asserting itself over their essential Koreanness.  Today I’m going to go back a couple steps and talk about how good ideas are changing Korea, and how good ideas beget bad ones.

South Korea has, since its inception, been reasonably open to foreign influence.  This openness is offset by a definite innate Korean protectionism, which seeks to take in as little that is foreign as is necessary while preserving as much that is Korean as possible.  Of course, as I said earlier, much of what we consider to be ‘Korean culture’ or ‘Western Culture’ is just a long list of practices, some of which are relatively good and others of which are relatively bad.  This is not earth-shattering stuff here.  Drinking like a Korean and eating like an American will both kill you.  So what?

So although plenty of cultural transmission has occurred from the West to Korea.  Most notably, Western legal traditions, democracy, and financial systems.  All good stuff, not because it’s Western, but because it’s time tested and has pretty much beaten out all the competition.

The problem is, you can’t open the door to good things without getting a lot of other useless junk as well.  Korea got democracy and spam at the same time, after all.  And the education system and the abuse associated with the education system came together as well.  Look at us in the US.  We got sushi and ramen at the same time.  The thing is, we’re not usually in a position to make these perfect determinations of what exactly is desirable and what is not.  We have to take the bath water with the baby, it would seem.

I call such things that spread from culture to culture on the strength of the culture of origin more than their own merit cultural junk DNA.  The question then becomes what is more likely to jump from one culture to another, something useful or something catchy?

Well, you know people.

Furthermore, how can Korean culture be changed to make jung the norm instead of the exception?

Find out tomorrow in the shocking conclusion of this series, only at the Joshing Gnome.

Part 5

It is essentially insane for an organism born as wrong as we humans are to be stubborn or adamant in asserting that we are right and others are wrong without huge amounts of proof.

Part 1
Part 2

So we’ve already established that, while all human beings are pretty much packing the same goods physically, there are huge and important qualitative differences in the ’software’ that their brains are running.  The world would be a better place if people tended to shift more towards the use of the best software available.  What does it all have to do with jung?

Koreans claim that jung is an untranslatable Korean concept.  The reason that Koreans have a difficult time translating jung is that it is, in fact, an alien concept to them.  Korean culture draws that ten foot trench between those you care about and those for whom you feel nothing.  To feel some affinity for someone on the other side of that trench is jung.  And it’s totally outside of the basic bounds of the culture.  That’s why jung is such a hard thing for Koreans to explain to you.  Because you already feel it all the time.  It would be like you explaining buoyancy to a fish.  You’s be at such a loss to express the concept that fish would merely nod in wonder when you told them ‘I guess buoyancy is a human concept that you just wouldn’t get.’

I either just knocked your socks off or you’re shaking your head in total disagreement.

Let’s think of jung using this rather out of left field analogy.  Remember the movie Empire of the Sun, which was about a bunch of Westerners in a Japanese POW camp during World War II.  The Japanese commander of the camp obviously felt some affection for the main character, a plucky British boy.  He might remark to one of his colleagues ‘I feel the strangest feeling of affinity for that boy.  How very odd.’  But that odd feeling would just be the entirely normal feeling of affection that one usually feels for a plucky young kid, filtered through the lens of the War.

Jung is like that.  People are meant to feel nothing for strangers.  Instead they feel something.  They feel moved to give this amazing development a name, and settle on ‘jung’.  They would have felt the same warmth if they didn’t live in a society of amoral familism, but since they do, the feeling sweeps over their natural defenses and overpowers their inborn urge to ignore the humanity of strangers.

I hope that explains jung.

See you here tomorrow for Part 4.  Same bat-time, same bat-URL.

Part 4
Part 5

There’s a woman on the TV show ‘Interview Game’ right now, and she is interviewing people around her to get an answer to the question of why her daughter, who studied piano for 19 years, suddenly quit in college and decided to become a gagwoman.  The woman interviews person after person who tells her that the daughter never wanted to be a pianist (like the mother always wished she had become) and she repeatedly responds with ‘I had no idea’.  The daughter tells her ‘Mom, I wanted to be a gagwoman since I was in second grade.  I never once was happy playing piano’ and the mother is like ‘I had no idea’.  She is pissed at her daughter for doing something other than what she wanted her to.  She doesn’t care that her daughter is happy, she just cries and cries and says ‘I did everything for you’.  But it was all for herself, because to her her daughter was nothing to her but a plaything.

In time it appears that the woman may come to terms with the truth and come to see her daughter as a human being.  Maybe.

Part 1

On Monday morning we talked about the concept of out-sourcing certain aspects of human self control to society.  Today I’m going to talk about why cultural relativism is wrong, something is always the best, and hopefully tie it in with the out-sourcing concept to answer the question we asked yesterday, which is essentially ‘What’s up with jung?’

Now it is said by those in the know that a stitch, made at the proper time, can save one the trouble of making nine stitches.  In other words, get ‘em while they’re young.  As Rodgers and Hammerstein put it so well, You’ve got to be carefully taught.  Naturally they were talking about racism, but I think it’s fair to say that you have to be carefully taught everything.  We, my dear readers, are more than just wet robots.  Sorry, I miswrote and I am for whatever reason unable to find the backspace and left arrow key on my computer.  What I meant to say is, we are little more than wet robots.  By virtue of that fact, we consist of hardware (guts, brains, grease, hair) and software (ideas, memes, facial expressions, salsa recipes).  For the most part we have little control over the hardware, but the software is all up to circumstance, nurture and other externalities, as well as our own choice.

It would be very unpleasant to believe, as the dictionary definition of ‘racism’ states, that substantial human differences stem from our race.  I would hate a world in which this were true, no matter how much it resembled the Lord of the Rings.  What is true is that most of the differences between people can be traced back to the ideas that they carry around in their heads, most of which they get from their ‘culture’ proper, but many of which come from things we might consider to be super-cultural, lest we water down the meaning of the word culture until it’s equivalent with the word ‘environment’.  Culture can tend to map onto race, as people show a pernicious tendency to marry into their own culture and thus reinforce a connection between physical characteristics and cultural traits.

Thus I have made it perfectly clear that I am not talking about race, correct?  So we can move on?  OK. 

As I’ve said before, people are running different ’software’ on their brains, which they’ve picked up from those around them.  Besides that, the culture or state in which people lives also determines what needs to be on-board and what can be out-sourced.  Follow?

Fantastic.  So now let’s try to talk out just one example of a function that a human being might find it useful to do.  How about negotiating one’s way through unknown humans.  There are several possible ways that an individual might go about this action that we can imagine:

1. Be as courteous to everyone as you would be to your family and friends
2. Maintain a base level of courtesy that allows everyone to move through the world without being touched by strangers
3. Be all up in everyone’s business without acknowledging their humanity
4. Be all up in everyone’s business while acknowledging their humanity
5. Actively push and direct the people around you
6. Be openly adversarial to strangers
7. Just do whatever

Immediately we see that some of these are no good at all.  Number 1 appears nice, but it would mean holding doors for endless lines of strangers, giving up every seat you ever came by, etc. Not pleasant.  Likewise number 4 seems plausible but in fact is ridiculous.  If you’re acknowledging their humanity, you really couldn’t justify being up in their business, eh?  Like ‘Hey lady, I’m sorry I’m all up on you, but what choice do I have?  I don’t want to wait 2 minutes for the next train.’

There are, likewise, problems with each of the above listed ways of dealing with strangers in public places especially when you consider what it would be like if everyone were doing them at the same time.  The one undeniable fact, though, is that, among the many approaches to this common human experience, there absolutely must be a best practice.  Perhaps we can’t measure it yet, but it seems undeniable to me that the reigning Korean strategy (social contract to ignore other people’s humanity, conscious decision not to connect to strangers in any way) is bad for society and thus likely not optimal.  Again, I can’t prove it, but I would happily concede if you can prove me wrong, i.e. that there is no best way to deal with this situation.  Furthermore, I am not claiming that my or any other person’s way of dealing with this situation is the best.  I am, however, unequivocally stating that my way of interacting with strangers is better than the Korean way.

And the Korean way of inducing group bonding and teaching respect for one’s elders are, to me, unequivocally superior to those which I came pre-loaded with.  They’re the OpenOffice to my American Microsoft Word, so to speak.  But it’s not about which country is better, but certainly if we acknowledge the fact that the chances of two different cultures being exactly equally ‘good’ in any one regard is vanishingly small, then perhaps we could make a list of best practices, so to speak, by just looking at Korea and North America.

Sample (i.e. joke) list:

• Best way to dispose of toilet paper: flush
• Best relationship to alcohol: get it out of your system while you’re young
• Best way to cut paper/food: scissors
• Best thing to eat at the movie theater: buttered something
• Best time to drink coffee: in the morning (sorry ajummas with nothing better to do than sit around Starbucks all day)

Anyway, you see what I’m getting at.  When there are two ways of doing things, one is likely to be better than the other.  Think about that stupid Dr. Seuss The Butter Battle Book, about the war between the people who ate bread buttered on the bottom versus the people who ate butter-side-up, which was essentially about what Freud called the narcissism of small differences.  I know that Dr. Seuss is enshrined as one of the patron saints of the lower-middle brow, with people giving his books to high school graduates and such and pretending its a huge departure for them to be reading something so simple, but I’m afraid I must point out what a completely idiotic story this is.  The basic idea, an arms race born out of a disagreement over which side to butter bread, was, according to Wikipedia, based on Seuss’s own belief in the moral equivalence of the Soviet Union and the United States.  But he used as his metaphor for this equivalence two divergent methods of eating buttered bread, one of which is clearly superior to the other.

And that, as you can probably guess by now, was the actual case at the time.  The Cold War was, in fact, about something, a good way of life versus a bad one.  Not that all qualitative differences between two things should lead to an arms race, but neither should we pretend that things don’t need to be changed that most certainly do need to be changed.

And who, pray tell, is going to change things?  We’ll discuss that in part 5.  The answer will blow your mind.

The important thing is that we have so far established two important concepts.  The first is that each culture makes a decision between internalizing and out-sourcing certain social functions.  The second is that there is always a best way to do any thing.  What does it all have to do with jung?

Find out in part 3!

Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

And my wife Miyoung is no different.  You know the old pickles and ice cream cliche (which I was able to confirm with an English friend spans the Atlantic Ocean).  Miyoung has stayed true to the cliche by demanding the weirdest thing she could possibly think of: ganjang gaejang (간장게장).

For those not in the know, ganjang gaejang is basically raw crab pickled in soy sauce.  It couldn’t just be any old pickled crab, though, it had to be from Midamche, a somewhat expensive Korean restaurant behind the GS Square Department Store.

Yeah, that’s the raw head of a pregnant crab that died several weeks ago.  Terrible picture, I know, so here’s one of what it’s supposed to look like:

The reason it had to be from Midamche is because their sauce is really good, extra sweet and cinnamoney.

Of course Miyoung’s morning sickness is so bad she ate about ten bites and then threw up.  At W15,000 for one crab, it was really expensive, but the sauce will be mixed into everyone in the house’s rice for a week, so it’s sort of worth it.

That appears to be the thinking behind the ubiquitous posters of white guys not smoking that you can see around Seoul these days.  My favorite is a fat old wealthy industrialist leaning on the mantlepiece of a palacial fireplace holding a hotdog like a cigar.

Here’s another one.

‘In developed countries* people consult with their doctors about quitting smoking.

There is a new smoking cessation technique more effective than you think waiting for you at your doctor’s’

The gist of the campaign is essentially ‘White countries don’t smoke anymore and neither should we.’  I should point out that Japan, one of the other ‘developed countries’, makes no appearance.

It always makes me sad to see this kind of marketing here.  On one level it’s somewhat equivalent to the concept of the ‘European secret’ as used in American marketing, but with way more racial implications.

Note, for example, that when you go to the website of the popular (?) Maasai Walking Shoe maker Ryn, you see this:

The Maasai Walking Shoe Website.

See, it’s all good that it was made in Africa, but until it has the white country seal of approval, it’s nothing in Korea.

*The word ‘선진국’ can be translated variously as ‘advanced country’, ‘developed country’ or ‘leading country’.  I used ‘developed country’ because it’s so fraught and charged.  I may be intellectually dishonest, but at least I’m honest about it.

No Jung, Bajung Gadung Gung

I’ve had that little ditty running through my head ever since I read Roboseyo’s great post about the movie Crossing, and how South Koreans seemed both unwilling to fund it and now unwilling to see it.  Here’s the money shot:

In my darker moments, I think that South Korea’s apathetic attitude toward what’s happening in the North (other than insofar as Kim Jong-il might have weapons that threaten the south) is the ultimate refutation of Koreans’ claim to have that mystical “jung” — some deep connection between humans that only Koreans could experience or understand. How could you claim “jung” — some deep, humanizing connection between Koreans, when many of your own are starving to death and eating dirt just to remember the feeling of having something in their stomachs, and you won’t even go to a damn movie about it?  The filmmakers had a hell of a time even finding funding for their movie, because South Koreans keep NK at SUCH an arm’s length.  Investors didn’t think the film would make any money.  No jung, gentle readers.  No urgency?  No feeling of need to have this story told?  No jung.

Badung gadung gung.

This is to me the central mystery of Korean life.  How can Koreans go from one extreme to the other so violently and clearly, dividing the inhabitants of the world along these stark lines into ‘people’ and ‘obstacles’. 

Disclaimer:  I’m not stupid.  Before you read on please know that I am aware I am making generalizations that do not apply to every single person in Korea.  If you’re one of those people whose only response to things you’re not familiar with is to say ‘That’s not true of everyone.’ then please consider your one good line taken and keep quiet.  I’m sick to death of people adding nothing to a conversation except the ‘this is a generalization’ caveat that another neglected to include.  It’s not conversing, it’s cherry-picking.

Anyway, I have been developing a theory for a while now that basically goes like this:  social functions can either be produced on-site (i.e. internalized) or out-sourced (i.e. regulated by society).

Example 1: Helping those less fortunate can either be done out of an inborn compulsion which leads to charitable acts or by the collection of taxes to fund social welfare programs.  The former would be an example of on-site philanthropy, while the latter would be out-sourced philanthropy.

Example 2: Maintaining order among waiting people can be achieved by having everyone in society respect the concept of lining up (on-site maintenance of order) or by devising systems in which people take numbers, orders are assigned according to some system, etc. (out-sourced maintenance of order).

Example 3: People can be encouraged to help their elderly parents by instilling in them a sense of duty (on-site responsibility) or by binding them by law to do so (out-sourced responsibility).

You didn’t think I was going to give you three examples where Korea out-sources its good behavior and North Americans readily take responsibility, did you?  No, no society has yet managed to educate  its people to the extent that they do everything they ought to do without any prompting.  Some Americans still need laws to prevent them from chucking their elders to the wolves.

So what does it have to do with jung? All this week I’m going to be developing on the question of jung, empathy and care for your fellow man, in this five-part series.  Every morning, in your feed reader.  Only at the Joshing Gnome.

Incidentally, the aforementioned little ditty I couldn’t get out of my head is:

노정, 빠정가덩겅,
노정, 빠정가덩겅,
정이란 없단말이졍,
노정 빠덩겅 껑가덩겅.

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5