Yes, Except…

Note: This post was pre-written for posting long ago. I set it to autopublish later on, as I won’t be having much internet access for the next few days. I do have it, off and on, but not enough to be logging in and writing posts for the moment.


I’m working on a somewhat complex series of posts that in a sense distill and clarify things I’ve been thinking about (and writing about here) lately for a while, tied to writing, writing theory and writing books, Hollywood, and modern culture in general.

But that “somewhat complex” means it takes time. In the meantime, I was reading reading up on a ton of things over at Ethan Iverson’s outstanding Do the Math blog, and followed a couple of links from there (on this page) to a couple of pieces on strategy for rehabilitating classical music in contemporary American society.

One of those pieces is by Greg Sandow, and leans heavily on comments by a young American woman (presumably, by her name, Korean-American), who expressed some interesting but problematic opinions about the “white culture” of classical music in America:

Lee’s bottom line was simple but profound. If we want people who aren’t white to go in any large numbers to classical concerts, we have to diversify the culture those concerts display. Which doesn’t just mean playing Latin American (or African-American) composers. It means presenting a not wholly white — not wholly low affect and respectful — face. With, maybe, applause or shouts during the music, which Mozart and Handel wouldn’t have found at all uncomfortable.

Bill Eddins replies at length to the more questionable of Lee’s assertions, not just the idea that maybe concerts should run on what he rightly notes would be more bluntly called “Colored People Time.” And really, that’s sort of silly, as if having a set time for an event to start were a wholly “white” thing: sounds kind of suspect to me, and simultaneously, I have to wonder why the looseness in terms of start time doesn’t upset the many white audience members at hip-hop shows. Black as hip-hop may be in its origins, isn’t the music itself located in youth culture that is generally (across racial lines) more lax about start times? As Eddins notes, people of all colors, including white, are often late for things. (I, personally, struggle to be on time for anything, and my mostly-white writing critique group in Seoul was perpetually starting late.) To suggest orchestras should be more lax about starting their concerts on time because of C.P. Time is pretty much the most patronizing thing you could do, isn’t it?

And so, I agree with Eddins here:

If this is the type of cultural diversity the League is pushing these days then please, I beg of you, shut down your “cultural diversity” program. Even this poor ‘Double Stuff’ guy can smell a condescending smack upside the head from a mile away, and any ‘outreach’ along these lines will do way more harm than good. Let me add a couple words to that definition list – condescending, paternalism, supercilious – that will do for starters.

The only way you are going to get black folk, or latino folk, or ANY folk interested in classical music is to not look at these people as black folk, or latino folk, or anything else. Look at them as people. Stop worrying about what race/culture they are and just push music education, whether that’s classical, jazz, pop, rock, funk, world, disco, whatever. Push the instruments and the music, and the positive effects that those things have on the culture at large.

I agree.

Mind you, I happen to think that a culture where people can applaud something remarkable without waiting for the end of the piece, or cry out, might not hurt the music, either. (Because, really, the culture of silence and self-containment we have in classical music concerts today is alien to most of the tradition.) Which is actually why thinking that “letting people shout during the concert” is a “black” thing is not just patronizing, it’s also ignorant of history.

(I’m not sure in practice I’m actually comfortable with people shouting, mind you. Orchestra concerts in Seoul invariably involved some moron’s phone being left on and ringing for a ridiculous amount of time during the concert, and that usually enraged me. But maybe if the aesthetic of concert-going were different, and more expressive… aw, hell, I don’t know.)

To me, the rules of concert etiquette are great for making sure we hear every note that gets played… but they’re not really great for getting people into the music. Really, they sort of reinforce a sense that this music belongs, first and foremost, in a museum, dead and stuffed. Which is a tragedy: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is a century old this year, but it is deeply alive, deeply vibrant, deeply exciting music.

(It’s a fucking ballet about annual pagan human sacrifice rituals of virgins! Composed out of Russian folk songs, some of them actually of occult provenance! (That part of my recently published story featuring The Rite of Spring, I actually didn’t make up!) I mean, basically, Stravinsky out-heavy-metaled heavy metal music before the genre even existed! Iron Maiden and Gwar are tame, conservative fluff beside this stuff!)

And Stravinsky’s just one example…

But anyway, Bill Eddins also takes Sandow (well, really, Lee, but also Sandow for repeating her ideas) to task for a questionable formulation of the idea of stereotypes, versus, well, “true” stereotypes (which she rather goofily calls “archetypes”). Here’s what Sandow wrote, quoting her:

If you think that what I just wrote–which is exactly what she said–trades in stereotypes, she had an answer for that. A stereotype, she said, is something you expect (so wrongly) to be true of every member of an ethnic group. With no exceptions. You’re looking for trouble if you think stereotypically.

But she contrasted that with what she called archetypes — traits that really are prevalent within any ethnic group, traits you’re not wrong to look (or look out) for, but which of course don’t show up in every individual.

Eddins has a serious issue with that, not only because Lee is not using the language in a sociologically correct way, but also, I’m going to take the liberty of imagining, because as a black man in the North America today, he’s met more than his fair share of idiots who’ve never run across a stereotype they didn’t think was an “archetype.” (Hell, he even concludes his rebuttal with the perfect example of such an idiot, some moron who assumes he can know about Eddins’ musical tastes by the color of his skin.)

I agree with Eddins that Lee and Sandow are wrongheaded in arguing that orchestras need to cater to these (imaginary?) cultural norms of nonwhite peoples: I mean, maybe Lee hasn’t been to an orchestra concert in Korea, but guess what? They also start at a set time, and on time. (Or, at least, no more late than orchestras anywhere else.) They also don’t allow applause in mid-piece, or even between movements, and ask people to turn off their cell phones. They also keep the doors shut after the orchestra starts, and don’t let you in until the end of the first piece… or, well, maybe the end of the current movement, but if they let you in, they insist you sit near the back and wait till the intermission to find your proper seat.

In other words, in Seoul, classical music concertgoers are expected (by fellow Korean concertgoers) to generally follow the same rules as any classical orchestra venue/audience in the world.

Sure, Seoul has its share (or maybe more than its share) of ignorant nouveaux-riche dunderheads who attend such concerts more to be seen, or to feel posh, and many Koreans seem still have a sense (one that is dying, if not dead, in the West) that “high culture” is something that ought to be enjoyed, even when they themselves don’t enjoy it… which is why the phones continue to ring, concert after concert, when people who aren’t that crazy about the music attend anyway. I’ve ranted about before.

But the rules of classical concert-going in Seoul are, as recognized by the vast majority of people and enforced by Korean ushers and venue operators, are the same as in Canada or the US. One presumes that this is also the case for orchestral concert venues and audiences in most parts of the world.

But the thing is, I feel like I can see where Lee is coming from. If she is, indeed, Korean, well: the thing is, a lot of Korean people–that is, people who are not assimilated into North American culture, or even in some cases who generally are–behave in ways that really do follow what we would call “stereotyped.” What Lee seems to be trying to talk about is that cultures differ, and that cultures also say something “true” about the people who are enculturated in them.

Which is to say, she’s run up against the fact that “stereotype” in English is a pejorative term, but we don’t really have a non-pejorative term for that same idea, when it’s an accurate depiction of reality. In Korea, I constantly found myself reminding students that “stereotype” means something negative; I’d get asked, “How can I say that without a negative nuance,” and I ended up having to explain that “normal” or “conventional” or “average” was close, though really, there wasn’t a great answer to that question in conversational English, because we tend not to be comfortable with the idea that some stereotypes could be stereotypes because they’re a useful rule of thumb.

(Because, after all, as soon as someone says that, it seems to enfranchise the idiots who are content to believe that every stereotype is a useful rule of thumb. All black people like hip-hop, right? Right?!?)

I found the students tended to prefer the English word “normal” or “usual” because for them, it had a very positive connotation. I would hear people describing themselves as “usual”–“I am a ‘usual’ ajeoshi [middle-aged man]” or “I am a ‘normal’ student, so I have no hobbies.” The hobbies thing is not an accident: the normalness of usualness of people was often used to explain preferences or behaviours. People didn’t seem to have the hangup that we North Americans sometimes have where being described as “usual” or “just like everyone else” troubles us. Rather, many people I met in Korea seemed to like that idea, or even hold that as something to aspire to.

It was culturally so alien that it baffled me at first. It was like people saying, “I aspire to live in the suburbs, and work a job I dislike. I aspire to be solidly middle class and conventional.” Not that plenty of North Americans don’t have the same aspiration, but they tend to either be less conscious of it, or to entertain fantasies to the contrary (often exploited by advertisers), or both.

But I think that in some ways, this is how people everywhere really are, even when we fool ourselves and believe to the contrary. The percentage of what’s said in day-to-day conversations that is absolutely formulaic and unoriginal is hard to grasp unless or until you become a foreign language teacher, and start teaching people the vocabulary and grammar and specific phrases and they need to get through a basic conversation. (Not that this is true of sparkling conversations, but that’s why most conversations aren’t described as “sparkling.”)

This doesn’t make Lee’s comments (about CP time or about the “respectfulness” of white culture–and the implied “non-respectfulness” of other cultures) any less ill-conceived: those stereotypes are silly. But she’s not wrong about the existence of commonalities shared within cultures,or the presence of other cultures in America. Branford Marsalis commented about this once, in an interview I’ve linked here before (yes, an interview for the hated Ken Burns documentary):

One of the things people in the egalitarian sensibility says that everyone is the same. See, but everyone is not the same. I mean, people are simply not the same. And black people are very different in a lot of ways from white people because we come from Africa. And the African sensibility could not be more diametrically opposed to the European sensibility in lots of ways. One of the easier ways is to watch a football game and watch a Michael Irvin score a touchdown and then he starts strutting in the end zone and, and you have one of my friends, a white guy say, “Why does he, why does he have to do that?” You know, and I, I know what a lot of those guys don’t know and I’m like, “Well, you have to understand that it’s a very African sensibility.” There was a time in western Africa when they were losing so many men to war that they… you had a new version of war and it was basically talk and smatter. You know, and they would essentially talk trash to one another and whoever talked the most trash won the war that year. I mean, and it, it, it’s a thing that has been a part of Af…, the African sensibility for thousands of years now. So, it is one of those things that happens when you take a group of people and you move them and you assign them new names and new identity, and you can do that. You can say, “Your name is now, you know, John. Washington. Or, you know, Le…, LeRoy Jones, or whatever the name is, but what you cannot do is go inside their souls and redefine their sensibility.

Of course, to me the most interesting thing about American culture is its mongrel nature: its mixed, recombined nature. But I’m also fascinated by this argument of Marsalis’ because I’ve seen, over the years, white athletes also do the victory dance, and seen white Americans who had somewhere along the way internalized that trash-talking, doing the dozens, aspect of the West African sensibility which always felt culturally alien to me–alien, but interesting.

Considering the question of cultural diversity in America (of multiple cultures within that country), I think of the expatriate Koreans I’ve known over the years–mostly not Korean-Americans, but Koreans who have adapted to life in other places (Canada, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam)–and I find that there are commonalities that seem to often be true, which form the basis of stereotypes about first and even second generation Koreans abroad, but which also happen to be descriptive in general terms: for example, the large percentage of overseas Koreans who are involved in Protestant church communities; or the tendency within ethnic Korean communities towards political conservativism; or those communities’ notorious insularity and preoccupation with Koreanness, Korean identity, Korean pride, and so on.

(Say what you want about whether those traits are positive, negative, or a mix of both; that’s not my point. The tendency is the point, and, I suppose, the observation that it hardly surprises me when someone who’s apparently Korean-American starts talking about ethnocultural traits in the context of American “multiculturalism.”)

I guess what I’m saying is that as wrongheaded as what some of Lee says (and Sandow repeats) might be, hammering at her arguments on the basis of “stereotypes” being universally offensive is probably not the most useful mode of disagreement. There obviously are stereotypes that are offensive, and unfortunately people who live as visible minorities face the brunt end of those… and even more unfortunately, she actually cites some of them directly. It’s enough to make you wince, as Eddins makes crystal clear.

And, well, you know, I’ve experienced that brunt end myself, a little bit: the idea that Westerners are sex maniacs, for example, is one I’ve encountered in many forms in Korea, from young men accusing me of sex mania when I talked to a female bartender (frankly, I was asking what the Korean word for a snack she’d given us was), to having older men attempt sexual passes at (or, yeah, attempt to grope) me, presumably because hypersexual white men will presumably go to bed with anyone.

Those experiences and stereotypes were really unpleasant and flat-out wrong, or in some cases rather dehumanizing. And, note, I’m fully aware that I got my taste of it served alongside a big, heaping side dish of white male privilege, which I’m sure made it somewhat less difficult to swallow. (Though it ain’t much help when stereotypes and jingoism drive a nutball all the way over into violence, and it never covered the foul aftertaste.)

But there were other stereotypes that aren’t so far off the money. My students have assumed that Americans have more of an investment in individualism, while Koreans are more willing to commit to being a group member and set aside their own identity or ego; which, broadly speaking, seems in my experience to be true (whether or not it really results in more individualism in practice among Westerners, or whether or not any individual is actually willing to set aside his or her ego for the group in practice among Koreans). Koreans and expats living in Korea often resort to using simplified shorthands, like, “Most people in Korea think,” or “Most Americans think,” and while some of the generalizations that follow those phrases are wrongheaded and flat-out untrue, and others are sort of so ahistorical as to be confusing or useless, there are some statements that start out that way and end up actually being pretty reliable and useful shorthands on how to navigate or manage your own expectations realistically in the face of another culture.

What I’m saying is, I’m not as ready as Eddins to just Lee’s claim that not all stereotypes are untrue, that cultural difference can be navigated through shorthands if we’re intelligent and self-aware enough not to see them as rules or universals.

It’s just, how are these shorthands useful for the diversity programs of our struggling symphony orchestras?

I’d say they’re mostly not. One might argue that classical music cultures in places like Seoul, or Cairo, or Saigon, or Lebanon, or Venezuela, all took up the “white” culture of concert etiquette, and ought to have done otherwise. The concertgoers in those places, I imagine, might argue otherwise, though.

The few people I knew in Seoul who made a serious habit of going to orchestral concerts all felt that etiquette was good, because it allowed one to enjoy the music, and they were just as angry as I was when random morons’ cell phones were not put into vibrate or silent mode, and went off during concerts–invariably, though momentarily, ruining the quietest part of a piece. Which is interesting, since when you attend a performance of traditional Korean “art” vocal music, pansori, the rules are a lot like in a jazz club: you can shout–there are formulaic phrases to shout, the Korean equivalent of “Woo!” and “Sing it!” and “Go on, go on!” And those do fit the pansori performances, they’re part of them, because the audience knows the rules and etiquette. Which is to say: Koreans are perfectly capable of “code-sliding” in terms of concert etiquette; so are African-Americans, Latino-American, and any other nonwhite group in America, I’m sure.

That’s not to say that people in Kinshasa, where there presumably hasn’t been a long tradition of live classical music concerts, ought to be following the same concertgoing rules as in those other places, now that they have their own orchestra in town. I have no idea what concert-hall etiquette is observed by Congolese audiences of the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra, though I’m actually very curious to know whether they, too, replicated the modern European model, or adopted other, different rules for audience behaviour. (I suppose I’ll have to watch the documentary about this group, which incidentally is billed in several places as “the world’s only all-black orchestra,” when I get a chance.)

But I agree with Eddins that it’s a bit patronizing (and more than a bit ridiculous) to argue that African-Americans and Latin-Americans aren’t going to classical music concerts because the culture of concert hall etiquette is “white, low affect, [and] respectful.” It’s far more reasonable to imagine that blacks and Latinos are not going to their local classical music concerts for the same reason that most white Americans aren’t going: because they, like the vast majority of people in the modern world, are musically illiterate (and thus ill-equipped to enjoy art music), and don’t realize it (and likely wouldn’t care even if they did realize it), and because they’ve become accustomed to the musical equivalent of TV dinners.

And yeah, as Iverson put it:

After all, European Classical Music was the house band for centuries of racist oppressors. Until all those years of hurt have been properly addressed, what good reason will there be for non-white communities to come out and support yet another moneyed white flagship?

That too, yes, though at the same time, questions seem to be raised about why anyone would then bother to start an orchestra in Kinshasa, or why people in Seoul attend concerts at all (even if their colonial conquerors were Japanese, not Western), or why the author and composer Somtow Sucharitkul (S.P. Somtow, to you SF fans out there) worked so hard and went so far out of his way to help build Bangkok’s opera scene, and develop its classical music scene?

Personally, I think that questions of the postcolonial politics of European Classical Music run distantly behind the way the relative nonexistence of arts and music education in North American schools has become normal, and the resulting general musical illiteracy of people today. (In addition to our literary illiteracy, our artistic illiteracy, our geographic and historical ignorance, our innumeracy: what is it that we North Americans collectively are supposed to be good at again?)

I sincerely doubt the problem of musical illiteracy is more profound among non-white Americans than it is among white Americans, but even if it were, I’d be turning first to the question of the inequity of educational opportunities, along with stupid stereotypes abut what musical tastes line up with which race–stereotypes that end up, in youth culture, being tied up with identity and consumer trends and wanting to fit in… in other words, which probably become unfortunate self-fulfilling prophecies.

But that’s assuming it is worse among nonwhite Americans, and I think there’s no real evidence to support that: in fact, my experience suggests that outside of small circles in the biggest cities, everyone–including white Americans, and white Canadians–is approximately equal in terms of their extreme musical (and artistic) illiteracy. I know that when I started middle school (prior to starting my picking up the saxophone) the music appreciation classes I got were so rudimentary that I shudder to imagine what I’d be listening to now if I’d kept along that educational track.

In the end, I’m less hostile to the idea that some stereotypes point to useful cultural differences (though calling them “archetypes” is a plain old misuse of the word, and Lee’s stupid application of the idea to orchestra diversity programs is just crazy-talk), but nonetheless I agree with Eddins (and Iverson): the solution here is to keep pushing education, and keep doing classical music with integrity, keep the fire alive.

Though I have my issues with some of Wynton Marsalis’ comments about some of the music I love deeply, he’s right in what he says in this interview with Iverson:

EI: H’mm. [long pause] Early jazz has sometimes been played – arguably defaced – by a presentation that is sarcastic.

WM: Huh. Well, I didn’t always like that kind of music, either. But I learned as I went along…

It’s a matter of us codifying our culture. We’re still young. But we will. It will be there. We’re not going to produce another Jelly Roll Morton. We’ll produce whatever we’ll produce but he’s there. It’s like Walt Whitman. He’s there. He’s in that time frame. If you want to deal with American writing and poetry, you’re going to deal with him. You will deal with Mark Twain. You will deal with Faulkner. You will deal with Hemingway. You’re going to deal with those people because they exist in that time.

If you want to write counterpoint, you are going to deal with Bach. If you look around, that’s who’s there. If you want to improvise, you’re going to deal with Louis Armstrong because when you actually start to look at it, he’s who’s there. The consciousness to do that and to want to be great at something in the American Arts is not here right now for a bulk of the people. But it’ll come.

Our job is more to keep it going and to conduct ourselves with integrity and keep all the references and get as much of the music in our music as we can get – so that when there are people who want to check it out, it’s there for them to check it out. It’s a bridge for them to develop it however they want to develop it.

As long as there’s not a bridge for them, then it’s hard.

Not just for people who aspire to be artists, but also for people who aspire to have music worthy of them, of their minds and ears and imaginations. Marsalis is talking utopian here–I mean this not to say he’s being a silly dreamer, either. I mean utopian in the positive sense of the word, speaking as a radical and as someone advocating the change we know must someday come, a position sadly few people in the modern West are willing to take about anything.

But it is inspiring to imagine that the masses, top-40ed-ad-nauseam, indeed will someday wake up and realize that corporate disposaculture is leaving them hungry, that they might start looking for something more nutritious, if not to supplant the diet then at least to supplement it. I might have thought that was crazy talk a decade ago, but John Palmer’s and Michael Ruhlman’s books are selling briskly these days. People are getting the equivalent point, to some degree, in terms of the industrialized crapification of their food, right now. Maybe in a generation or two, they’ll realize the same thing has been done to their arts and entertainment–to their culture, really.

In the meantime, the way forward with classical music concerts is not to superficially remodel their concert hall etiquette after hip-hop concerts, or jazz concerts, or whatever it is Lee thinks those non-white people would find more comfortable. Because, frankly, I think Iverson and Eddins are right: that kind of change comes off way more patronizing.

6 thoughts on “Yes, Except…

  1. Oh god, where to begin? There’s so much worth reading in this post I haven’t quite got my head wrapped around it all, but basically, I get the sense that stereotypes are a useful JUMPING OFF POINT. But anyone who stops there should be given a good smack upside the head.

    Koreans like to tell themselves that they are more genuine than Westerners, occasionally. That they harbor fewer grand delusions about who they are and what the world is like. And in some situations, that is true: as you’ve said, there is the basic reality that people are formed (to varying extents) by the culture they live in. Americans tend to dance around that fact: they are so eager to prove that no culture is good culture that they are blind to the effects of their own, unique culture on their psyches. (and therefore often run into the blunder of assuming that ALL cultures share the same assumptions as American culture).

    But Koreans also limit themselves to a huge extent by… not exactly conflating stereotypes with reality. But neither do they think about how their stereotyped thinking actually applies in reality very often, and therefore that stereotyped thinking goes unchallenged.

    At the risk of promoting another stereotype about Koreans (but this, I would argue, is not so much a stereotype as a sociological observation), Koreans have to have a socially appropriate response ready for every situation, and mistakes are not tolerated. No wonder so many people, then, train themselves to think in stereotypes, because human interaction would be a complete minefield if you didn’t classify them into neat categories, to which you would respond with pre-determined action plans.

    1. Anne,

      Oh god, where to begin? There’s so much worth reading in this post I haven’t quite got my head wrapped around it all, but basically, I get the sense that stereotypes are a useful JUMPING OFF POINT. But anyone who stops there should be given a good smack upside the head.

      Right, with the caveat that sometimes stereotypes are a useful jumping off point. Sometimes they’re not even at, but sometimes they are, and somehow in America acknowledging that reality has become equated with racism across the board.

      Of course, it doesn’t help that the stereotypes mentioned in the article (as “archetypes”) are mostly dumb. Actually Ms. Lee should have just come out and said what she meant, which is that white people attending “cultural events” (as opposed to rap shows) tend to be uptight about audience behaviour and about start time, or that the uptightness that has (really, honestly, it really has) permeated classical music culture (worldwide by now), and which she feels aren’t doing it any favors, are peculiarly Western-European ideals of “culture” and “arts”-related behaviour (and, I suspect, much more Anglo- and Franco-cultural than anything else). We clap politely. We don’t shout or cheer when we like something till the piece is completed. We don’t like to start thirty minutes late. That’s basically unobjectionable: I (as a white man who actually prefers audiences at the Symphony to shut up and who wants the concert to start relatively on time) would have no problem hearing that, as long as phrased intelligently.

      Koreans like to tell themselves that they are more genuine than Westerners, occasionally. That they harbor fewer grand delusions about who they are and what the world is like. And in some situations, that is true: as you’ve said, there is the basic reality that people are formed (to varying extents) by the culture they live in. Americans tend to dance around that fact: they are so eager to prove that no culture is good culture that they are blind to the effects of their own, unique culture on their psyches. (and therefore often run into the blunder of assuming that ALL cultures share the same assumptions as American culture).

      Don’t they? Ha, sorry. Couldn’t help myself.

      But Koreans also limit themselves to a huge extent by… not exactly conflating stereotypes with reality. But neither do they think about how their stereotyped thinking actually applies in reality very often, and therefore that stereotyped thinking goes unchallenged.

      Right, that’s the thing. What I often encountered in Korea was a lot people saying they admired something about some other culture, but following up with, “But this is Korea.” It felt like a lot of resignation, mixed with a good dollop of simply taking stereotypes for granted. I would sometimes point to counter-examples in Korea, which got us nowhere, because the counter-examples seemed not to be received as they were offered (as a challenge to the reasoning that XYZ was universal and inescapable in Korea) but rather as anomalies that proved the inescapability of XYZ.

      It sort of brought Kant to mind; I’m not the biggest fan of Kant, but he did have this whole thing where he tried to figure out what the categorical imperative was, and as far as I remember, one of his questions in developing it was to ask, prior to deciding that behaviour X is okay, what the world would be like if everyone did X.

      (I’m tempted to go into a rant about people hocking up phlegm and spitting it on the sidewalk, but that’s a tangent, except to say people don’t do it here. It took almost six months in Saigon before he heard a man loudly hocking up phlegm. And I suspect that guy was a Korean expatriate!)

      But more relevant to this discussion: the thing I’m thinking of is the way, in Korea, words and reality can become so disconnected. Stereotypes (like other parts of consensus reality) must be paid lip service, even when people consciously disagree. That seems to be one of the fundamental things in Korean society. Maybe because I’m reading Pound in his discussion of Confucius, I’m not sure, but I’m starting to feel like Confucius’ biggest gift to Asia was the development of the technology of the simulacrum: here’s a massive, complex, symbolically interwoven system we’ll call “civilization.” It is a simulation of how human beings function in the world, with some startling mental physics that disconnect from reality. We all know it disconnects. That’s fine, as long as we all agree to pretend that it’s how it works. Which is to say, it’s about demeanor, not about nature, right?

      That’s the biggest divergence with the West, isn’t it? We’re maybe 0-30% worried about how it looks when people catch us in our awful behaviours, but 70-100% obsessed with our own nature, with our authentic, imperfect essence: we “sin” and then worry about it, and obsess about our evil nature, our hidden corruption, and fight to warp our interiorities to fix external institutions’ models of how humans are or should be. (Like, say Churches, or governments.) My impression is that in Korea, the formula seems inverted: the majority of concern is about the public semblance of corruption, while the idea of one’s inborn imperfections is more often a secondary concern if at all. This seems true even among many Korean Christians. Which, I don’t know, maybeI’m leaning on that old idea of guilt cultures vs. shame cultures.

      But the point is: Koreans (on average, with exceptions) do seem to be much more comfortable with the occasional social necessitation of saying things and enacting gestures that they don’t authentically, honestly mean. I remember saying, at several points, that I felt like I simply was missing some crucial toolkit that the Koreans around he seemed to have been equipped with, for smiling and acting like things were okay, when some authority figure was being a ridiculous prick.

      At the risk of promoting another stereotype about Koreans (but this, I would argue, is not so much a stereotype as a sociological observation), Koreans have to have a socially appropriate response ready for every situation, and mistakes are not tolerated. No wonder so many people, then, train themselves to think in stereotypes, because human interaction would be a complete minefield if you didn’t classify them into neat categories, to which you would respond with pre-determined action plans.

      Yeah, true, and it makes sense when I read it the way you’ve put it.

      Then again, it reminds me of some of the old-days SF authors’ attitudes regarding women: they relied on stereotypes because women were just so darn incomprehensible. I read that, to some degree, as socially-enfranchised laziness. The difference being that mistakes were tolerated back in SF’s Golden Age-era, much more than now.

      Which… now that I think of it: you say mistakes are not tolerated, but which mistakes? I felt like a lot of mistakes that would never be tolerated for long in the social circles I left behind in Canada, were absolutely tolerated in Seoul. When I left, Jihyun was losing friends all over the place for calling them them on their indiscriminate bigotry against Chinese and Sino-Koreans. I constantly saw Korean guys saying sexist crap and not being called out on it, even by women who knew it for what it was. I encountered way more snarky regionalist put-downs, too, more bizarre stereotypes altogether. (The kind of thing that, back home, we associate with uneducated farmers from the Dustbowl era, fairly regularly dripping from the mouths of PhDs who’d spent years overseas.)

      What I’m saying is that Korea’s actually a very tolerant environment for certain kinds of mistakes involving “stereotypes”… just not the mistakes you’re thinking of, like senior-junior, authority-subordinate, or unanticipated-backdoor-connection type mistakes, right? (Which, ha, seem to be precisely the kinds of mistakes that Westerners tend to be more tolerant or permissive with, because of our ostensible anti-authoritarian streak. Ostenisble, I say again.)

      I guess this all leads back to my idea that each culture and society penalizes a certain subset of stupid behaviours more harshly than other stupid behaviours, and that intercultural tensions often have more to do with differences in what behaviours are deemed socially acceptable versus socially unacceptable. Even smart people act stupidly sometimes; but most people aren’t effectively that smart — whether because of inborn limitations or laziness — so human stupidity is constantly manifest in all societies; societies are just shaped by which specific forms of stupidity they opt to penalize and repress.

      (It seems to me that as we become more post-industrial, the number of behaviours deemed intolerable rises… which may well explain the fervor for eugenics in Western Europe a century or so ago. We, today, seem to have bought into the idea that no stupidity — neither intellectual nor moral — is irremediable: hence the apparent assumption that social awareness and consciousness-raising can completely eliminate things like sexual violence, racism, or sexism. I’d argue it’s on a bellcurve: we can probably eliminate a lot of it, but some forms of stupidity will always remain irremediable. There will always be assholes. So probably eugenics will return, in a kinder, friendlier form as our technology improves: people genetically manipulating their kids to be less stupid. Well, except of course the stupidest people, who will want their kids to be just like them.)

      Wow. Pretty far afield! Er… anyway.

      1. Which… now that I think of it: you say mistakes are not tolerated, but which mistakes? I felt like a lot of mistakes that would never be tolerated for long in the social circles I left behind in Canada, were absolutely tolerated in Seoul. When I left, Jihyun was losing friends all over the place for calling them them on their indiscriminate bigotry against Chinese and Sino-Koreans. I constantly saw Korean guys saying sexist crap and not being called out on it, even by women who knew it for what it was.

        I’m starting to feel like Confucius’ biggest gift to Asia was the development of the technology of the simulacrum: here’s a massive, complex, symbolically interwoven system we’ll call “civilization.” It is a simulation of how human beings function in the world, with some startling mental physics that disconnect from reality. We all know it disconnects. That’s fine, as long as we all agree to pretend that it’s how it works. Which is to say, it’s about demeanor, not about nature, right?

        Ah, not all mistakes are created equal, and different ones hold different importance in different societies. Yes, it’s a good point, that Koreans often make MANY mistakes that go forgiven. You don’t even have to talk about ways in which you can be a horrible person in Korea and not be called out for it… even what would be considered faux pas in those “superior-inferior” interactions you speak of are brushed off quite often, under the pretext that the wrongdoer “tried to do good”. And that is precisely the function stereotypes hold in Korean society: they give you a set of prescribed motions to follow, and as long as you’ve followed them all, it’s much harder to punish you for the results, whatever they are. And yes, that’s exactly all about the simulacrum.

        I’m not sure if that’s really from Confucius, though. I get the sense that it’s a modern attempt at compensation: a pressure valve for a society straddling the divide between a monarch-ruled agrarian society and post-industrialization, and therefore struggling with deep cracks and stress points the haphazardly cobbled-together structure is ill-equipped to deal with. “We won’t let you be yourselves, in fact we will make you go against your own natures, desires, convictions, and any semblance of free will you may develop… but you know what? If you can pay lip service to the illusion we are keeping up, we’ll pretend we never knew anything about your political liberalism / sexual orientation / model airplane hobby / sex trip to thailand / etc.” Thus keeping up the illusion that Koreans aren’t repressed.

        I see it as a sort of social contract (although maybe I am wrong and this is just my Anglo education speaking, the very idea of a contract): if you keep up the illusion, we’ll forgive your mistakes, whether they be deviations from the norm (a particularly otaku-ish hobby, liberal political convictions, or a suspicious trip to Bangkok), or actual evidence that you’re a horrible person. That’s probably why your wife’s friends saw fit to drop her (not that it doesn’t make them extremely small-minded). They thought they were keeping their end of the deal by doing whatever’s required of Korean women in their position (if my assumptions are correct, probably not much). They probably took it as a betrayal that she was criticizing them for doing something that society never taught them was wrong.

        1. Ah, not all mistakes are created equal, and different ones hold different importance in different societies. Yes, it’s a good point, that Koreans often make MANY mistakes that go forgiven. You don’t even have to talk about ways in which you can be a horrible person in Korea and not be called out for it… even what would be considered faux pas in those “superior-inferior” interactions you speak of are brushed off quite often, under the pretext that the wrongdoer “tried to do good”.

          That’s really interesting, because I have seen do things that violate the whole “superior-inferior” dynamic and get away with it pretty often. I wonder if the Dunning-Kruger Effect is part of it: people overestimate the competency of the transgressor to intend good, and the transgressor underestimates the ability of others to realize he or she does not?

          And that is precisely the function stereotypes hold in Korean society: they give you a set of prescribed motions to follow, and as long as you’ve followed them all, it’s much harder to punish you for the results, whatever they are. And yes, that’s exactly all about the simulacrum.

          Owch, reminds me of some comments by another regular commenter on why TOEIC scores are so important in the Korean job market. (Ass-covering in the HR Dept.)

          I’m not sure if that’s really from Confucius, though. I get the sense that it’s a modern attempt at compensation: a pressure valve for a society straddling the divide between a monarch-ruled agrarian society and post-industrialization, and therefore struggling with deep cracks and stress points the haphazardly cobbled-together structure is ill-equipped to deal with. “We won’t let you be yourselves, in fact we will make you go against your own natures, desires, convictions, and any semblance of free will you may develop… but you know what? If you can pay lip service to the illusion we are keeping up, we’ll pretend we never knew anything about your political liberalism / sexual orientation / model airplane hobby / sex trip to thailand / etc.” Thus keeping up the illusion that Koreans aren’t repressed.

          That’s interesting, and appeals to me because, after all, for years I’ve been preaching that Korea isn’t really all that Confucian a society; that the Confucius is a trapping. Because, you know: ask your friends how many of them have read any of The Four Books, or even just, you know, The Analects or something. The last time I asked around, the only people who had were Chinese Lit majors. And in a Confucian society, you’d think Confucian texts would sort of be required reading. Like, you know, Christians have to read the Bible? Because, yeah, anyone who’s not bothered to read the Bible? I’m pretty sure I’d rightfully say the person wasn’t a Christian. I mean, if you really, truly believe in the religion or philosophy, there’s no reason not to read the core texts.

          (And yes,I realize that part of the problem is that the study of Chinese classics is often forced onto students in original text form. But, again, in an actually Confucian society, someone would think those texts would be worth disseminating to a population that can’t really read hanja. Even my Chinese Lit students complained about that.)

          So anyway, yeah, it’s very likely “modern” like all “traditions” are. And also, it strikes me as very, very Victorian. I think the Victorians did precisely the same sort of thing: we’ll pretend we didn’t notice XYZ, until it’s impossible to pretend. Oscar Wilde being a very likely, and sadly unfortunate, example.

          But the reason I attribute it to Confucius is this deep, difficult-to-grapple-with difference I’ve observed, in my experience, about the Western obsession with authenticity and one’s true nature, with the essence of selfhood, as opposed to what it seems to me less of a hangup about that in places that fall within the Confucian sphere. It’s like in observing conflicts: I tend to be more likely to attribute blame to a single party, whereas Mrs. Jiwaku is more likely to see blame as distributed (unevenly, often, but still distributed) among all parties… And we’ve both commented to the effect that this tendency reflects a cultural tendency: she’s seen it somewhat pervasive among my Western friends, and I’ve seen it as pervasive among her Korean friends.

          Then again: that could well be simply a remnant of village life, which, unlike in urban life, requires people to look at one another after a significant conflict. But it seems to me very Judeo-Christian to want a public agreement of blame falling upon one party, and seems very Confucian to want to partition it out among all involved. In the former, the observation of another’s “sin” (and its punishment) reinforces the process of self-interrogation in terms of the management of one’s own “sinful nature” whereas in the latter, the acceptance of blame for any violation seems to reinforce one’s resolve to play that contextually-determined set of social roles (and to help others continue to do the same).

          But maybe both are universal. I dunno. It’s hard for me gauge because there’s also the sticky awkwardness of cultural differences along other axes that could make things look more different in this one than it really is…

          That’s probably why your wife’s friends saw fit to drop her (not that it doesn’t make them extremely small-minded). They thought they were keeping their end of the deal by doing whatever’s required of Korean women in their position (if my assumptions are correct, probably not much). They probably took it as a betrayal that she was criticizing them for doing something that society never taught them was wrong.

          I’m not exactly sure which case you’re talking about, but in all fairness, it was actually she who chose to cut ties with certain people who persisted in saying and doing bigoted things after she asked them not to, explained why it was wrong, explained how it felt when they talked shit about foreigners and Korean women who dated them (given the fact of our then-engagement), and was met with, “I don’t care.” It’s the bluntness of the “I don’t care,” that gets me: among friends, that sort of thing’s inexcusable.

          But then, it seems plenty of people in both cultures are comfortable excusing much more than I’m willing to excuse…

          1. […] after all, for years I’ve been preaching that Korea isn’t really all that Confucian a society; that the Confucius is a trapping. Because, you know: ask your friends how many of them have read any of The Four Books, or even just, you know, The Analects or something.

            I haven’t read The Analects myself, but my boyfriend has, and maybe he’s cherry-picking, but there are some passages that actually support disobedience when there’s an issue of right or wrong at stake. Like this one: “A man who has no enemies is not a 君子 (roughly translated as “great man”, “noble man”, with the emphasis on moral nobility).” Implying that doing the right thing often involves not conforming to the demands of society or authority.

            It’s not something Confucius is known for, and it’s certainly not one of the main tenets of his philosophy (or is it? Confucius’s ideal society is one that is maintained on a simulacrum that is based on moral justice, an external morality that is eventually internalized. In a less than perfect society, where some (or even the majority) do not conform to this morality, you could argue that being an upright person involves not being swayed by those corrupting influences… and many Confucian texts indeed betray an obsession with moral purity).

            Nevertheless, I would assert that it’s a complete misconception that Confucius advocates blind obedience. I see it this way: since natural instinct is to value offspring above feeble parents who grow increasingly closer to death, the philosophy of filial piety can just as easily be interpreted simply as a reminder not to blindly follow this instinct, to treat elders humanely and and to make use of their valuable experience.

            The emphasis on self-abnegating submission in Korean and Chinese culture actually came later, when the ruling class co-opted Confucian teachings to their own use, and it’s perhaps not surprising that most horror stories of “Confucian” cultures come from periods of economic and social decline. Confucius never explicitly stated that women should not inherit property or participate in ancestor veneration side by side with men. And in fact, during the early Joseon period, women did just that. So to say that Confucianism justifies tyranny perpetuated by elders, rulers, and men is just as ignorant as to say purdah and FGM are Muslim practices.

            I’m sure you already know all this though. I couldn’t resist stating the more-or-less obvious.

            But the reason I attribute it to Confucius is this deep, difficult-to-grapple-with difference I’ve observed, in my experience, about the Western obsession with authenticity and one’s true nature, with the essence of selfhood, as opposed to what it seems to me less of a hangup about that in places that fall within the Confucian sphere.

            Have you read The Geography of Thought? The crux of the book’s argument is that while the Euro-Anglo attitude is to trace things back to their origin, determine the innate characteristics of isolated entities, and separate cause and effect, Asian attitudes almost ignore the entities themselves in favor of looking at the relationship between them (using the Buddhist analogy of the world as a network of glass/steel marbles in which is reflected all the others, with the reflection of self contained in the reflection of the other marbles). To an Asian, no phenomenon can be attributed to a single cause, and context is practically everything.

            The influence is not just Confucian, it’s also Daoist, Shamanistic, and Buddhist. I also suspect that it is, as you speculate, an effect of industrialization happening later in most Asian countries.

            I mention it because what you say almost exactly reminds me of what is said in this book. To someone with a foot in both cultures, it’s an assertion that rings very true. You might find the book itself boring and overly simplistic, though.

          2. Hi Anne,

            I haven’t read The Analects myself, but my boyfriend has, and maybe he’s cherry-picking, but there are some passages that actually support disobedience when there’s an issue of right or wrong at stake. Like this one: “A man who has no enemies is not a 君子 (roughly translated as “great man”, “noble man”, with the emphasis on moral nobility).” Implying that doing the right thing often involves not conforming to the demands of society or authority.

            Yeah, that sounds familiar. Context is also important: Confucius was living at a time when the Zhou Dynasty was kind of fragmented and what he perceived as corruption was rampant all around him. He was actually treated like crap a fair bit, and ended up sort of being a failure in a lot of what he set out to do within his own lifetime–which seems to be why Ezra Pound was so obsessed with him, which is why I know enough to comment on the fragmentation of the Zhou Dynasty, because it’s the subject of the Canto I’m about to post about. (Thanks, Ez!)

            It’s not something Confucius is known for, and it’s certainly not one of the main tenets of his philosophy (or is it? Confucius’s ideal society is one that is maintained on a simulacrum that is based on moral justice, an external morality that is eventually internalized. In a less than perfect society, where some (or even the majority) do not conform to this morality, you could argue that being an upright person involves not being swayed by those corrupting influences… and many Confucian texts indeed betray an obsession with moral purity).

            Nevertheless, I would assert that it’s a complete misconception that Confucius advocates blind obedience. I see it this way: since natural instinct is to value offspring above feeble parents who grow increasingly closer to death, the philosophy of filial piety can just as easily be interpreted simply as a reminder not to blindly follow this instinct, to treat elders humanely and to make use of their valuable experience.

            … even when it’s not actually valuable.

            It reminds me of a time when some of my students were working on the university English magazine, around the time when the UN’s Gender Empowerment Index (I think it’s called) got published, and Korea was somewhere near the bottom of the OECD, which I remember shocking even me. And it was like watching German academics rush to talk about the plight of Native Americans, I swear: these students started cranking out drafts of articles on how horrible life was for women in the Muslim world (the big, huge, monolithic Muslim world, right). They indeed did argue that FGM and purdah were Muslim practices, actually.

            As I’ve often argued, the big ideologies are often used as cover for a more fundamental misogyny that perhaps doesn’t originate within them, but which often co-opts the misogyny (and classism, and other bigotries) in practice. Christianity and Confucianism, if you go to fundamental beliefs, are probably about equally sexist. (Which is to say, the core texts exclude women in a general way, and occasionally assert pretty unfair things about them.) But Christians and Confucians have used those texts to build and enshrine a lot of misogyny.

            I will make one side-note, though: women in the early Joseon did inherit property, but I seem to recall from the couple of general histories I read that actually that relative degree of enfranchisement was actually a holdover from the preceding Goryeo Dynasty–in other words, that the inheritance and property rights women had in the early Joseon were rights left over from before, which simply hadn’t been eradicated yet, and that Neo-Confucian doctrines attained dominance in the Joseon Dynasty in a way that at least correlates to the erosion of those rights. Which of course is to impose a sense of progression on what may have been a slow shift of change in values, but I’ve seen that suggested in more than one text. (Though, you know, I’m far from an expert, and welcome correction!)

            That said, I think it’s fair to say that the inherent misogyny in the cultures that adopted Christian, Muslim, and Confucian identities and religious practices often got woven into the practice of those religions or philosophies as living traditions: you cannot separate the denigration of women in Medieval Christendom from Christianity, for example… and I’d argue the same (or similar, with other forms of hatred and oppression) of Confucianism, Islam, and every other religious or philosophical system that attains the status of state religion (and plenty that don’t).

            But, you know, very tentatively, yes, it’s unfair to blame Confucius for the sins of those who call themselves Confucians; I imagine Confucius would probably box plenty of people around the ears if he visited modern South Korea, just as I imagine if this Jesus guy were who they say he was, and he showed up in the modern world, he’d be mightily pissed off–or hopelessly frustrated, baffled, and finally morose–at the horrors committed in his name. (I have a so-far unpublished short story that plays with that idea, in fact, inspired by some quote from an article Jung wrote on the subject for some American ladies’ magazine back in the day.)

            Have you read The Geography of Thought? The crux of the book’s argument is that while the Euro-Anglo attitude is to trace things back to their origin, determine the innate characteristics of isolated entities, and separate cause and effect, Asian attitudes almost ignore the entities themselves in favor of looking at the relationship between them (using the Buddhist analogy of the world as a network of glass/steel marbles in which is reflected all the others, with the reflection of self contained in the reflection of the other marbles). To an Asian, no phenomenon can be attributed to a single cause, and context is practically everything.

            The influence is not just Confucian, it’s also Daoist, Shamanistic, and Buddhist. I also suspect that it is, as you speculate, an effect of industrialization happening later in most Asian countries.

            I mention it because what you say almost exactly reminds me of what is said in this book. To someone with a foot in both cultures, it’s an assertion that rings very true. You might find the book itself boring and overly simplistic, though.

            I haven’t read the book, but it does sound about right. This is probably the most fundamentally frustrating thing for a Westerner in East Asia, too, because, obviously, context might be everything in some settings, but in systems that have been imported from the West, no, it’s not. Traffic laws are not contextual or situational; enrollment systems in universities should be well-oiled machines… and so on. When you operate an algorithmic machine on contextual cues and fixes and workarounds, you end up… well, it’s like software covered in piles of cruft, and eventually the cruft just kills functionality. (Why am I think of ecommerce in Korea now?)

            The thing is: the contextual way isn’t bad, it’s just, it’s not the way Western systems work. But one could construct systems that work in this contextual, less-strictly-algorithmic way, if one wanted. You know, where class enrollments are flexible and fluid or whatever, where traffic systems privilege drivers in terms of age or the urgency of their journey or whatever; you’d just have to actually put effort into building it. But instead, the acontextual, hard-and-fast rules systems get imported and set up, and then everyone figures out how to make it work when maybe half the players aren’t following the rules.

            So you end up with, you know, red lights being regarded as suggestions flexible based on one’s mood or personal sense of urgency, and you get whole universities whose enrollment systems don’t account for the concept of prerequisites (and the various elaborate workarounds that this necessitates). It’s weird, to suggest the obvious fix that would save hundreds and hundreds of hours of human labour at a university a year, and probably would require less than five hours of work in updating the proprietary software code–since they’re updating the registration software in cosmetic ways all the time–and you get looked at as if you’re suggesting, “Why can’t we just all vote on everything?” As if you’re looked at as if you’re a numbskull if you think a simple systemic fix would solve what seems to you like a simple systemic problem, traceable to a single systemic cause.

            It’s back to that question of the status of algorithmic thinking in North American culture vs. in Korean culture. But since I’m naturally very inclined to think algorithmically, and since I spent much of my time in Korea surrounded by people in the fields of lit, culture, language, and linguistics, I’m not sure how useful my experience is in looking at that issue, except to say the way most institutions in Korea seem to run, algorithms don’t seem to come as naturally to people who think in that primarily contextual, multi-causal way as for those who trace things back to a single explanation or source.

            But that may also be unfair: I’m not sure that university systems were any less nonfunctional in American schools in the 1950s or 1960s, for example. (One among many I could mention…)

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