'Silhak' tradition as a solution to the current geopolitical crisis

By Emanuel Pastreich

South Koreans are having tremendous trouble grasping how familiar political and academic institutions in the United States have ceased to function as they once did.

Koreans are confused to see Harvard professors promote nonsensical arguments about COVID-19 or to see politicians in Washington D.C. at the highest levels engage in the basest and the most venal games.

Most Korean opinion leaders remember fondly the intellectual communities that they joined when they studied at America's best universities back in the 1980s and 1990s. They still have fond conversations with their former professors, who now retired.

This intellectual class in Korea, however, must increasingly bend over backwards to avoid seeing the cultural collapse in America that is gaining speed.

They read material taken from the New York Times and Washington Post, material then regurgitated in the Korean press and they must control their immediate negative response as they glace on the ridiculous statements by the Americans they once had such respect for.

A culture of nostalgia and denial has swept over Seoul. A serious discussion about what is wrong with American, and Korean, policy has become almost impossible.

It is not the first time that Korea has suffered a massive cultural and political crisis as the basic assumptions about governance and society were shaken to the core by the moral collapse of a trusted ally.

A similar cultural blindness swept over Korea in the 1600s as the respected Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) started to crack. That blindness produced a sclerotic, isolationist Korea incapable of putting forth a vision for its own future development.

At the time, Korea had a close relationship with the Ming Dynasty, which had sent troops to defend Korea against the Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century ― much as the United States defended the Republic of Korea against North Korea and the People's Republic of China. The two countries were blood allies.

Ming interpretations of law and philosophy, concepts of international relations, intellectual and cultural norms had unquestionable authority in Korea.

For this reason, Korean intellectuals could not grasp, could not see, how it was that the Ming Dynasty could so rapidly collapse into political infighting, decadence and financial insolvency in the first half of the 17th century.

When the Ming Dynasty was overthrown by the Manchus in 1644, not because of Manchu military power but because of the rise of bandit armies at home that tore China apart, Koreans responded in a curious manner. Rather than reassess their own cultural and geopolitical standing and thereby create their own strategy, they plunged into nostalgia about the great Ming Dynasty that had ceased to exist.

Although the conquering Manchus forced Korea to recognize their new Qing Dynasty, Koreans continued to use the reign title of the last Emperor Chongzhen 崇? for centuries after his death ― some academies in Korea continue to use the Chongzhen reign year today.

Rather than reform, Koreans took pride in being the only nation that held up that noble tradition, embracing the idea of "sochunghwa" 小中華: that Korea's legitimacy derived from its adherence to the lost Chinese tradition of the Ming Dynasty.

Although the emotions were understandable, the results were disastrous. Korea closed itself off from foreign influences and fell behind in science and technology.

We see the traces of exactly such a mindset in Korea today with regards to the United States.

As institutions like the State Department have been gutted of expertise and filled with sycophants, as Harvard University has become increasingly a PR agency for multinational banks and pharmaceutical companies (and the quality of its research has slipped), as the political freedom in the United States has continued to weaken and the economy has become dominated by a the super-rich, Koreans grow only the more nostalgic about an America that no longer exists.

Korean politics during the late Ming Dynasty, and the early Qing Dynasty, were the same. Korean political and academic figures cited the authority of the Ming Dynasty, even after it had ceased to exist, to justify narrow and parochial agendas at home.

The model of silhak (practical learning)

A handful of Korean intellectuals in the 18th century put forth a new vision for Korean that is known as Silhak (practical learning). Silhak broke with the stultifying nostalgia that had seized the nation and crippled both domestic reform and the acceptance of innovations from abroad.

Brave scholars like Park Je-ga, Park Ji-won and Jeong Yak-yong demanded that Koreans assert their own cultural and intellectual agency and that they assess the value of contemporary foreign cultures on their own.

These scholars argued that if there were technologies, policies or institutions in the Qing Dynasty that were suitable for Korea, they should be adopted even if the Qing was ruled by the Manchus and it no longer followed the ways of the Ming Dynasty. They held that nostalgia should not blind Koreans to technological or geopolitical reality.

If there were aspects of Qing society that were unhealthy, or inappropriate, they suggested, those parts should be avoided. These scholars suggested the same attitude towards Japan, and towards Western nations.

That spirit is precisely what we need most in Seoul today. There are many aspects of contemporary American culture, technology, policy and public institutions that continue to be of tremendous value to Korea and there are American innovations that cannot be ignored. It would be stupid and foolish to turn a blind eye to the best of America out of anti-Americanism.

At the same time, however, it is a self-evident fact that the United States has lost much of its shine and that there has been a notable decline in the quality of governance and the quality of the culture.

Americans like myself readily admit this point.

Those negative aspects of American society must be rejected by Koreans on the basis of an objective assessment of reality by Koreans themselves.

The same holds true for Japan, Germany or China today. All of these countries, and others, offer models for Korea, but there are parts of each nation's tradition that are clearly inappropriate for Korea.

Koreans must decide on their own, and not based on what some foreign expert tells them, what parts of these countries are most appropriate.

In addition to the need for Korea to come up with its own objective evaluation of how the United States works, it is also critical for Koreans to put forth a clear and convincing Korean position on issues ― and stop waiting for a signal from Washington D.C.

Sadly, opposition to the policies of the Moon government in Korea are made by conservative groups who idolize the United States, and are in many cases incapable of a critical assessment of what is wrong in Washington D.C. Progressive forces also both collaborate with powerful forces in the United States while making sweeping critiques of the United States that fail to take into account what the United States can offer to Korea.

The time has come for Koreans to rediscover the true significance of silhak: the objective evaluation of the appropriateness of foreign models by Koreans themselves in accord with scientific principles.