No Korean Summer of Love

By J. Scott Burgeson

Sometimes I feel so sorry for South Korea. For the past 45 years, it's toiled and sweated like a slave on all the hard work of national economic development, but hardly had a chance to experience any of the real fun that other developed countries in the West enjoyed in the past. What is the point of development when it is so boring and bland, so utterly one-dimensional?

Last fall at Hongik University, I taught two writing classes to a great group of whip-smart students, and early in the semester gave a lecture on the 1960s in the West, since I had assigned Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel ``On the Road,’’ a sort of Bible for free-spirited American youth in the ‘60s. When I asked at the start of my lecture if any of them knew anything about the ‘60s in the West, I saw only blank faces and heard only the sound of silence. I was astonished.

What is wrong with South Korea's education system, when its teachers cannot do their job properly? The 1960s in the West shook the entire world, and now it was as if they had never happened. Incredible!

During the 1960s in the U.S. and Western Europe and even Japan, something truly special happened in the development of modern civilization: Millions of ordinary people decided that there was more to life than just working for a company that didn't really care for you, and being a mindless consumer of endless and often useless products made by those very same companies. There was, in other words, a broad-scale redefinition of what being human really meant.

How did this happen? In short, the forces of sexual liberation and political revolution came together and created an explosive synergy, a kind of cultural big bang. The social and political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, for instance, argued in ``Eros and Civilization’’ (1955) that liberated sexual energy could be channeled and used as a tool to help transform repressive capitalist societies. Such ideas resonated widely among the younger generations who came of age in the ‘60s in the West, and who sought to lead a counter-cultural revolt against the established order. Rock `n’ roll, of course, was the soundtrack for this exciting new movement, and it was very sexy indeed.

It helped that an oral contraceptive pill for women had been introduced at the start of the 1960s, radically freeing sex from biological reproduction. Christian sexual morality and the nuclear family underwent widespread questioning, as the notion of ``free love’’ transformed traditional social relationships and helped liberate women from oppressive patriarchy. On a basic level, ``free love’’ meant ``free sex’’ for many, but it was much more than that. Sex was not just a private act between individuals, but also part of a greater social and political consciousness. The personal was now political. ``Make love, not war’’ was the popular mantra of those seeking an end to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Making love suddenly became a revolutionary act.

In 1967, the ``free love’’ ethos reached critical mass during the ``Summer of Love’’ in San Francisco, when tens of thousands of hippies and young people from around the world flocked to the city's famed Haight-Ashbury district. Scott McKenzie's hit ``San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),’’ released in May of the same year, expressed the loving mood perfectly:

All across the nation such a strange vibration

People in motion

There's a whole generation with a new explanation

People in motion people in motion

Soon this ``strange vibration’’ was shaking the very foundations of mainstream Western culture, and turning it on its head. In the summer of 1969, half a million ``flower children’’ gathered at the four-day Woodstock Music and Art Festival in Bethel, New York, celebrating the values of peace and love while legends like The Who and Jimi Hendrix rocked the world.

Meanwhile, in France, radical students had brought the entire country to its knees in May 1968, as 10 million workers nationwide went on strike in support of the students' protest against a soulless technocratic society. Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 film ``The Dreamers,’’ starring the brainy bombshell Eva Green, is all about the idealistic energy and spirit of May ‘68, and its title says it all. Never before had revolution been so much fun, and so damn sexy.

Alas, it is doubtful that South Korea will ever have its own Summer of Love, or even its own equivalent of the counter-cultural ‘60s as seen in the West. The April Revolution of 1960 was quickly silenced by nearly two decades of dictatorship under Park Chung-hee, while the democratization movement of the 1980s offered no serious challenge or lasting threat to this country's underlying capitalist system, let alone sexual liberation. (Free market? Yes! Free love? What?!) No wonder my students hadn't been taught about the ‘60s in the West during their middle or high school years _ the anti-establishment values of that decade were in fundamental contradiction with South Korea's all-important and all-consuming ideology of hyper-development.

Of course, thanks to the Internet and so-called ``globalization’’ (read: Americanization), there has been sexual liberalization of a sort here in South Korea for the past few years, but there has been nothing terribly revolutionary about it. Just as slick disco overtook radical rock in the 1970s, the market found a way to co-opt sex in the 1970s and ‘80s and use it for its own insatiable purposes.

Today in South Korea as in the West, sex largely follows the laws of the marketplace, driven primarily by ruthless competition and compulsive consumption. It has been drained of any counter-cultural energy or revolutionary potential, transformed into endless marketing strategies and so many shallow, disposable lifestyle choices for sale.

Certainly the Hongik University area is a perfect symbol of this entire process: Where once it was a true alternative to the mainstream back in the 1990s, today it has been thoroughly colonized by the market and well-integrated into South Korea's developmental paradigm.

In general, it offers no grander idea beyond efficient and quick _ "Bballi, bballi, Oppa!" _ sexual consumption for the time-pressed working masses, a sort of all-night flesh emporium where drunken one-night stands and escapist anonymous sex are available to just about anyone who's willing to pay the seductively cheap price.

Forty years after the original Summer of Love, another summer is upon us here in South Korea. No doubt, there will be much ``free sex’’ here this summer, but will there be any free love? Who dares to dream of something higher than themselves? Who dares to dream that revolutionary love is the greatest gift of all?

J. Scott Burgeson is the author of ``Korea Consumer Report’’ (Galleon, 2007) and ``Korea Bug’’ (Eunhaeng Namu, 2005).