Recently, I met a Korean-American professor who pointed out that the Korean people’s mental clock had stopped ticking, and was forever stuck in the past times of colonial rule and military dictatorship. I could not agree with her more. Ironically, our psychological clocks are stuck in the past, even as we develop forward-looking technologies.
There is no doubt that we are a past-oriented people. For example, we are still obsessed with hunting down people who allegedly collaborated with the Japanese government during colonial rule. Meanwhile, we are still disputing with Japan over the atrocities committed in Korea in the early 20th century. The Cold War is over now and so is communism almost everywhere in the world, except for the Korean Peninsula where both are an unfinished business and an ongoing project. North Korean leaders and their sympathizers in the South still naively dream of building a socialist paradise. Since their mental clock is stuck in the past, they do not realize that their project is long past its sell-by date.
The mental clock of our radical politicians and activists is stuck in the 1970s and 1980s, when Koreans suffered under military dictatorship. Still preoccupied by their past anti-dictatorial campaigns, the leftists stick to the same old rhetoric even today, shouting: “For the sake of democracy,” “This is the burial of democracy,” or “Down with the dictatorship!” However, these slogans are no longer valid because the military dictatorship ended two decades ago and South Korea is a full-fledged democracy today.
On the other side of fence, the psychological clock of the conservative people seems to have stopped in the past as well. Not realizing that the Korean society has radically changed, they still believe they can control information, exercise censorship or eradicate leftists. But times have changed and we no longer live under the military dictatorship that enabled such things.
Even the mental clock of some writers is stuck in the early 20th century when theories of literary modernism advocating pure literature and artistic novels held sway. Oblivious that the world has changed, they still stubbornly insist, “Literature must be pure, serving only a small number of elite readers.” That manifesto sounds like an elegy for moribund literature in this age of multimedia.
Recently, a literary critic, who was too young to experience the Korean War, stated that the Korean War was started, not by North Korea but by the Rhee Syngman administration and the U.S. government. Her mental clock also seems to be stuck in the 1980s when she was brainwashed by leftist ideology.
The mental clock of many Koreans also seems to be stuck in the 19th century, when people blamed their king for everything. Back then, people thought their king was responsible for almost everything, including droughts, floods or epidemics, which they thought stemmed from their king’s lack of virtue or unworthiness. That tradition persists to date. Koreans tend to blame their government and the president for everything under the sun, including accidents, disasters or catastrophes. Experts argue that this tendency is predominant in Korea because Koreans did not overthrow the monarchy and build a republic on their own. Foreign countries did it for them, so Koreans did not experience the transition period.
We often complain, “This happened because of the government’s incompetence.” It is true that our government is often incredibly incompetent in times of crisis, and yet it would not be right to constantly blame the government for everything. Still, we always make the government responsible even for our personal miseries and misfortunes.
There was a joke doing the rounds online about this: To the question “What would you do if your husband cheated on you?” women from different countries answered differently. For example, an American wife said, “I’d find a divorce lawyer.” Others answered variably: “I’d shoot my husband,” “I’d shoot his mistress,” “I’d shoot both my husband and his mistress,” “I’d pretend nothing happened,” “I’d cheat on him too,” and so on. The most hilarious answer came from the Korean wife, who said, “I’d rush to Cheong Wa Dae and demand the president step down.”
This is a uniquely Korean phenomenon. When the Twin Towers in New York City were destroyed in the 9/11 terrorist attack, Americans were busy recuperating, reconstructing and repairing the city, instead of blaming their government. At that time, Koreans were amazed to see only a few Americans blame George W. Bush for the disaster. If the same terrorist attack had hit a Korean city, the Korean president would have been impeached or ousted by an angry mob. Strangely, however, Bush was reelected for a second term despite the huge disaster, and remained in office for eight long years.
We cannot let the specters of the past haunt us constantly. We need to rewind our mental clock so it can begin ticking again. We should reset the clock to 2015 and soar into the future, not regress into the past.
By Kim Seong-kon
Kim Seong-kon is a professor emeritus of English at Seoul National University and president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. — Ed.
