{"id":4616,"date":"2019-02-10T09:36:21","date_gmt":"2019-02-10T17:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4616"},"modified":"2019-02-10T09:37:06","modified_gmt":"2019-02-10T17:37:06","slug":"korea-blog-reading-tocqueville-in-korea-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4616","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: Reading Tocqueville in Korea (Part Two)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Alexis de Tocqueville made his transatlantic journey in 1831 in order to discover what made America different from other countries, especially his native France and the rest of \u201cOld World\u201d Europe. \u201cOn my arrival in the United States, it was the religious atmosphere which first struck me,\u201d he writes in the first volume of Democracy in America<\/em>, published in 1835. \u201cAmericans so completely identify the spirit of Christianity with freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive the one without the other.\u201d He saw \u201cAmericans coming together to dispatch priests to the new states in the West in order to found schools and churches\u201d and met \u201cwealthy New Englanders who left their native land in order to establish the fundamentals of Christianity and freedom on the banks of the Missouri or in the prairies of Illinois. In this way, in the United States, religious zeal constantly gains vitality from the fires of patriotism.\u201d<\/p>

When I first started taking notice of Korea, gleaning what I could from the occasional visit to Korean restaurants and Korean-American classmates\u2019 houses, I sensed how different a culture it really seemed to possess from that of, say, Japan and China, the countries with which Westerners tended to conflated it. Certain differences in sensibilities and aesthetics quickly make themselves felt (even someone completely ignorant of east Asian languages can usually identify Korean script, \u201cthe one that has circles\u201d), but nothing stands out quite as much as the prevalence in Korea of Christianity. A Westerner visiting Korea for the first time might expect some kind of theocracy, extrapolating from the enthusiasm so many Koreans profess for the church back in the West, but in reality Protestants and Catholics (a distinction insisted upon much more fiercely than in America today) account for about 30 percent of the South Korean population combined.
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By the standards of this part of the world, 30 percent is an impressive figure, but it might nevertheless strike our Westerner in Korea as a serious underestimate, especially if he arrives by night to see all the neon crosses that burn red along the Seoul skyline. There aren\u2019t as many neon crosses as there used to be, but culturally, Christianity in Korea still punches well above its weight, stop just short though it may of Tocqueville\u2019s observation, made in the second volume of Democracy in America<\/em>, of the its being \u201cintimately linked to all national habits and all the emotions which one\u2019s native country arouses\u201d and ruling \u201cnot only like a philosophy taken up after evaluation but like a religion believed without discussion.\u201d But since America towered as an example of national success \u2014 and in a way, an object of worship itself \u2014 all throughout Korea\u2019s development in the second half of the 20th century, its trifecta of Christianity, democracy, and capitalism must have looked like a magic formula to banish privation and humiliation to the past.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a> (and part one here<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alexis de Tocqueville made his transatlantic journey in 1831 in order to discover what made America different from other countries, especially his native France and the rest of \u201cOld World\u201d Europe. \u201cOn my arrival in the United States, it was the religious atmosphere which first struck me,\u201d he writes in the first volume of Democracy in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4616"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4619,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4616\/revisions\/4619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}