Articles

“The Unbearable Sadness of THAAD” (Kyunghyang Shinmun July 17, 2016)

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Kyunghyang Shinmun

“The Unbearable Sadness of THAAD”

July 17, 2016

Emanuel Pastreich

 

When I read that South Korea has agreed to deploy the THAAD missile defense system, I was swept over with a profound sense of sadness. For all the misunderstandings that have emerged, many in the United States and Korean military have worked together over the years for a common purpose of establishing stability in the face of a perceived North Korean threat. But this time all logic and science has fallen out of the debate. In fact, it seems as if the decision to deploy was made at the highest level with minimal consultation with the wide range of experts on security who have harbored doubts about the effectiveness of missile defense. The project seems to be driven more by the potential for profit, and recalls the tragic consequences of the political machinations of multinational arms dealers one hundred years ago that drew the world into World War One.

To start with, THAAD is an outdated technology whose ability to stop missiles is doubtful. To the degree that THAAD might work, it does so for missiles flying at high altitudes. North Korea does not need to send missiles at high altitudes to attack South Korea, if such an unlikely scenario unfolded.

After all, if North Korea wanted to kill tens of thousands, or more, South Korean civilians, it does not need to use any missiles at all, but rather can use its substantial artillery units for which Seoul is fully within range. THAAD is entirely useless against artillery.

Moreover, there are any number of strategies that render the missile defense system ineffective. As THAAD is aimed at missiles flying at a high altitude, most likely is will simply encourage the Chinese, who perceive the system as intended primarily to deter them, to build many more missiles. That will only bring on an arms race and greater insecurity.

There is only one way to respond to the threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles such as the SALT (strategic arms limitation treaties) that brought stability to Europe. During the early 1970s, the two sides of the Cold War divide made a commitment to addressing their various disagreements in three ways: through bilateral nuclear agreements between Moscow and Washington, through political and economic discussions in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), and through the reduction of military forces in Europe in the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) negotiations. But today the United States is not even considering such an approach.

But there is even more to this tragic decision. The immediate threat to security in Northeast Asia is not missiles or nuclear weapons. Creating a peaceful political environment and embracing disarmament regime, starting with the United States, will greatly reduce the chance that such weapons would ever be employed.

But drones are developing at a rapid rate and pose a poorly-understood security threat around the world. The players behind future drone warfare may not even be nation states at all. We have not even started to draft protocols to address the proliferation of drones in the region and their employment. Drones are potentially the most destabilizing aspect of an arms race in East Asia.

Finally, the entire region faces the existential threat of climate change, rising oceans, spreading deserts and the potential of massive dislocation over the next twenty years of hundreds of millions of people. The cost of mitigating climate change, by shifting away from fossil fuels and creating a low-consumption economy, and the cost of adapting to its impact on society through new infrastructure, policy and institutions will cost trillions of dollars and eventually dominate our economy. The United States, China, Japan, Russia and other nations must cooperate closely in the long-term response and establish a common security agenda based on the response to climate change.

It is no longer an option for Koreans to meekly follow mis-informed policies like the deployment of THAAD that are issued from Washington D.C. think tanks wallowing in corruption. We cannot waste our precious resources and Korea will be the greatest victim if it permits a greater arms race. If Korea has the bravery and the vision to propose a new security agenda for East Asia with a focus on climate change and emerging threats, and if Korea includes the other nations of East Asia as partners in this enterprise, Korea will find unexpected supporters in the United States or elsewhere.

A nuclear strike on South Korea from North Korea is a highly unlikely scenario. The threat of drone warfare is certain. The existential danger of climate change is guaranteed.

If Korea goes along with a misguided program because of the profits to be made, or because of the political benefits to be gained, the costs for the world will be tremendous and future generations will be unforgiving in their judgment.

 

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“The mayors of Seoul” (July 9, 2016 JoongAng Daily)

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JoongAng Daily

“The mayors of Seoul”

July 9, 2016

Emanuel Pastreich

 

 

If you visit the old city hall in Seoul (now a public library), a rather stoic Germanic building built during the colonial period, you will find on the third floor a small museum featuring fascinating exhibitions that detail the development of the city over the last century.

On the wall of the museum hangs a mosaic of asymmetrically arranged rectangles that feature the pictures and short biographies of the mayors of Seoul. The first mayor in the series is Kim Hyung-min who served 1946-1948 in the immediate post-war period.

It seems natural to Seoulites that the list of mayors starts from the establishment of an independent Korea—although this first mayor served before the founding of the Republic of Korea. You cannot included the 18 mayors of Seoul who served during the colonial period because they were all Japanese and carried out an exploitative colonial policy.

There was a first Korean mayor after the war, Lee Beomseung, but he worked in the old colonial system before modern city of Seoul was established.

But it struck me immediately that this pantheon of mayors was deeply wrong. After all, the first first “mayor” of Seoul (Commissioner for Hanseong City Government) was Seong Seok-rin who took up the office in 1395. An astonishing 832 people served as mayors of Seoul from the founding of the Joseon Dynasty until the Japanese occupation. Granted that the position did not have the same authority as the modern mayor of Seoul, and only a short term of rule, nevertheless, those public servants all deserve to be listed as mayors of one of the few cities in the world with a literally unbroken administrative history of over six hundred years.

So what is the psychology behind the decision to leave out 551 years of Seoul history from this museum about Seoul?

Clearly there is a profound cultural break in Seoul’s history which makes it hard for current Seoulites to associate themselves with that long history and its culture. Whereas most Parisians can name all of the bridges over the Seine River, few Seoulites can name the bridges over the Cheonggyecheon. The past is all around us in the form of monuments, and occasionally surviving buildings, but we pay little attention to those traces. They could be, by contrast, an inspiration for building a new Seoul.

More often Seoul tries to create a culture that will motivate and inspire its citizens by becoming like London, or Singapore, or Paris. The best example of this obsession with becoming some other city is the project to transform the Seoul Station Overpass into a public park covered with plants and works of arts. This plan is based on the High Line Park on the West side of Manhattan and although the results may be interesting, the plan is entirely based on an imported concept that will be implemented by the Dutch firm MVRDV.

But what Seoul really needs is not “Manhattan-ness” but rather “Seoul-ness.” The challenge for the city is how it reinterprets and makes relevant the sleeping traditions of the past, in order to create a new urban environment that leaves as many older buildings standing as possible, and hints back to the city’s roots, even back to the 14th century.

But the city is moving quickly in the wrong direction. All across Seoul, glass and steel office buildings and apartment buildings are being thrown up that completely ignore the ancient alleys of the city and which do not even hint at the traditions of Seoul’s architecture in their exteriors, or, for that matter, in their interiors.

The destruction of Seoul’s deep structure, whether it is the building of apartment buildings along the edge of the Kyunghee Palace that are alien to the traditional urban environment, or the erection of massive office buildings at Uljiro 2-ga which leave no space for the merchants or the ordinary citizens who have made the neighborhoods of Seoul feel like intimate villages for the last five hundred years.

Such radical changes in the urban environment do not create vitality, but rather break up the very continuity that encourages innovation. To make Seoul into another Singapore is to kill everything that has made Seoul so resilient. If you want to find vital culture in Seoul, seek out the factories around Uljiro 3-ga where artists make their sculptures in the back street factories run by small businesses, or visit Jungang Market where local merchants have joined up with artists have to create a vital culture.

I am not suggesting that we should try to restore Seoul to what it was in the past. That is not possible. Rather, new buildings should be built to last and built with a profound sense of Seoul’s past. We should see modern buildings as new variations on melodies from the distant past, using elements of traditional hanok, and at times even choosing clay and wood over glass and steel.

At the same time, our vast ignorance of the mayors of Seoul during the Joseon Dynasty means that we know nothing about the policies that were employed in the administration of the city for five hundred years. Few of us, including those working in city hall, know about the policies for the promotion of government officials in the city of Seoul during that time, the environmental preservation and urban farming policies, the management of markets and factories, and the local administration of the districts of Seoul.

We do not have the vaguest idea what wisdom lies in the policies of Seoul from those days, or what parts might be applied to the present, or to the future. The collective wisdom, the institutional knowledge of the city, which is its greatest treasure, has been thoughtlessly tossed aside in our rush to make Seoul into a modern city indistinguishable from other modern cities around the world.

Seoulites feel that to be too closely tied to Seoul’s past will somehow hold them back, tying them to a backwards city of poverty and filth. But although a wealthy city like Copenhagen or Munich may look attractive, it is not Seoul. We will find the keys to this city’s future in its past. We must reinterpret the back streets, the urban policies, and the communities of the past and find in those patterns the past offers hints of what a sustainable future Seoul should look like.

I have no doubt that the hundreds of previous mayors of Seoul have much wisdom to share with us if we will only listen.

 

“The Confucian Approach to Public Diplomacy in Korea” (Asia Today July 3, 2016)

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Asia Today

“The Confucian Approach to Public Diplomacy in Korea”

July 3, 2016

 

 

 

Emanuel Pastreich

 

What would be the qualifications of a Korean diplomat in response to the rapidly changing nature of diplomacy in our age? Here is a lecture entitled, “What does diplomacy mean in our age?” by Prof. Emanuel Pastreich, Senior Advisor ofAsiaToday and director of The Asia Institute. This lecture was conducted for over fifty Korean diplomats engaged in the field of public diplomacy and cultural diplomacy at the Foreign Office building on June 27. [Editor’s Note]

 

When I met with Korea’s Ambassador for public diplomacy Cho Hyun-dong last month we talked briefly about my current research and I met with a small group of diplomats interested in public diplomacy. Ambassador Cho made a rather unusual offer to me after our meeting. He suggested that I could come to the foreign ministry to deliver a talk on the topic.

He left it up to me to write the paper, giving me the freedom to explore various themes. He also suggested that there might be an opportunity to develop it into a more complete report or monograph at a later date.

I felt that this opportunity to talk with Korean diplomats about the field of diplomacy, rather than a specific topic in current affairs, was a tremendous honor, and a chance to share some of my ideas about the rapidly changing nature of diplomacy in our age.

I am deeply concerned about how the nature of international relations is being so rapidly transformed by technological change that the field of diplomacy is simply not keeping up and we will be facing a serious crisis in the future when nations are rocked by forces within and without of which policy makers simply have no understanding.

I spent many hours writing the talk and discussed its content with several friends in advance.

The sky over Seoul was bright blue and the lecture hall on the 19th floor had a perfect view of Bukhan Mountain and the Blue House. The room was filled with over fifty Korean diplomats engaged in the field of public diplomacy and cultural diplomacy.

I first discussed the impact of technology on international relations and how our assumptions about the nature of the nation state no longer applied. I then spent some time discussing the serious challenges posed by climate change and suggested that the response to climate change would increasingly dominate all aspects of diplomacy and security.

What was perhaps most unusual about the talk was the amount of time that I spent talking about the Confucian tradition and the strengths of traditional Korean government. I felt strongly that Koreans are not aware of just how many precedents for good government exist in Korea’s past and how much we can learn about good governance by studying past precedents from the sixteenth or seventeen centuries.

I drew attention to Choi Chi-won, the great Korean diplomat of the Silla Dynasty who used culture as a mean to reinforce relations between the two countries, and was perhaps uniquely able to play a central role in policy in both countries.

I closed the talk with a few remarks about the role of women in diplomacy. As I had anticipated, more than half of the diplomats in the audience were women. I told them that I had great hopes for an age in which women would play a central role in Korean diplomacy, but I also suggested that women had to create their own women’s culture that moved beyond the highly commercialized femininity that is rampant in Korean society.

I recommended that women needed to reinterpret the Confucian tradition to make it inclusive of women in order to assure that Korea did not lose the very best of the Confucian tradition of good governance. I hinted that only through the creative reinterpretation of Confucianism can we make it relevant to the present day, but at the same time, Korean Confucianism offered the potential of true innovation.

 

 

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“Making Korean smartphones smarter” (JoongAng Daily June 20, 2016)

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JoongAng Daily

“Making Korean smartphones smarter”

June 20, 2016

Emanuel Pastreich

 

The craze with smartphones in Korea today reminds me of the glory days for Motorola cellphones when I studied in Tokyo in the late 1980s. I took tremendous pride that America was able to produce the thinnest and most powerful cell phones, ones that could not be matched even by the IT powerhouse Japan.

But Americans were drunk at the time on our success. Motorola started putting more money into marketing and sales, and less into long-term technological development. Moreover, American industry became obsessed with profits and ceased to think carefully about what the future of manufacturing would be.

I worry that Korea will lose control in the smartphone market because firms in China, Vietnam and elsewhere develop cheaper and more sophisticated versions, and because Korean smartphone firms grew inebriated with their current positive image and short-term market share and failed to take the steps required to keep on top.

But the problem goes far deeper. The designs of smartphones in Korea are identical with those made elsewhere in the world. There is no distinctive Korean layout employed in Korean smartphones, or designs and patterns in the form of the phone, or the graphics used within the programs that are based on Korea’s artistic past. If anything, Korea’s smartphone has been developed with the assumption that it should not appear Korean in any sense.

Moreover the production of emoticons and applications for smartphones is essentially cut off from the millions of creative young Koreans who use those phones. High school students cannot easily design emoticons and sell them to each other, or to other young people around the world. College students cannot get easy financing to create new social network programs that can go beyond applications like Facebook in terms of flexibility and creativity, thus allowing our youth to build a robust and dynamic cyberspace throughout the region of East Asia. The production of smartphones themselves has less and less to do with Korea (as factories are built around the world) but the culture that flows through those smartphones should be made by the youth of Korea directly.

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“Korea needs serious debate on environmental issues” (The Korea Times June 13, 2016 )

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The Korea Times

June 13, 2016

“Korea needs serious debate on environmental issues”

 

By Kang Hyun-kyung

Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” though written more than 50 years ago, may still be valuable for Korea today, especially amid the public’s fear of toxic chemicals spurred by the recent humidifier disinfectant scandal.

The 1962 book, which warns of the danger of pesticides, fueled a pros and cons debate about the use of pesticides in the United States and eventually led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. But perhaps another important contribution of the book is the idea that a committed, trusted intellectual can change the direction of society.

In the aftermath of the humidifier disinfectant scandal that killed over 100 Koreans and damaged the respiratory systems of hundreds others, some experts put forth the role of experts in preventing similar incidents. The scandal is made even more unfortunate by the fact that the toxic chemicals involved had already been prohibited in Europe.

Observers point out that the public may not have a full understanding of chemical ingredients, and to educate the public on safe products, easy-to-understand publications about the possible harmful effects of chemicals are needed.

The experts’ opinions raise two important questions. Why is there no meaningful public debate about toxic chemicals in Korea? And why is there no intellectual like Rachel Carson in the country that could lead such a debate?

Emanuel Pastreich, a professor at Kyung Hee University, said a structural barrier hinders a serious debate about environmental issues in Korea, including toxic chemicals. “The whole system here is set up in a way that makes it almost impossible for intellectuals to devote themselves to writing for the general audience,” he said.

He said the commercialized media and publishing industry, along with the limited readership and the narrowly focused environmental movement, is responsible for the absence of such debates.

“Books about the environment are almost sidelined by commercialized media and commercial publishing. There are probably people like Rachel Carson, but their writings are not visible,” he said.”Writing for the media regarding environmental issues is almost suicidal for a professor like me because writing about the environment or environmental issues is not considered to be research by my university. They only count academic journal articles.”

Pastreich is one of the few active environmental contributors in the Korean media. His regular opinion pieces in major media outlets express his concerns about issues such as the desertification of North Korea and the water shortages and dying forests in South Korea.

He cites the way the environmental movement has developed in Korea as another setback. “Even today, education on the environment is not as high as you would think,” said Pastreich, whose experience in the Korean environmental movement includes two years as a board member with a Seoul-based environmental group.

The environmental movement in Korea has its roots in the human rights and democracy movements going back to the 1970s. At the time, many people were fighting for democracy and protesting against the authoritarian Park Chung-hee government. However, few were concerned about the country’s ecosystem partly because urbanization and industrialization were widely accepted as virtues, and few paid attention to the destructive impact of human activities on the ecosystem. A handful of people who were knowledgeable about the environment teamed up with students and labor unionists to start the pro-democracy movement, focusing on helping workers who were poisoned by toxic chemicals and promoting workers’ rights and safety ahead of other environmental concerns, such as conservation and the ecosystem.

In the early 1990s, environmental groups were officially established in the country, and activists have since expanded their activities to such previously overlooked environmental issues.

“It will be great if someone like Rachel Carson would be working in Korea today,” Pastreich said. “Carson was successful because she was able to write about a relatively complicated subject for the general audience in the 1960s.”

A biologist and naturalist, Carson was a dedicated intellectual who campaigned on several environmental issues, including pesticides and the oceans. In Silent Spring, Carson warned of the long-term harmful effects of prevalent pesticide on the ecosystem and on humans. She also raised the possible relationship between toxic chemicals and cancer. Prior to Silent Spring, she had already established herself in the field of science, having published articles in newspapers and magazines. From 1940 to 1952, she was also the editor-in-chief of U.S. Fish and Wildlife publications, after which she retired from government service to write full time.

Linda Lear, author of the biography “Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature,” describes Carson as a lone, single female who challenged the corporate chemical giants.

According to Lear, Silent Spring was the product of Carson’s fears brought about by the 1945 atomic bombing. She said the book was born out of Carson’s belief that science needed to be regulated and that the public had the right to know what science was doing to the earth.

“She had the ability to synthesize large amounts of information not only into a form that was readable by the expert but was understandable and even eloquent for the average reader,” Lear said. “When it came to telling the public about the misuse of synthetic pesticides Carson had a huge reputation for telling the truth, for being a voice of reason and scientific accuracy and for caring for the natural world and about human health.”

Lear, a former professor of environmental history, said that Carson had to withstand the withering criticism heaped upon her in a backlash from the chemical industry in the wake of her book’s publication.

“Carson did not expect the hatred and vitriol that came to her from the chemical lobby and the petroleum companies,” Lear said. “Their attack on her was personal and gendered. Before Carson, no one questioned scientists or challenged the idea that they knew best. After Silent Spring, the general public was not so easily written off. And that was one of the reasons the scientific establishment tried to silence her.”

Despite the hostility and criticism hurled against her, Carson told the public what she believed was true and stood up against the chemical industry.

“Carson not only wrote about the damage to the biota and to the human system caused by misused chemicals, she questioned the government’s right to put chemicals into the environment without the public knowing,” Lear said. “She questioned the power of money behind the chemical lobby and their representatives in government, and she insisted that the general public could ask questions of government and science that they had a right to know.”

Lear admired Carson’s courage and determination to stand up against bureaucracy and the chemical lobby. She said she was further motivated to write the Carson’s biography through her personal ties with the naturalist. Lear hails from the same area outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Carson was from. She said Carson’s childhood home was not far from hers, which made her feel an affinity with Carson.

 

“The poor Chinese book section” (JoongAng Daily June 8, 2016)

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JoongAng Daily

“The poor Chinese book section”

June 8, 2016

 

Emanuel Pastreich

 

 

I visited a big bookstore in Gwanghwamun last week looking for some recent books written in Chinese about politics and economics.

Since May 16, the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of the Cultural Revolution in China, there has been a very heated debate within China about the legacy of Mao Zedong, which includes a diverse range of opinions. I have read a bit on the Internet about recent debates in China and I wanted to read in a bit more detail.

The foreign books section of the mammoth bookstore has been remodeled recently and I was told that there would be a Chinese book section a few months ago. That made sense. After all, there is a substantial population of Koreans who read Chinese and many Koreans take a strong interest in contemporary China. Moreover, the Chinese population of Seoul has increased not only in terms of tourists, but also in terms of exchange students and long-term residents.

But the Chinese book section that I found at the bookstore is one of the poorest collections of books I have ever seen. The Chinese books are hidden away in a corner of the Japanese book section without any signage indicating that the books are in the Chinese language. Unless you asked an employee, you would not know this section existed.

There are only seven shelves of Chinese language books, and Chinese language textbooks take up the top two shelves. The remaining shelves are filled with Chinese translations of foreign books by notable authors like Murakami Haruki and J. K. Rowling — and a biography of Barack Obama and a few Chinese translations of the Bible. 

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George Stilwell on the responsibility for war

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“You will hear a lot of talk about how this or that generation messed things up and got us into war. What nonsense! All living generations are responsible for what we do, and all dead ones as well.”

 

George Stilwell

Private Diary Entry

 

 

George Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945

 

 

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“韓国の空気政策、このままではいけない” (中央日報 2016年　５月　９日)

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中央日報

“韓国の空気政策、このままではいけない”

2016年　５月　９日

 

エマニュエル パストリッチ

先週末、私の娘が学校のサッカー試合に初めて出場した。１ゴールを入れ、決定的なアシストも何度かした。誇らしかった。その日夜、私は娘のせきで何度も目覚めた。私は自分の子どもたちがソウルに暮らしながら韓国文化を習うのをうれしく思う。米国で生活していれば得られない非常に大きなチャンスだと私はよく主張する。しかし最近は子どもを健康の心配なく外で運動できる空気がきれいなところに送らなければいけないという気がする。昨年、韓国を訪問した父は、ソウル駅を出ると空気から硫黄のにおいがすると語った。

農村地域を含めて韓国の空気が悪化し、そのために病気にかかる人が増えているという事実は公開された秘密だ。有害大気汚染物質に対する規定を違反するディーゼル自動車が市場に出ることが多い。そのような車はにおいだけでも分かる。しかしいかなる措置もない。市民の健康を脅かす粒子状物質に比べると、中国の砂漠から風に乗って飛んでくる黄砂の危害性は何でもないという気もする。

責任を中国に問うのはいくつかの面で不正確だ。有害ガスを排出するのは韓国だ。中国の石炭火力発電所と工場が排出する有害ガスは韓国にも責任がある。韓国人が中国に建設する工場は厳格なガス排出基準を守らない。さらに重要な事実は、中国が韓国の環境政策から直接的な影響を受けるという点だ。韓国がガス排出に対して厳格になり、スウェーデンやデンマークのように化石燃料の使用中断と気候変動緩和のための野心的な計画を推進すれば、中国はこれに注目するだろう。韓国の政策をベンチマーキングする可能性が高い。実際、中国は再生可能エネルギーに韓国より多くの投資をしている。

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“A cleaner Korean dream” (JoongAng Daily May 9, 2016)

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JoongAng Daily

“A cleaner Korean dream”

May 9, 2016

 

 

Emanuel Pastreich

 

My daughter played for the first time on the football team of her school over the weekend. I was proud to see her score a goal and make several critical assists for her teammates. But then I was awakened repeatedly from sleep by her coughing late at night.

I am glad to have my family living with me here in Seoul and to have my children learn about Korean culture. I have often argued to others that our children have tremendous opportunities living here that they would not have in the United States. But I am starting to wonder these days whether I should send my children to live somewhere else where the air is clean, a country where they can exercise outside without endangering their health.

I was deeply embarrassed when my father came to visit us in Korea last year. The first thing he remarked when he stepped out of Seoul Station was that the air smelled like Sulphur.

It is an open secret that the air in Korea, even in rural areas, is getting much worse and that the number of people who become ill as a result is increasing. There have been frequent cases of diesel automobiles on the market which violate restrictions on hazardous emissions — I can smell them when I walk by — and yet nothing is done to ban them.

The fine dust that endangers citizens has made the yellow dust blown from the spreading deserts of China, seem harmless compared with the fine dust particles in the air.

To blame this situation on China is inaccurate on many levels. Not only do many emissions of hazardous gases originate in Korea, the emissions from coal plants and other factories in China are not beyond Korea’s responsibility. Koreans build factories in China that do not hold high standards for emissions. Even more importantly, China in turn is directly influenced by Korea’s environmental policy. If Korea were strict about emissions and had an ambitious program to eliminate fossil fuels and mitigate climate change, in the manner that Sweden or Denmark do, the Chinese would take note of that fact and most likely would benchmark Korean policies accordingly. In fact, China is making a greater investment overall in renewables than Korea.

Several foreign friends have confessed to me that they are having trouble recruiting people to Korea these days because of the terrible air quality. I can see that the reputation of Korea has suffered terribly from this wanton destruction of the environment and thoughtless embrace of short-term growth.

Nothing was more telling than the near simultaneous resignations of Yvo de Boer, the director general of the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), and Hela Cheikhrouhou, executive director of the Green Climate Fund. Whether those decisions were directly related to frustration with current Korean policies, I don’t know, but I do know for a fact that the decision of the Korean minister of the environment not to stay to the end of the COP 21 conference in Paris was noticed around the world.

Sadly, all we see in Korea these days is a booming market for various filters for the home, or automobile, that promise to make this uninhabitable climate more tolerable to those who can afford such devices. Most Koreans seem to be in deep denial about the impact of such terrible air on their health, let alone the catastrophe of climate change that awaits them.

The time has come for us to take a stand. Korea must move bravely forward and establish itself as the nation with the strictest rules on emissions in Asia and Korea should make it clear that all coal-fired power stations will be closed down in the next five years, rather than increasing the number. Korea should be the model of a developing nation that moves beyond fossil fuels quickly.

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“Filial piety and Korea’s future” (JoongAng Daily April 18, 2016)

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JoongAng Daily
“Filial piety and Korea’s future”
April 18, 2016

 

Emanuel Pastreich

 

When I wrote the book “Another Republic of Korea, of which Koreans are Ignorant,” I spent hours deciding which part of traditional Korean culture could serve as a blueprint for its future development. I wrote the outline for a chapter about the value of filial piety for Korea’s future, but ultimately did not use it because the response to it from Korean friends was so lukewarm.

Koreans describe filial piety as an obligatory duty, but evince no particular enthusiasm for it.

Yet filial piety was not a quaint habit in the Joseon Dynasty, but rather the core of an ethical system that bridged abstract morality and concrete practice, one that brought together the private and the public realms to create a sustainable political system.

Chinese in the 18th century spoke highly of Korean filial piety, considering the respect Koreans showed for their elders and ancestors to be the mark of civilized society. It seems wrong-headed to leave out filial piety when we plan the future of Korea.

I visited Confucianland in Andong, a massive building crammed full of dioramas illustrating Confucian values with cartoonish figures. Although I understand the motivation for the amusement park, regrettably it seems more aimed at tourism than at promoting virtue, and it contains little that would draw in people over the age of twelve.

But the compassion for others found in filial piety is desperately needed in our society, in a country in where elder parents are abandoned by their children, and similarly youth are so alienated from family that they commit suicide in despair.

The Korean tradition of filial piety must be revived, but that can only be done if we first accept that filial piety must be completely reinterpreted and made a living, breathing part of daily life, and not an abstract concept. We must use our imagination to radically reinvent filial piety. We need intellectuals to work together with artists, writers and common citizens to reinterpret the tradition for the present day—the work cannot be done by “branding committees” or PR consultants.

First, filial piety must be stripped of any bias against women. Korean society has changed fundamentally and the Confucian tradition must be gender neutral. There are plenty of examples of such reforms in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Women should be important ancestors and they should participate in the Confucian rites in the same manner as men. A failure to reform the tradition will result in its loss.

Second, filial piety must be understood not only as a moral duty but as a process that leads to self-understanding. Filial piety is the key to our own true identity because we understand how we are a product of the contributions of ancestors about whom we know so little.

We need to use storytelling to revitalize the filial piety tradition and parents should tell their children about past ancestors and allow them to see how their thinking, the shapes of their bodies and their experiences are related to past generations. Filial piety offers a form of psychological understanding which is akin to, but more constructive than, Freudian approaches. The critical role of the parent in the lives of children is recognized through filial piety, not in abstract scientific analysis, but in daily practices that reinforce positives of the relationship.

After Bertrand Russell spent a year in Beijing giving lectures in 1920, he noted in his book, “The Problem with China,” that Confucian filial piety was a far preferable system for running a government than the “patriotism [which] directs one’s loyalty to a fighting unit” employed in Western nations. These words have profound significance. Filial piety offers potential for a unifying philosophy connecting the personal and the political. It is not a simplistic “ideology,” nor dependent on any “patriotism” that can easily descend into militarism. Koreans were criticized by Westerners in the 19th century for placing too much emphasis on family, but perhaps it was precisely filial piety that kept Korea from becoming imperialist and has allowed it to retain humanity in government institutions.