Culturalism and Understanding of Culture

[Series Index]

Propagandist poster symbolizing the Lusitania. (source)

A sinking ship has been a subject of romanticized tragedy for at least a century, going back to the Lusitania and the Titanic. In a large part, this treatment of maritime disasters happens because a sinking ship is such a perfect vehicle for a narrative. A ship is a self-contained civilization, constantly exposed to the apocalyptic possibility for any number of reasons. Those reasons, eventually, become the story of each sinking. The Lusitania is remembered as a story about German aggression; the Titanic, a story about human hubris. If the story’s devices include the death of hundreds of young school children, it can only be more compelling.

So, inevitably, the tragic sinking of the Sewol became another story. Initially, much of the story revolved around the captain’s criminal dereliction of duty, as he was seen–as the world was watching–abandoning the ship without any concern for the passengers. But in a matter of days, the story turned into the one about Korean culture–how its Confucianism made its children too unthinking and obedient to save themselves when the ship’s PA system instructed them to stay in their cabins as the ship was sinking. 

In the wake of the Asiana plane crash last year, I discussed the concept of culturalism, which I defined as “unwarranted impulse to explain people’s behavior with a ‘cultural difference,’ whether real or imagined.” I tried to show that the fountainhead of cultural explanation for airplane crashes, i.e. one chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outlier, was based on shoddy reasoning founded upon cherry-picked evidence. Then I explained the danger of culturalism: it obfuscates the truth, distracts from the real issue, and wipes away the individuality of the people who are “explained” through culture.

This time, before I could comment, several writers produced excellent pieces of writing that persuasively argued against the reductionist claims about Korean culture and the Sewol disaster. The best ones came from John Bocskay and Jakob Dorof–you should read them. Because Bocskay and Dorof did such an excellent job refuting the reductionist, “Korean culture sinks ships” claim, I feel that I should not belabor the point.

Instead, I will address a different angle. As to my Asiana article and the Sewol-related articles by Bocskay and Dorof, the objections were the same: culture is real, and it exerts real force on human decisions. When I presented my critique of culturalism in the context of the Asiana flight crash, most of the objections, in so many words, said there really was a cultural difference in communication patterns, which may well affect airline safety. Likewise, to articles by Bocskay and Dorof, many objected by claiming that culture clearly impacted the way in which the Sewol disaster unfolded, and it is not only incorrect, but also willfully blind, to say otherwise.

But such objections miss the point completely, since neither I nor Bocskay and Dorof argued that there was no such thing as culture or cultural differences. Recall that the definition of culturalism is “unwarranted impulse to explain people’s behavior with a ‘cultural difference.’” In my original piece about culturalism as well as in my subsequent discussion, I stressed repeatedly that cultural explanations have their place. I have little doubt that Bocskay and Dorof would agree with me in saying that culture is real, and it impacts human actions.

This leads to a natural question:  if culture is real, then what separates a cultural explanation from a culturalist one? 

(More after the jump.)

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.

*             *             *

When people offer an explanation based on “Korean culture,” not simply in regards to the Sewol disaster but in general, I often find that the speaker is not entirely clear on what she means by “Korean culture.” As far as I can tell, the definition of “Korean culture” in those explanation oscillates between two different poles of meanings.

In certain cases, “Korean culture” denotes a type of unchanging, indelible essence, common to Koreans and only Koreans. In this sense, “Korean culture” commands the actions of every Korean who has ever lived, past, present and future. It dictates the decisions of any Korean who has ever lived in any part of the world, be she a Korean in Busan whose family never left the city for a thousand years, or a Korean-Chinese whose family migrated outside of Korea more than a hundred years ago. It is obvious that this definition is no more than disguised racism, with “culture” serving as another dog whistle. Any “cultural” explanation based on this definition holds little explanatory power, as it collapses under its own weight.

In other cases, “Korean culture” is a shorthand for any commonly observable pattern of thoughts or behavior in Korea or among Koreans. As a shorthand, “Korean culture” amounts to little more than the sum of its highly diverse parts. “Korean culture,” in this sense, is divisible to nearly infinite number of sub- and sub-sub-cultures upon a closer look. One can speak of Korea’s corporate culture, culinary culture, pop culture, political culture, maritime culture, school culture, familial culture, Internet culture, youth culture, regional culture. Sometimes, these sub-cultures and sub-sub-cultures point to the same direction; at other times, they either subtly diverge, or actively clash with one another.

I believe that the second definition is the correct way of understanding culture. When I say “culture is real and exerts real influence,” I am employing this definition. I do so because the difference between the first definition of “Korean culture” and the second definition of “Korean culture” is plain. The first definition is a yoke on Koreans, reducing them to unthinking automatons; the second definition is merely a descriptor, a shorthand that we are forced to use even though the shorthand never does justice to the real thing. The bodies of water that cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface include both extreme depth and extreme height, extreme heat and extreme cold, extremely large creatures and the extremely small ones. Yet we are forced to call them all “the ocean,” for the sake of manageable brevity. Likewise, we may refer to “Korean culture” without losing sight of the fact that the vastness and complexity of hundreds of millions of actions taken by hundreds of millions of people every second can never be truly reducible to those two words.

One way of understanding culturalism is:  it is the moment at which the second, expansive definition of culture is tainted by the first, reductionist definition of culture. In most cases, the term “culture,” as used by those who explain events by way of culture, represents a varying level of mixture of the two definitions. Importantly, those who offer the cultural explanations rarely understand the precise definition of the term “culture” that they employ, i.e. their exact location relative to the two poles. Like much of the racism in the world, culturalism is expressed not through active malice, but through unthinking deference to subconscious bias.

But regardless of whether the speaker is aware of his own bias, we know that much of the cultural explanations floating in the world is infected by culturalism, a form of bias. We can see this in the manner in which cultural explanations are offered. Fans of cultural explanations exhort that it is eminently fair to consider whether culture contributed to certain events. But the manner in which cultural explanations are employed gives a lie to this claim, since the applications of cultural explanations are anything but fair.

We know, for example, that the facts that do not fit the pre-existing stereotypes about Korea are rarely explained by way of Korean culture. This is a significant data point, for the term “stereotype” may well be another way of describing the reductionist understanding of culture. Several of the Sewol’s junior crew members died as heroes, saving as many school children as they could before they perished. But there is little discussion about how Korean culture impelled those crew members to selflessly give their lives. If it is so eminently fair to cite culture as a significant contributor of human actions, why is such heroism not hailed a cultural achievement by Koreans?

Any part of Korean culture that that does not fit the stereotype about Korean culture is also disregarded. The culturalist explanation about the Sewol tragedy revolved around the supposed “Korean culture of obedience.” But Korea marched from fascist dictatorship to democracy through relentless resistance and protests against the authority. A significant part of that protesting tradition of Korea involved young students, right around the age of the Danwon High School students who perished on the Sewol. If it is so eminently fair to introduce culture to explain behavior, why is one part of the national culture prioritized over another?

We also know that a cultural explanation overwhelmingly is more likely to emerge regarding a disaster in Asia or involving Asians (Fukushima, the Asiana crash or the Sewol sinking) compared to a disaster in North America or Europe (Katrina, Deep Water Horizon, Santiago de Compostela derailment.) This, too, indicates bias: cultural explanation is overwhelmingly more likely to appear when something happens in a faraway land to inscrutable people. The same question may be asked:  If it is so eminently fair to cite culture as a significant contributor of disasters, where are all the cultural explanations that expound on how American culture contributed to the bumbling response after the Hurricane Katrina, how British culture contributed the BP oil rig explosion, or how Spanish culture is to blame for the massive train derailment?

*             *             *

Here, a short detour. The last point requires further discussion, because of this common objection: the claim that Americans and Europeans engage in cultural examinations of themselves all the time, chief example of which is the gun culture of America. This is a rather weak claim; it is plain that there is significantly less willingness to explain events that happen in America and Europe in terms of culture. (Again: where are all the cultural explanations that explain how British culture contributed to the BP oil disaster?)

To the extent that this weak objection has a grain of truth, it only serves to illuminate the difference between the two definitions of culture that come into play in a cultural explanation. For it is clear that “culture” in the context of Americans’ discussions of “America’s gun culture” refers to the expansive definition of “culture.” When Americans discuss their own country’s gun culture, absolutely no American thinks that the word “America” in “America’s gun culture” serves to bind all Americans, or even a majority of Americans. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that when Americans speak of how Americans need to fix their gun culture, they are quietly whispering to themselves:  ”except me.”

The same is true for a similar objection:  the claim that Koreans constantly point to their own culture to explain the events in Korea–if Koreans themselves can use cultural explanation, why not us? But when Koreans are critiquing their own culture, the same silent whisper is constantly present:  ”except me.” When a non-Korean repeats Koreans’ criticism of their own culture, the silent whisper of “except me” takes on a very different meaning. An “except me” uttered by a member of a culture speaking of her own culture serves to limit the applicability of “culture”; the same uttered by someone outside of that culture does the opposite.

*           *           *

To return to the earlier point: none of this is intended to say that there is no such thing as culture. Culture is real, and it exerts real influence on people. What, then, can one do to talk about culture while avoiding the pitfalls of culturalism?

Judging from the experience of running a moderately successful blog about Korean culture, what I have found effective is to directly address the components of culture. After all, “culture” is a shorthand, containing a vast array of multitudes. An effective exposition of culture would necessarily be an unpacking of that shorthand.

I deliberately chose to write this post within the series after the post about the causes and contributing factors of the Sewol tragedy. My first priority in writing the second part of the series was to provide a concise summary of the relevant facts and circumstances surrounding the tragedy. But I also had a secondary aim:  I was trying to show just how much of the tragedy I could explain without any explicit reference to the word “culture.” So the post included discussions about lax regulation by a neoliberal government, unchecked greed by a struggling corporation that led to a distorted business model, potential corruption and all-around incompetence.

I am humbled that the post was very well received; I am yet to see any criticism that the lack of express reference to culture somehow leaves the post incomplete. (To the contrary, many of the positive reviews for my post praised it for being “complete.”) However, my post is still a thoroughly cultural piece, as it discusses many different cultural trends that one can encounter in Korea. Years of neoliberal economic reforms led to an unstable labor market, which fostered a culture of hapless dependency among the incompetent crew of Sewol. Lack of adequate disaster training bred a culture of amateurism within Korea’s disaster response system, although their effort must be praised. At many junctures, large and small safety regulations were ignored, implying at a weak culture for public safety.

But how much would my post improve, had I chosen to explain the tragedy in those terms? How would the explanation become better by filtering everything through the word “culture,” which inevitably invites a reductionist interpretation? In my estimation, this is simply the better way of explaining a foreign culture: break it down to its components, by presenting the facts and circumstances that gave rise to that particular pattern of behavior. Aim for true empathy and understanding by suggesting that, if you encountered the same facts and circumstances, you would do the same. I do not always succeed in doing this, but it has always been the guiding principle for this blog. The modicum of readership that this blog has enjoyed seems to say that I am not alone in the opinion that this is the better approach.

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.

Source: Ask a Korean!