Korean Pride

I've been meaning to blog about a number of thoughts for a while now. I'll get to them, and my trip to china, over the following week. Tonight I'm going to briefly touch on the bizarre amount of pride korea has in simply being korea. If you should ask a Korean are they proud to be Korean I would be willing to bet that there isn't a single one who wouldn't say yes. Korean's take an enormous pride in their country, their language, and their culture. Outside of the stalled war with the communists there isn't much they are ashamed of regarding their nationality (that i've found so far). take a moment to read this article on what it means to be korean.

http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2008/06/what-makes-person-korean.html

now the thing that weirds me out about all this isn't the fact that koreans have pride. I mean, even i have some pride in america. It's more the overwhelming, fawning/fanatic pride that was stereotyped in Southpark back when it was still good. "if you don't like you can git out". you remember that episode? where the rednecks just had absurd pride in everything that was, or claimed to be, american? It's a lot like that here. Ask a korean what their favorite food is and be damned if they don't say korean. Mind you, maybe that's not fair, Korean food really is better than most other asian foods i've tried here in korea, and a helluva a lot better than the food in china. Will see what further travels reveal on this issue. But I'm digressing.

the point that weirds me out is the overwhelming fanaticism of Korean pride. For a country that's basically spent it's entire existence as a subject nation of China, routinely getting it's ass kicked by Chinese, Mongols, or Japs I wouldn't feel a lot of pride in Korea's power. For a nation that is trailing behind China and Japan economically there isn't a lot of pride there. It's still divided by the most guarded military border in the world. It's not particulary friendly and it's historically been rather boring and unimportant (they call it the hermit kingdom for a reason). I don't know, i just don't see what there is to take pride in. At least, not the kind of pride I see from Koreans, which is all encompassing.

To put this in context I should say that I don't have a particularly great deal of pride in being American. In fact, I can't wait to get out permanently.

Then I got to thinking that maybe it's just the way they were raised, the culture. Redneck American pride was stereotyped for a reason in southpark, because it exists in that form to a greater or lesser extent. I think that too is cultural. Perhaps it's as simple as not being brought up to value indepence and critical thought. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the more conservative, prideful, sections or our country live in cultures that value respecting authority and tradition and god and guns and country more than rights and independent thought and equality. In fact, studies have confirmed that that is the main difference between conservative thinking and liberal thinking. for more on that see (or search on google):

http://psychcentral.com/news/2007/09/10/brains-of-liberals-conservatives-may-work-differently/1691.html

http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/04/21/liberals-and-conversatives-hold-different-moral-foundations/5460.html

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html

Now this is obviously a generalization but its fair to say that Korea as a whole is basically Wyoming. They are extremely xenophobic, closed, conservative, traditional, and proud of who they are, they also all pretty much look the same ;). They aren't "ignorant" but their learning is completely based around memorization and regurgitation of facts, going from teacher to student. Personal opinion is not encouraged, possibly not even permitted (though I haven't confirmed that latter) and students are unable to think outside of a narrowly defined box. I know this for a fact actually as I'm helping a teachers kid prepare for studying in america and he literally has no idea how to write an opinion paper. As in, he doesn't know how to assert his opinion, or possibly how to even form his own opinion. it's sheer craziness. But on the other hand its the same thing you find in the conservative party, where all hands agreed that bush was the right cat to reelect in 2004. It literally took the destruction of our nation to realize he wasn't the right guy and you can STILL find around 20% of the nation that thinks he was a savior, most of them conservative christians who fit the same mold as koreans. It hasn't even been a year and Obama has already lost roughly 16% of his support. I think conservatives as a culture just follow along and take blind pride in who and what they are, sans independent thought.

It's creepy living here, I've kept away from politics and thankfully religion isn't much of an issue, but it really is like being a closet liberal in Wyoming. It's not as bad as Wyoming would be because religion doesn't really factor in, and they aren't conservative because they are ignorant, as I mentioned before. It's just really hard for them to form new opinions and become part of the global community. Gay rights for instance, is still almost unheard of outside of western establishments. In fact, most Koreans still hold the same opinions of gays that ahmadinejad was berated for having. I'm very interested in how I will view Europe when I finally get there.

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