Korean Confucianism - 11. The Relevance and Future of Korean Confucianism in the Modern World
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Confucianism was declared dead not long ago: many Western intellectuals anticipated its complete collapse in East Asia including Korea. However, it still remains healthy and engaging in South Korean society and its overseas communities including those in North America. Confucianism is an important and interesting topic for understanding Korean people, society, culture, religion, and thought. This book therefore discussed various aspects of Korean Confucianism in terms of tradition and modernity pertaining to the fundamental patterns of its history, philosophy, education, family values, social ethics, and spiritual culture.
As we discussed in the preceding chapters, the Confucian school of thought generally sees the world to be transformable, calls for a return to human virtue, views the political realm in moral terms, teaches fundamental human values and relationships, articulates their proper social roles, and emphasizes self-cultivation as the universal foundation. The inseparability of learning, morality, society, and politics was emphasized in the entire Confucian tradition of East Asia. For five centuries in Chosŏn Korea, this promoted an intensive competition in the public domains including education, examination system, government, public career, commercial arenas, and even family reputation, many of which still influence today’s Koreans in various modern ways.
Confucianism is no longer the elite tradition that had once dominated intellectual culture, philosophic orthodoxy, political authority, bureaucratic system, and social hierarchy in Chosŏn Korea until the end of the nineteenth century. Its current situation embodies a diffused language influencing the moral, social, and cultural core of Korean identity. As I discussed in Chapters 5 and 7, Confucianism in modern Korea has transformed itself into a common national discourse associated with academic elitism, family values, moral education, social relationships, political leadership, and so on. Nonetheless, we also need to understand the sophisticated issue of how traditional values in South Korea are adjusting themselves to new economic and institutional changes.
The Confucian value system is a major source of inspiration for Korean people, thereby endowing them with a common belief in the worth of humanity and human-relatedness, as well as with a shared path to academic and ethical growth. On the whole, it remains vital in the backbone of Korean society. An average person has a collective sense of Korean identity; ideally he or she is expected to think and act according to social norms and interests. Overall, it is essentially the Confucian pattern of family values and interpersonal relationships that maintains the moral educational dimension of Korean society. This combination of cultural acceptance and social expectation is sustained more by public adherence to traditional values. Even with the massive economic, political and social changes since the late 1980s, it continues to be important and is quickly going through a process of assimilating more new changes. The attitudes of Koreans toward their traditional values associated with Confucian principles vary according to generational, family, social, economic, and religious factors.
In South Korea, the Confucian value system has been interacting with other religious traditions as well. Buddhism has influenced religious life for many centuries, and Christianity is a very popular and somewhat “Koreanized” religion in this religiously diverse and competitive society. However, most Koreans including Buddhists and Christians tend to share the cultural heritage that influences their attitudes toward daily values and norms. In this regard, they, as well as overseas Koreans in the West, do not usually find any serious friction between Korean values and religious identity; this is true in the context of assimilating the basic moral principles, such as Confucian human-heartedness and filial piety, Christian love and fellowship, and Buddhist wisdom and compassion.
The arena of the Korean family appears to be a moral-cultural institution that maintains an essential life of its own in its own right; this is central to Korean Confucian culture. As we discussed in Chapter 9, many families participate in the regular ancestral (memorial) rites at home or grave sites, for these rites are viewed as important for sharing family bond and preserving core human values. Children are encouraged to remember and respect their ancestors’ virtue and wisdom. The fundamental moral principles that support the ancestral rites are filial piety, propriety, reverence, and family love. Overall, the basic Confucian teaching of ritual propriety (ye/li) plays a key role in Korean people’s moral thinking and practice.
The tradition of ancestral rites is already making necessary adjustments in today’s Korea partly because a growing number of urbanized families want to simplify its ceremonial procedure and requirements in response to recent economic and social changes. Family and public ritual standards in today’s Korea clearly reveal the living elements of Confucian ritual practice. There are also Korean immigrant families in the West who observe their simplified ancestral rites, except most Protestants and many Catholics who generally replaced the Confucian ancestral rites with Christian prayer and hymn-singing.
In general Koreans think and behave more as members of groups than as individuals with absolute freedom and self-autonomy. Stable families, affectionate parents, filial sons and daughters, benevolent elders, superiors, and employers, loyal juniors, inferiors, and employees, and faithful friends and colleagues are often mentioned; in other words, interpersonal relationships and values are expressed in Confucian terms, thereby conveying the public view that the proper understanding and practice of these social relations is an important part of the educational curriculum.
Confucianism emphasizes self-cultivation as the basis of maintaining family solidarity, social harmony, and political order. When educated Koreans (including politicians) talk about “democracy” (minju chuŭi in Korean; literally, people-centered ideology), they usually emphasize moral leadership and social-ethical responsibility in addition to democratic government and politics. For example, “democratic government and economic growth” cannot be accomplished properly without maintaining the moral and social order of the nation.[1] Chapter 5 therefore articulated that these kinds of public voices remind us of the modern reformist tendency of Confucian moral-political thinking, which can be effective in a country where the Confucian-oriented value system remains a common, national discourse.
These and related factors made the Korean work ethic strong for both men and women, thereby playing an important role in South Korea’s economic development since the late 1970s. The Korean people’s serious dedication to education also contributed to this development by improving both individual and family positions. In South Korea (as well as in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) various kinds of examinations are still very important for personal, family and social success, thereby maintaining an intense level of competition. According to the proven power of this system, successful people are said to be those who work hardest for entrance exams, family reputation, career success, etc. This is deeply grounded in elite Confucian culture; in the long run, it facilitated South Korea’s economic success on both personal and collective levels.
However, the whole topic is more sophisticated than just competitive education. As I mentioned in Chapters 6 and 7, we should consider South Korea’s economic success in a holistic way by discussing the unifying influence of Confucian values on family contribution, moral education, political authority and economy, social competition and mobility, group dependency and productivity, and so on. For example, family culture, an essential part of the Confucian tradition, made a significant contribution which is directly related to the Korean mother’s dedication to dealing with family goals such as academic excellence. In South Korea, the mother’s roles are significant especially through nurturing her child(ren) intellectually, ethically, and culturally, thereby facilitating the child’s study, school, and teachers. I know this well from many cases regarding my relatives and friends and other Koreans both inside and outside South Korea.
As economic prosperity gained its full momentum in the late 1980s, authoritarian norms and hierarchical structures began to decline quickly, thereby allowing many political, institutional, and social changes. In recent years, the ideas of self-awareness, self-autonomy and self-esteem have quickly developed among the younger generations in their thinking, behaviour, and social interaction, all of which strongly affect their individual opinions and attitudes about almost everything including traditional values, partly under the influence of Western life-styles and the appeal of Christianity.
Regarding today’s Korean women as well, traditional group norms and expectations have definitely declined to the lowest level. For example, the tradition of gender role specialization is observed to a far lesser extent than before; some people now argue that it no longer exists in South Korea. The updated value system of social harmony and gender balance in the family and larger social units appears to be maintained at the heart of Korean society. Chapter 8 also pointed out that greater emphasis is now placed on women’s equal status and full rights in both public and domestic spheres. The role of women has became much stronger, exerting a much more powerful influence on all family, educational, social, economic and political matters.[2] In the socio-political arena, for instance, South Koreans elected Madam Park Geun-hye as their eleventh and current President in December 2012; indeed, she is the first female head of state not only in the Republic of Korea but also in the modern history of East Asia.
Since the 1980s urbanization and industrialization brought the Korean people into modern standards of life, and the recent influence of the internet, social network, and high-tech culture quickly advanced their daily ideas and lifestyles. As a result, the younger generations’ perspectives exert a much stronger impact on traditional values, education, work, marriage, career, business, politics, and so on. Given all these changes, however, new problems–such as increasing materialism, moral decline, disrespect for the elderly, and an increasing crime rate–have stimulated concerned parents and the media to recognize the relevance of their proud moral tradition. These public voices basically point to the unifying moral, social, and political order and harmony, which appears to be associated with the Confucian foundation of Korean society.
So what is the future of Confucianism in Korea, where religious dynamism and division are led by Christianity and Buddhism? We may anticipate Korean Confucianism to continue as an engaging tradition of ethical humanism and family spirituality while influencing Korean people’s moral, educational and social thinking. In other words, the Confucian coding of “cultural DNA” seems to exist in their daily value system. Confucianism has never been a membership or congregational religion with organized priesthood and religious dogmas. As a socially “diffused” tradition, it will continue co-existing with other spiritual traditions positively. From a comparative and crosscultural perspective, it is important to study this living tradition in Korea, East Asia, and their international communities. Otherwise, it would be difficult to develop a penetrating global understanding of Korean Confucianism in terms of tradition and modernity.
The heart of Korean identity will motivate more public discourses, embodying Confucian ideals, often under different names. “The Way of learning to be human” may play an essential role in the ongoing process of Korea’s changing identity in the coming years. The modern West is also something that should be addressed because its institutional and economic ideas strongly influence East Asia including South Korea. The Confucian heritage of today’s Korean society will therefore continue to interact with the globalizing process of its economic, social, and political transformation.
Furthermore, Confucian values have helped the international Korean community to achieve much of its well-known academic and cultural reputation in the West. The mutual interplay between Korean identity and Western society may help us to develop a balanced global understanding of Confucianism. Although there are some generational gaps, younger Koreans in the West basically assimilate their Korean values to varying degrees in managing bilingual adjustment and bicultural harmony. As we explored in Chapter 10, their respect for education and family relations may be integrated with their international identity vis-à-vis Western ideas and lifestyles.
If we refer to Confucianism as a cultural heritage of appreciating the worth of humanity, of emphasizing the human capability of intellectual, ethical and spiritual growth through learning and self-cultivation, and of sustaining the fundamental human relationships in a harmonious family and society, then it is certainly relevant to today’s Korean people and, thus, remains as an important living tradition in both today’s Korea and the world.
As a final reflection, I note that Confucianism is adjusting itself to the globalizing world of ideas, values, beliefs, and rituals; indeed, it is an “ethic of adjustment to the world,” to borrow an early insight by Max Weber (1968), an eminent German sociologist and comparative thinker. From a crosscultural international perspective, Korean Confucianism supports a natural, human concern for harmony, a moral and socio-political concern for order, and a cultural and economic concern for balance and prosperity. To conclude, this is potentially compatible with our global ethics and our universal mission of education and cultural development.
Footnote
- ↑ This was mentioned in a national daily newspapers, Han’guk Ilbo (Korea daily news), Apr. 16, 1993.
- ↑ Many Korean husbands respect their wives’ wisdom and ability in decision-making processes, depending heavily on their wives in many respects: virtually all of the family finance, the education of children, the purchase of household goods, and the handling of various domestic and social relationships are under the direct control and management of women.
