[KS] Re: KSR 2000-03:_Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age ofGlobalization_,by C. Fred Alford

[ophelia.ucs.indiana.edu]

Dear Michael:

Thank you for your review of Fred Alford's book posted below.  I'll find out
how to clean up replies soon on the new mail program.  In any event, I'm
glad the book is being aired and discussed.  I am curious that I'm "cited"
in the review.  Since when was a casual remark on a mail list considered
grist for citation as a serious opinion.  As you pointed out it was clear I
had not read the book, but was cynical viewing the title.  That was all that
I said, so it seems a very weak straw dog to use in a more serious review.
I suppose I'll have to read the book and comment at some point.  Until then,
hold your fire and give me a chance.

Mike Robinson

----- Original Message -----
From: Stephen Epstein <Stephen.Epstein at vuw.ac.nz>
To: <korean-studies at mailbase.ac.uk>
Sent: Monday, April 03, 2000 6:06 PM
Subject: KSR 2000-03:_Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age
ofGlobalization_,by C. Fred Alford


> _Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age of Globalization_, by C. Fred
Alford.
> Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. (ISBN 0-8014-3666-4,
> cloth)
>
> Reviewed by Michael Goodwin
> mgoodwin at greenvillenc.com
>
> I
>
> "`Essentialism' and its cousin `ontologizing'", writes C. Fred Alford
> (Professor of Government & Politics at the University of Maryland) in his
> ninth book entitled, _Think No Evil: Korean Values in The Age of
> Globalization_ (1999. Ithaca: Cornell University), "are terms tossed
around
> loosely these days." "It is possible," he then immediately admits, "that I
> am mistaken about the unanimity with which Koreans view the non-existence
> of evil." But, Alford adds, "[i]f that were so, it would be an empirical
> failure on my part: a failure to interview enough different Koreans, a
> failure to listen attentively, or whatever. It is, in any case, not a
> question of essentializing or ontologizing anything.  It is simply a
> question of whether I have looked and listened with enough subtlety to be
> faithful to a complex and fascinating reality. About this only the
> knowledgeable reader can decide" (p.8)
>
> Thus marks the circumspect beginnings of a work which takes to the
> study of "evil, the Korean self, and globalization," (p.5) neither an
> ahistorical nor simply "syncretic" method (and that's a word which I
> suspect reifies Alford's approach somewhat), but one its author
> characterizes- hesitantly-as, "an anthropological approach to philosophy."
> (XI).
> I'll get to aspects of Alford's study momentarily. For now, however, let
me
> ask the following question: is this anthro-philosphical approach
> appropriate to a study whose object seems to traverse at least these two
> disciplines -if not a good deal more; e.g., political-economy, sociology,
> cultural studies, etc.? The quick but I think still correct answer is,
> "Yes!" And this for at least two reasons -both relating more to the
analyst
> than the matter at hand.
>
> "A recent review [by Robert Kagan entitled, `What Korea Teaches']
> concluded", Alford writes, "that `there is no Korean model. There is only
> Korean history'". But even that, he suggests, "is not quite right." Why?
> Because "[t]here are only Korean histories ?What looks like a single
> narrative, the history of Korea, is in actuality a series of contestations
> and compromises among contending factions, contending stories? "My
> project", he asserts, "is not an interpretation of Korean history. It is
an
> interpretation of my experience of aspects of Korean history at a certain
> point: immediately and after the economic collapse." (p.7)
>
> So there, in the effort made to interpret not the thing itself
> (arguably one of Kant's goals) but the meaning of his experience of the
> history of the present (the Foucauldian appropriation is mine)-again
> defined not as any unchanging essence, but as a series of contingent
> accounts, interviews, individuals' stories even-is the philosophical
> dimension. And here is the anthropological: "my work," Alford states, "is
> the experience of one who is an outsider, not just to Korea but to Korean
> studies. It is the experience
> of an outsider who has come upon Korea at a singular moment, when the
> triumph of the Korean economy was giving way to an economic crisis that
> involves far more than economics." 1
>
> And finally, the following frankness can perhaps count as a defining
> introductory statement for the work as a whole: "I do not imagine," Alford
> writes, "that I have explained the Korean view of evil. Rather, I have
> mapped its absence. This map is fundamentally a Western overlay, showing
> where East does not match West. It is all I could do, all any Westerner
can
> do, I believe. *The trick is to know it*." (P.7, my emphasis) 2
>
> II
>
> What then, does the map of the absence of the Korean view of evil look
> like? How does Alford chart something that is nothing? Drawing both on his
> own capacities, as well as, those of a translator/interpreter Alford
> talked-and sometimes ate and drank as well-with two-hundred and fifty
> Koreans. Combined they represented an economic, political, religious, and
> demographic cross-section of Korea. He also gathered written accounts
> (i.e., formal essays) from students at Hankuk University of Foreign
> Studies. 3
>
> The interviews and the essays covered the same topics; questions
> regarding evil, the self, and globalization. His working hypothesis-that
> "[e]vil?ould be divided into different areas of life governed by different
> religious principles" (p.89)-was not borne out. Instead what emerged was
> the idea-and here we begin to sense the phenomenological connections
> between the Korean view of evil as it meets the Western world (i.e., a
> curious, philosophically- and anthropologically-minded professor) that
evil
> is unrelatedness. (p.11)
>
> How's that? Writes Alford: "`Tell me the relationship and I'll tell you
> what evil is' is what one Korean said to me. In many ways it is the
> signature response, the motto of the Korean world view" of evil. (p.11)
> This accords with the sense I had while in Korea; i.e., that a certain,
> temporary dissonance-a kind of psycho-social uncertainty or
> hesitancy-quickly becomes palpable when Koreans are faced with ambiguity
at
> the level of the relationship to the other, the idea, whatever. (Such
> responses may indeed be exaggerated in cases where a foreigner-or just
> "foreignness" even (and there's the lilt of the global creeping in)-is the
> bald causal force behind such moments.)
>
> To put this metaphorically, the content of the Korean view of evil
> is, as Alford sees it, "the fear of absolute otherness and difference".
But, he
> tells us (and this is "essential"), "[i]t is not a fear of the other. That
> is the Western academic version. The Korean version is the fear of
becoming
> other *to oneself*." (my emphasis) Globalization, from this point of view,
> can be seen as a sub-topic of evil because, "it threatens to create a
world
> in which Koreans no longer recognize themselves, in which Koreans are
other
> *to themselves*." (my emphasis, p.12)
>
> I find this idea-of Koreans becoming other to themselves through
> aspects of globalization-both intuitively appealing and logical (the
latter
> perhaps because the idea accords so directly with my own experience and
> that of other non-Koreans with whom I have reflected on Korea). If the way
> in which interpersonal relationships are organized is the sine qua non
> (anything to avoid another metaphor) of the Korean belief system or, in
> this case,
> disbelief, "then the real evil," Alford adds, "must be the evil that
cannot
> be spoken: unrelatedness, the dread of absolute alienation and
> unconnectedness, pure loneliness, absolute difference." (p.11)
>
> And that feels right too! Yet despite his initial wariness toward
> "essentialism" and "its cousin ontologizing" is Alford committing
something
> just like that here with talk of "real evil"? Having thought about this
> I've concluded that he's still on safe ground. To see this we've got to
dig
> a bit deeper in the philosophical direction of Alford's overall approach.
>
> Most allegations of essentialism in this case-according to which,
> in Korea today, "unrelatedness, the dread of absolute alienation and
> unconnectedness, pure loneliness, absolute difference" are quietly resting
> at the heart of an unspoken evil-like concept-would likely come up against
> the limits of the logical meanings underlying the words that give sense to
> the idea; i.e., unrelatedness, unconnectedness, alienation, and
loneliness,
> etc.
>
> This last term, for instance, "loneliness", need not be thought of in
> (further) terms of the sadness of being alone. It can also refer to the
> being of the one who is alone. Seen from this point of view (for shorthand
> we can call it Heideggerian) Alford's depiction of evil as "loneliness"
has
> significant intelligible content; i.e., stripped of the relational aspect
> of his or her being in the world the individual experiencing evil is
simply
> alone, or a lone, or better still, loneness.
>
> And perhaps this is an illuminating notion of what evil in the Korean
> worldview might be like. But it should not be confused with any
> essentialism underlying the experience of sadness per se. Not satisfied?
> Regarding the odd (some might even say ontological sounding) passage, evil
> is "the being of the one who is alone", we would do well to keep this
quite
> basic fact in mind: "?eing for Heidegger was neither a thing, nor a
> concept, nor a totalizing essence, but rather the very emblem of a
> differential relation? 4
>
> Alford's account of a discussion with two students can shed
> concrete light on such insights. Confronted with the Kholbergian moral
> dilemma about a man (his name, some will remember, is Heinz) pressed to
> steal medicine for an ailing wife the students are asked to respond as to
> the rightness or
> wrongness of the act. At first Alford can't understand their answers. "It
> all depends who Heinz was stealing the medicine for," states one student.
> "If it was for his friend, that would be one thing, for his mother
> another." According to Alford, while "[s]he might seem to be talking about
> the partners in the relationship ?she is actually talking about the
> relationship as it is defined by the partners in it, a subtle but
important
> distinction." (p.94)
>
> The students' responses reveal that they are, indeed, engaged in a form
> moral deliberation recognizable through the dominant prism of modern
> Western ethics-whether filtered through Rawls or Kohlberg, it is still
> basically Kantianism. Yet what the students are doing is different as well
> and is not to be conflated with relativism either (often conceived as the
> only alternative outside universalism). "The university women sounded like
> they were discussing the relativism of evil the way a Westerner would, but
> they were not. Their position," Alford writes (and as we have seen), "was
> that one can only know right and wrong from within the perspective of a
> relationship."
>
> And there's the fascinating part. Simply put, "the Western version
> of the problem," concludes Alford, "is the lack of an external,
third-party
> standpoint from which to judge." (p.94) That's interesting because it puts
> us on new territory; with the Korean students we are neither in the land
of
> Kant's imperatives ("will only that which you would will universally") nor
> that of outright (culturally determined) relativism. A common and
> pernicious dualism has been sidestepped -and ethically. The essence
> (ooops!) of this new perspective is this: the relationship is itself the
> standpoint of judgment.
>
> III
>
> But if evil has to do with all that can arise for our understanding of
> Korean experience when "the relational aspect" (for Koreans) becomes
> unclear, then how does this in turn relate to globalization? Ultimately,
> this a question that can only be answered by those with solid
understanding
> of the complex political, economic, and cultural changes now reshaping the
> Korean peninsula. _Think No Evil_ is not to be hurried through: there are
> important connections to be made between (at least) ten steps in a book
its
> author presents-in the spirit of experimentation-as being "first of all an
> argument." (p.26)
>
> I have discussed two of these steps conjointly; i.e., the
> possibility of seeing Korean evil as isolation, loneliness, or, in the
end,
> as the becoming other to oneself (out of a temporary inability to
recognize
> the
> markers that would help place the moment relative to one's personal
> resources). Yet there are several others too including the question, as
> Alford says, of "why Koreans find globalization so threatening", and the
> question of the possibility (for all of us) of embracing authentically new
> forms of life (i.e., the question of the possible value of cross-cultural
> understanding).
>
> _Think No Evil_ is an ambitious, inventive, highly nuanced, yet
> circumspect exploration of both the hazards and the opportunities
currently
> facing Korean culture. It will be of interest to those who seek to think
> critically about globalization in general, as well as, to those with an
> interest in exploring how such changes are altering-just as they further
> embed-the Korean concepts of the self.
>
> Notes
>
> 1 Alford, I think, is correct here: the crisis of 1997 surely
> involved, as he said, "far more than economics". But the meaning of such a
> remark is underdetermined. Lest anyone conclude from it that Alford
> subscribes to the (almost malicious) myth-recently the doyen of much, if
> not all, of the
> Western popular media-that Korea's economic difficulties are/were wholly
> self-generated a quick review of Alford's Bibliography repays close
> reading. For here, against the widespread idea that market turf wars,
> chaebol expansionism, moral corruption, and a basic lack of respect among
> Koreans for regulation caused the crisis, we find reference to the work of
> Immanuel Wallerstein -a critic who prefers to assess the vicissitudes of
> postmodern capitalism less from the standpoint of Western moralism and
more
> from a world-economic perspective and one whose views Alford by no means
> dismisses: "One can agree", he states, "that globalization is what
> colonialism and imperialism look like in the late twentieth century and
the
> question still remains -what do they really look like?" (p.147)
>
> Further evidence to suggest that Alford might not easily side with the
> "Korean-culture-caused-the-Korean-crisis" myth is this statement:
> "[C]ulture is made from below by those who participate in it, and it is
> remade every day in every interaction. Consequently, culture is not an
> explanation of anything, as in `Confucian culture explains the persistence
> of a rigid hierarchy in the chaebol.' Culture is not the explicans but the
> explicandum." (p.198)
>
> 2 Is it odd that something so obvious needs to be said so clearly? Surely
> not. My own Korean experience regularly lead me to Westerners-and this is
> not a new idea-who seemed to have succumbed to a desire to be, for lack of
> better words, "more Korean than Koreans". In the end though, and however
> awkwardly such wishes found expression, were they not (in an age of
alleged
> rampant individualism in Western societies) a fascinating -if somewhat
> tortuous- sign of the needs of some to "reach out" (as they say on _NYPD
> Blue_) to others?
>
> Peter Winch, as Alford shows, has a better -more Wittgensteinian-
> take on this. "From other cultures, we may learn different possibilities
of
> making sense of human life, different ideas about the possible importance
> that the carrying out of certain activities may take on for a man, trying
to
> complete the sense of his life as a whole." (p.17)
>
> So it may be that emulation (which is what some Westerners are
> doing)-of anything-is but another way to learn: here, by rote. This is
always a
> justified method of moving from no knowledge to having some (parents
> enlighten infants this way every day). Perhaps then, in some cases (though
> I believe not all), underlying my own uneasiness with non-Koreans in Korea
> whose enthusiasm for things Eastern seemed to border on the whacky, was a
> subtle if defensive awareness (on my part) of being in the presence of
real
> growth, actual development, perhaps even enlightenment; i.e., of being in
> the presence of individuals who are experimenting, as Alford might put it,
> with "new ways of organizing the experience of our lives." (p.17)
>
> Foucault once said, "?y role (and that is much too emphatic a word
> for it) is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that
> people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes that have been built up
at a
> certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be
> criticized and destroyed." Now there, I think, are words which, because
> they cut both ways (i.e., speak about freedom equally to
> collectivist-minded Easterners and rugged individualists) truly have the
> power to heal woes. (And I'm convinced that's precisely what Foucault
> sought for us.)
>
>
> 3 Despite my reservations about the value of the essays-all 150
> written by students who likely share overwhelmingly similar class and
economic
> backgrounds and, therefore, political attitudes-I am nonetheless convinced
> as to the representativeness of Korean society of Alford's interview-based
> sample proper. (I say "proper" because he actually interviewed some of the
> Hankuk essayists too).
>
> Regarding Alford's work Michael Robinson recently wrote: "I'm heartened
> that interviews with 250 Koreans can cull Korean values. I thought there
> might be more depth to Korea than that, but now I can just read one book
> and I'll finally have a handle on it." (Source:
> http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/korean-studies/1999-10/0069.html)
> Ironically, one need not even read the "one book"-but only the opening
> chapter and the Research Appendix-to quickly sense that Robinson's
cynicism
> is entirely unjustified. (It was also ungrounded-and therefore somewhat
> unsporting too-since he had not read Alford's book at the time he "lauded"
> its virtues.)
>
> 4 Dallmayr, F.  _Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village_
> (Oxford:
> Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) p.282
>
>
> Citation:
> Goodwin, Michael 2000
> Review of _Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age of Globalization_, by
C.
> Fred Alford (1999)
> _Korean Studies Review_ 2000, no. 3
> Electronic file:
> http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/korean-studies/files/ksr00-03.htm
>



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%