Overcoming Group Emotions and Reductionist Thinking

In the course of social life, you often see some people who communicate notices or instructions precisely so that no one misunderstands them, while many others fail to do so. What is the problem? The latter usually convey things from their own point of view or according to their own standards. They assume that the listener naturally shares the “context” of what they are saying. As a teacher, I often exchange documents in which only the month and day are written, without the year 2020. In many cases this may cause no major problem, but when one wants to trace exactly what happened, it can lead to confusion. Difficulties in communicating meaning arise not only for individuals but also within a society. If the language used by the members of a society makes precise communication difficult, that is often because the language has a “context-centered” system rather than one of “objective rigor.”

I am not a linguist, but for a history teacher I have had the chance to study quite a wide range of disciplines. At first I studied dentistry, and after graduating from college I changed fields and studied history, learning classical Chinese in order to read historical sources. Later, in my master’s program, I studied “medical humanities,” which integrated those two previous fields. In my master’s thesis, I analyzed a literary work—a Korean short story from the 1950s—from the perspective of medical professionalism, and I wrote my doctoral dissertation, on another topic related to the philosophy and history of medicine, entirely in English in the United Kingdom.

These experiences led me to pay attention to the subtle differences in perspective and approach that exist and operate in these various languages and academic fields. For example, there are clear differences among Chinese characters, English, and Korean, yet if one learns a foreign language only to the level needed for rough communication, it is easy to overlook those essential differences. But fundamentally, the core elements of communicating meaning are very different across these languages. In particular, if we compare English and Korean, in the former the core of meaning transmission lies in nouns. Even if English does not assign gender to nouns as German does, it still basically distinguishes singular and plural nouns and uses articles (a/the) to differentiate meaning more precisely. Korean, by contrast, focuses on predicates, especially on the use of highly variable sentence endings.

For example, the simple English sentence “He kicked a ball” can be rendered in Korean in countless ways through combinations of verb endings—그가 볼을 찼다 / 찼어요 / 찼네요 / 찼단다 / 찼구나 / 차버렸다 / 차고 말았다 / 찼단 말이지—allowing endless variation in the predicate without adding adverbs. By contrast, unlike English, Korean does not distinguish between “kicked” and “has kicked.” In other words, it is less rigorous in conveying exactly at what point, relative to the moment of speaking, the act of kicking the ball occurred. Above all, it shows little concern for the “ball”: one usually cannot tell whether it is “the ball” known to both speaker and listener, or simply “a ball.” In other words, it is more concerned with to whom I am speaking and in what context than with the noun “ball” itself.

From this perspective, Korean has difficulties compared with English when it comes to identifying a phenomenon or object precisely. The difference between these two languages becomes even more striking when studying science as opposed to literature. In fact, a linguistic structure that distinguishes various contexts and reflects them in verb endings has the drawback of directing more attention to outward appearance than to essence.

Then how have Koreans historically overcome this difficulty? Through Chinese characters. By using Chinese characters, they were able to pursue a more precise understanding of objects and phenomena. This was something I especially felt while studying Korean history in the college of education and reading sentences written in Chinese characters by Joseon-era scholars. I still remember that the preface to Yulgok Yi I’s Essentials for Enlightening the Ignorant was clearer and yet more profound than any English text I have ever read.

Not long ago, while talking with a friend, I said, “Korean society, with its strongly collectivist character, is a society in which the individual is undifferentiated.” At first my friend misunderstood the “mi” in “undifferentiated” (未分化) as the “mi” in calculus (微分). What I meant was that Korean society has not yet differentiated from a group-centered society into an individual-centered one, but my friend understood the exact opposite—that Korean society had become more individualistic. Perhaps communication among Koreans is actually proceeding in a very superficial way, and we may be living without properly realizing it. Since the 1990s, the exclusive use of Hangul has become the social mainstream. As a result, the strengthened “context-oriented linguistic structure” of Korean suits art and humanistic sensibility well, but it is in fact inefficient for logically analyzing social phenomena.

For example, if you want to feel better, you can listen to music or read a novel. But it is better not to use that heightened “sensibility” to support or criticize some object logically. Unfortunately, however, in 21st-century Korean society, political and economic agitation openly driven by the “emotions” of historical trauma and economic inequality—that is, hatred and resentment—is rampant. In the end, under a context-oriented linguistic structure such as Korean or Japanese, unless one actively uses nouns written in Chinese characters, rigorous and objective thinking faces many constraints.

On the other hand, an “object-oriented language”—that is, a linguistic structure that analyzes and expresses phenomena or objects themselves with excessive minuteness and rigor—also creates serious problems of its own. For instance, Joseon-era Confucian scholars distinguished more abstract nouns than necessary and used them in their logic, causing their thought to drift away from reality. In a sense, this resembles the behavior of today’s leftists, so-called cultural Marxists. Although the absolute proposition “All human beings should be respected equally” is sufficient in itself, left-wing human rights activists and intellectuals separately distinguish the rights of women, workers, homosexuals, the disabled, students, and so on.

Just as Neo-Confucian scholars kept dissecting human nature into smaller and smaller parts, the essence of this left-wing identity politics is a reductionist and fragmented understanding of human beings. Rather than approaching the selfish and fickle essence of human beings in a holistic way, it approaches them by unnecessarily subdividing the self of the social human being.

Of course, nearly all modern academic disciplines operating within the platform of the university are based largely on such reductionist perspectives and methods. In the natural sciences, this is indeed a very effective approach. For example, molecules are separated into atoms, and atoms are further divided ever more finely into nuclei and electrons. But even in medicine, human knowledge and understanding are still far too limited to explain the body’s physiological phenomena solely through such a reductionist method. For example, no matter how much physiological and biomedical engineering knowledge and data concerning teeth, jawbone, and dental materials are mobilized to create a dental implant, it can never replace a healthy natural tooth.

Going further, what about the social sciences—economics, sociology, psychology—which take human thought and behavior themselves as their object of inquiry? Attempts to understand society on the basis of such approaches—for example, artificially classifying and defining the identities of social groups—clearly have limits. Moreover, efforts by government or society to intervene in or influence individuals’ decision-making on the basis of such analyses almost always produce side effects. In other words, they fail.

Suppose, for example, that one tries to distinguish women and men and identify them respectively as the socially weak and the socially strong. And suppose that, in order to protect women thoroughly as the weaker party, especially in the event of divorce, a divorce law is enacted under which all of the husband’s property must be given to the woman. If that happened, women would probably be able to lead marital relationships from a far more advantageous position. But in the long run, and from the perspective of society as a whole, under such a divorce law women would never become happier. Why? Because by the next generation, economically capable men in the marriage market would avoid poor women as if they were avoiding robbers.

This may be an extreme analogy, but whether one divides human beings into capitalists and workers, as Marxists do, or divides society into male-centered culture and female-centered culture, as feminists do, this fragmented and reductionist approach is deeply related to an object-oriented language structure and has served as the ideological foundation for many ineffective and destructive policies.

It is not easy for human beings to face the limits of their own language and thought and overcome them. Those who proudly called themselves “Daekkaemun” showed this well. The first step in overcoming such limits is to try first to read the objective coordinates of the position in which one stands. One needs to step back from the group to which one belongs—that is, from one’s “context”—and look at oneself “alone.” And beyond that, one should question whether one’s thinking is trying, too hastily, to understand or judge some phenomenon or object simply on the basis of an accumulation of fragmented knowledge or theories.

In the end, simply facing the limits of the language you speak and the thought you possess greatly lowers the probability that you will be agitated or brainwashed by a left-wing socialist worldview.

Baemin Bae, History Teacher at Soongeui Girls’ High School

: The above is also the original text of the article “How to Live Wisely While Avoiding Agitation and Dogmatism,” contributed to Mediawatch.

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Original title: 집단감성과 환원론적 사고의 극복

Author: Baemin

Date: 2020-05-19

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=14&idx=22753