If You Fail Once, Try, Try 770 Times More

I realize most of you probably hail from hick places like Podunk or Butt-fuck, Nowheresville where there’s only one or two traffic lights in the entire goddamn town or some shit like that. I realize for someone like that traffic in crowded, impatient, fast-moving Korea can probably seem rather traumatic.

But if you’re from NYC like me, that ain’t no thang. Compared to NYC, everything else in the world seems par for the course. Or a big joke.

Even in downtown Cleveland, the biggest city in Ohio, the level of traffic was such that it seemed like it was a lazy Sunday afternoon. Except it was on a weekday during lunch hour.

I even drove in Dublin, Ireland. They got these narrow roads that seem like they should be one-way streets. But the cars are parked in both directions on either side, so you cant tell from looking at them if its a one-way or two-way street. But you wont find me being unnecessarily snarky about that. And I had drive on the wrong side of the road in a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car.

Cut the hyperbole.

#20 I loved driving in Korea for the shear competitiveness of it.

For better or for worse, Korea remains a highly competitive society. It is a consequence of the fact that within the living memory of many older Koreans still, whether you were quicker than your rival at grabbing whatever scraps available made the difference of hunger or even survival. Naturally, this innate competitiveness would manifest itself in the driving culture within the Land of a Thousand Contradictions.

I once read in an old National Geographic article about a NASA astronaut who experienced a similar culture clash with Russian cosmonauts. This is back in the days immediately following Perestroika, when US and Soviet space agencies started collaborating for the very first time. During mealtimes, the Russians would just grab the rations as quickly as possible, seemingly without any regard to the next person. There was no orderly system of distribution. The astronaut was puzzled at first but slowly realized this was normal and acceptable in a society where people waited on frighteningly long lines just to get toilet tissue. Pretty soon, the astronaut was grabbing food also. This is reminiscent of Korean schoolchildren during lunch time in the old days. Everyone would help themselves to each other’s banchan without asking, especially the one who had the tastier morsels.

My apartment complex throws a picnic party every once a year. There’s hamburgers, hot dogs, and BBQ. We’re waiting on line to get and this old Chinese lady pops out of nowhere, skips everyone on line, and grabs the last remaining hot dog in the tray. To an American, this is rude, outrageous, unacceptable behavior. But sometime during that Chinese lady’s past, starvation was a reality.

Old habits die hard. When I traveled in Europe, I had a German travel companion. I visited her family a few times and even got to meet her 80+ year old grandmother. When the granny saw me, my companion explained that I was from America. Granny asked if I had arrived on a ship. She had lived through the harsh periods after the Versailles Treaty and WWII. Even after decades of West German prosperity, she and her deceased husband used to stock hordes of food in their house, as if to prepare for some unforeseen disaster. Every time my friend visited her granny, granny always, ALWAYS had a piece of toast with jam prepared for her. Because when food is scarce, the adults had to make sure the young were fed first.

My mother always used to tell me: if you are not quicker and faster than the one next to you, and you let others get ahead because you want to be polite, then you are babo. Unfortunately, I grew up to be a typical lazy American, who takes many things for granted. Korea is now a prosperous society but the collective memory still remembers the cold, yuntan heating, and scrambling for scraps thrown out on the trash heaps of US Army bases of well fed GIs.

This overcompensative scarcity mentality will naturally manifest itself in Korea’s driving culture as well. And in education. And in Korea’s trade relations with the world. And so forth.

It has also had a huge influence in the shaping of our judiciary and government.

Yes, it has. Atheists like to claim that the Church was largely responsible for the long period of fear, ignorance and superstition known as the Dark Ages. However, it was the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther that really set the stage for the Age of Enlightenment.

so too has it been twisted to suit people’s true nature in Korea. Many of my students write about praying to Jesus to make them beautiful and rich, Korean Christians of my acquaintance tell me they pray for their or their spouses promotions and pay rises and a good friend who is a devout Christian walked out of a service here, after hearing all the materialistic crap the pastor was spouting. So basically, I can’t really seeing it having a profound effect on the Confusianistic way of thinking.

Confucianism has nothing to do with this. Confucianism is a state philosophy not a religion. There is no “Confucian god” that one prays to for material blessings.

Before Christianity, Shamanism was one of the dominant belief system in Korea. This prayerful groveling for material blessings is an aspect of Shamanism. This pre-existing religious habit simply got transferred onto Christianity. It’s called syncretism. Happened in Europe also. Where do you think the Christmas tree and the Easter Egg originated?

I think much of the unique habits and modes of thinking found only with Korean Christians is rooted in syncretism with pre-existing Shamanism.

The Italians, I’m talking about. According to your idea of the civilizing effects of Christianity, you’d expect the Italians to be a prime example of it. I don’t find that to be true. More likely it had the effect of polarizing and making worse good and bad people who were headed in their respective directions anyway.

Give a specific example of what you’re talking about.

it is the product of blending Judaic and Greek mythology that developed in an area of the world that was a cultural crossroads at the time.

Judaism was an extraordinarily innovative religion during ancient times. The idea that there is only one God? Unheard of. Judaism was also the first religion to incorporate a code of ethical conduct into its belief structure. You didn’t have that with the pagan religions.

I would differ with you about Christianity being a blend of Judaism and Greek beliefs, however. Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism (ie the arrival of the moshiah). Also, early churches struggled with the infiltration of heretical gospels such as gnosticism, which is based on the concept that the spiritual form is good and perfect while the material world is undesirable and evil, a predominant theme in ancient Greek thought.