Korea’s Insoluble Dilemma

By Roger Dix

On June 1, Mr. Jon Huer wrote in a column concerning education for this paper that Korea is, once again, looking for ``A Place in the Sun,'' wondering what it can do to be recognized by the international community as a world-class nation.

He went on to say that Korea wants urgently to be part of globalization but just as urgently refuses to change in order to achieve that endeavour.

In an acknowledgement to Huer's writing, I must agree. As a long time resident of Korea, whenever I observe Korean society, I often think of the late American cartoonist, Walt Kelly, and his popular cartoon character, Pogo Possum, and his declaration: ``We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us.''

It certainly appears to this observer that in more situations than not, the Korean people are, indeed, the enemies within themselves. By that I mean, for example, the inflexible structure and customs of the Korean society, I believe, have played a strong role in creating communication barriers that prevent Korean people from making independently-minded social interactions both in their own culture and in cross-cultural situations, interactions that if communicated from a less rigid and group mindset social structure could make life much less complicated and much less difficult for all concerned.

While there are certainly some respectable values that can be attributed to Korea's Confucian social thinking, I feel that the social restraints (if not national restraints) of Confucian collective thinking is an ideology left over from the ``Land of the Morning Calm'' Korean society of the past that needs to be left in the past.

For the modern society of Korea to be truly considered by the outside world a ``Dynamic'' Korea and/or a ``Korea Sparkling,'' the country cannot address the international community or its own community, for that matter, with the social thinking and practices of the yesterdays of its past. ``Dynamism'' and Confucianism, it seems to me, are at the opposite ends of the nation's global developmental poles. It's time for new thinking!

The sociologist and futurist, Alvin Toffler, in his 1970 book, ``Future Shock,'' wrote that ``Too much change in too short a period of time will overwhelm people.''

The accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected, suffering from ``shattering stress and disorientation.'' And this line of thinking, I have come to believe, is one of the many challenges facing Korean society today that needs to be urgently addressed.

South Korea is a society that has gone from millenniums as an agrarian society to becoming an industrial high-tech society almost overnight, without the necessary socio-psychological adjustments to those changes along the way. Not many societies in the world have gone through such a rapid evolution as South Korea, a country that in less than 40 years has changed from a Third World ``backwater'' poor farming country to a world-class leader in industry and technology and the world's 13th largest economy with a reasonably high standard of living.

But it is also a country that has left many, if not most, of its citizens in a state of psychosocial emptiness, suffering from shattering stress and disorientation. Much of the society of today has been simply left behind, overwhelmed by all the changes so rapidly taking place in their new world. As I noted above, Confucianism and ``Dynamism'' cannot exist together.

The present Korean society needs to decide once and for all, and sooner rather than later, whether it wants to step forward into the world of the international community, or stay behind, remaining in its inwardly collective, nationalistic Korean way of thinking.

Huer is right. A nation ``can't have its cake and eat it too.'' Korea's days of copying developed nation's advancements, accessing their information and knowledge, using the accomplishments of others for its own development but emotionally remaining ``Only Korean,'' is over. Koreans need to grow up!

The writer lives in Ulsan and can be reached at hansfordmacgruder@yahoo.com.