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I haven’t read any books on Korean sociology, politics or history. However, I’ve been living here for a year, have had plenty of different Korean friends including a girlfriend, and I’ve spent time engaging with other expats and Koreans about the things I’m about to discuss. A big place where I’ve done the latter is Waygook.org, a discussion board for foreigners in Korea, particularly English teachers. This board is divided between the sharing of teaching materials, practical discussions about where to get a credit card, how best to book a holiday from Korea to Thailand and the like, and discussions of Korean culture and sociology (politics is limited due to the language barrier). A lot of the posts on Waygook.org are just disgruntled expats venting their culture shock over and over again. However, there are also insightful posters who comment intelligently on the culture they are living in. And the repetitive disgruntled posts are a way of determining some patterns.

That’s my credentials and my data, such as it is. I intend to first describe some things about Korean contemporary culture that the English-speaking world might learn from. Then I will talk about Korea’s problems. Unfortunately, the latter list will be longer. It’s risky to say, given my situation as an expat who still experiences culture shock from time to time, with no academic experience in sociology. But I cannot escape my judgement that South Korea is in so many ways totally insane, as compared with the English-speaking world.

Let me say something only very briefly about what one might do once one has reached this conclusion. One way to go is to excuse Korea on the basis that it has developed incredibly fast over the past fifty years, and so people like to say that Korea has a first world economy but a third world culture and the generally accepted ethical values are third world. I’m no cultural relativist, but this is just a very simple paternalism. I’m not aware of a convincing argument that Western unadulterated capitalism and consumerism are strongly linked to a development in ethics. A more convincing line is that Korea has tried to adopt a huge amount of Western modernity without thought for how this might fit with its deeply Eastern culture. It is often said that Japan managed to avoid this, picking and choosing from the West without inviting huge clashes with the East. But that’s all I feel able to say. I don’t want to speculate far beyond my own experiences of Korea, but I did want to set this paternalism aside.

I will speak both of the English-speaking world and the Western world. When I talk about the former I will be basing what I say on my experience of being brought up in Britain. When I talk about the latter I will mainly be thinking about Western ethical values developed through the tradition of Western philosophy, rather than elements of, say, non-English-speaking European culture of which I know almost nothing.

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