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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| [CULTURAL KALEIDOSCOPE]Rebooting an Old 386 |
| 2005-01-20 |
| Korean university professors have to be careful these days when referring to such concepts as liberalism and liberal democracy. Unless you intend to be critical, you are best advised not to mention them at all. The moment you become an apologist for these taboo subjects, you lose popularity among students and younger faculty members and are labeled a hopeless conservative. What a paradox! You become a conservative by advocating liberalism. Yet that is exactly what happens in Korea. This all probably stems from the brainwashing impressionable students receive from radical teachers at high school, where it is instilled in them that "liberal" is a bad word. The problem is that once these students enter a university they are not sufficiently deprogrammed to fully benefit from what is supposed to be a broadening of their intellect and imagination through a "liberal" education. Young people in Korea also seem to believe that capitalism and the market economy are something evil, that they are perhaps part of an American conspiracy to dominate the world. "The principle of capitalism was the cause of all of the corruption that we see in it," indignantly announced a student of mine in a class presentation recently, confusing capitalism with commercialism or materialism. For this uniquely Korean phenomenon, we should blame radical politicians in the ruling party who are preoccupied with socialist ideals. Socialism and Marxism did provide an ideological foundation for those who fought the right-wing military dictatorship of the seventies and eighties. But radical left ideologies have always proven to be failures when actually applied to the real world. Only our politicians, apparently oblivious to the lessons of history, seem to believe that the faded dreams of these obsolete ideologies can come true. Metaphorically speaking, for the past two years these politicians have been trying to reboot a dusty old 386 DX-II computer while other countries are flying ahead with high-tech Pentium IV¡¯s. When you boot up an old 386, the immediate problem is that everything on it is outdated and incompatible with current machines; nor is its system able to cope with the installation and running of new programs. Not only that, such an obsolete system does not have the latest in communications technology, so even communicating with those running the latest systems is going to be a frustrating and cumbersome task. You¡¯ll be lucky if it doesn¡¯t crash every time you use it. In short, if you insist on adopting an obsolete system, backwardness and isolation from the wider community are inevitable. Seeing politicians still clinging to failed political ideologies is even more astounding given that they are living in such a modern country as Korea. In keeping with the above metaphor, it¡¯s like finding a 386 user in Korea, a country at the cutting edge of high-tech computer chip production, who has not heard the news that there is an upgrade available. You would seriously question their cultural awareness if not intelligence, after you had stopped laughing. One also wonders why hostility towards capitalism and a market economy has become so fashionable in Korea, a country that has benefited so much from them. Perhaps it¡¯s because Koreans tend to be fashion victims. If something is in vogue, we clamor after it like sheep, whether it¡¯s a political protest or a famous brand name. Thankfully, not all do: my favorite poem, Kim Seung-hee¡¯s "Literary History of Korea without Me," beautifully renders the agonies of a poet who refused to be a faddist. In the age of pure poetry, I did not write pure poems. In the era of protest poetry, I did (could) not write protest poems Against the a la mode of poetry in the Korean 1980s, In the times of deconstruction poetry I did not write deconstruction poems (perhaps I could not) In the period of commercial love poetry I did not write love poems (perhaps I could not) In the age of ¡¯minjung (people)¡¯ poetry I did not write ¡¯minjung¡¯ poems (perhaps I could not). Dear politicians: in 2005, leave behind the sweet memories of your old 386¡¯s; nostalgia is no reason to reboot. Resurrecting a system that is no longer valid in the 21st century will surely ruin what we have achieved over the past 60 years. Korea has enough economic and diplomatic bugs to cope with as it is; don¡¯t boot us back into the last century. Dr. Kim is a professor of English and dean of the Language School at Seoul National University. - Ed. |
| Posted by:tipper |