one expat's life in Korea
Thursday, August 15, 2002
Monday, August 07, 2000
Monday, January 10, 2000
Community is the Key to Happiness
For my first six months in Korea, I had a really great roommate named Dave, who had a terrible sense of direction, but liked to go for long rambling walks. He was a good friend during my first year. Then Dave went back to New York to start medical school, and starting with Dave's exit, over the next three months, all of the people who had sustained me through my initial Korea culture shock, disappeared. By halfway through my second year, I had experienced a second complete turnover in my social circles. It seemed like every time I got together with friends, it was either a house-warming or a goodbye party.
Coming to another country, and being immersed in a new culture, is an overwhelming experience: Korea is different, relentlessly different, from my home country, and it will not stop being Korea just because I need a break. This can be a good thing. A lot of expats made the choice to come here because they wanted to get outside their old back-home comfort zones. The first few months of the expat experience especially are a real stretching experience for many of us, adjusting in what seems like a comfort-free zone.
Every expat develops ways to cope with the non-stop otherness. Most of us start out by leaning hard on life back home. Many fresh-off-the-plane expats I know spend a lot of time writing or phoning home, and seeking out the foods and activities they did back home. I did this, too: for my first four months, a fast-food burger set and an English movie was the echo of home I needed to get through a rough week. The problem is that people finding comfort this way may never be more than visitors here. Sure, they lived here, technically, but Korea was never their home, and they always had one foot out the door, either backward, planted in the place they left, or forward, leaning toward the next step before even finishing this one.
There is nothing wrong with being a visitor in Korea: for some expats, Korea will never mean more to them than a paycheck to send home, a way to pay down the student loan, to see the world before settling down back home, or to save up before another leg of their trip around the world. For visitors, the constant coming and going of friends might be no big deal. However, there are some people who have their reasons to make Korea their home, who invest here, and for them, the revolving door can be frustrating.
Humans are intensely communal creatures, and for many of us, making connections with like-minded people adds a vital kind of meaning to our lives. The good news for expats in Korea is that there are more people now, with more diverse interests, staying here for longer periods, than ever before. Thanks to the internet and the community pages of local papers and magazines, there are many more opportunities to find kindred spirits, and connect in meaningful ways, than there were when I first came.
In this column, I hope to highlight some of the communities that expats use to connect with each other, adding meaning and value to their experience in Korea. If you know about, or are a member of a community where expats meet, connect, support each other, drop me a line at roboseyo@gmail.com with the word "community" in the subject line, and tell me when and where you meet, and why you think I should feature your group.
By Rob Ouwehand /Networking
See Rob Ouwehand's blog at roboseyo.blogspot.com. E-mail roboseyo@gmail.com -- Ed.
2009.01.09
Sunday, January 02, 2000
Why Modern Religion Deserves Richard Dawkins
As you know, Richard Dawkins wrote a book called "The God Delusion," a fairly emphatic attack on organized religion and theism. I grew up in the Christian faith, so this kind of thing catches my attention. I read the book, thought about it a lot, and wrote a series of essays.
Now I'm just a guy, nobody special; there's no real reason you should listen to me, but maybe you'll read something you haven't thought of before. Here are some of my thoughts.
This is the table of contents for my series.
A prologue about Heaven and Hell (not part of the main series, but these thoughts also came out of reading Dawkins.)
Why Modern Religion Deserves Richard Dawkins
Part One: Parameters
Why I'm writing, and what I am and am not trying to do.
Part Two: Creation/Evolution, Science and Anti-intellectualism
Background and The Essay
Part Three: The Straw Man We Gave Him
Background and The Essay
Part Four: The Crisis In Moral Authority
Background (Times Change, So Can We) and The Essay
Hope you enjoy them!
(btw: thanks to the Hominid for the kudos!)
Now I'm just a guy, nobody special; there's no real reason you should listen to me, but maybe you'll read something you haven't thought of before. Here are some of my thoughts.
This is the table of contents for my series.
A prologue about Heaven and Hell (not part of the main series, but these thoughts also came out of reading Dawkins.)
Why Modern Religion Deserves Richard Dawkins
Part One: Parameters
Why I'm writing, and what I am and am not trying to do.
Part Two: Creation/Evolution, Science and Anti-intellectualism
Background and The Essay
Part Three: The Straw Man We Gave Him
Background and The Essay
Part Four: The Crisis In Moral Authority
Background (Times Change, So Can We) and The Essay
Hope you enjoy them!
(btw: thanks to the Hominid for the kudos!)
Dawkins: Companion to Part 4: Times Change. Keep Up! or Admitting The Reality Of Memetic Natural Selection
Soundtrack time: Tom Waits: Chocolate Jesus
(an immaculate confection)
This is the companion piece to my essay here: how to regain a relevant voice.
To read the other essays in my Richard Dawkins series:
The previous essay. Table of contents. The next essay.
Ever since humans started thinking, ideas have smacked up against each other, like rocks in a tumbler, or plants and animals competing for resources on the savannah; eventually, the better ideas gained consensus, while the weaker ones faded into irrelevance. Though they forced him to drink poison, Socrates' ideas have survived, and their worries that he corrupted young minds couldn't stop them from spreading. It's impossible to keep a good idea down. It's also impossible to prop up a weak idea indefinitely. The great rock-tumbler of ideas will eventually grind weaker ideas into dust, though the excision might be painful, and even bloody (those remaining despots sure kick up a fuss, even as the free world makes them less and less relevant).
Dawkins talks about this when he discusses the changing moral zeitgeist; he even has a name for these little units of information and ideas that circulate, combine with other ideas, change with the times, or fade away: he calls them memes. The idea that “All men are created equal” became an important meme in the American, and French Revolutions. Its influence grew, and led to the civil rights and suffragist movements. Like creatures in an ecosystem, memes generally follow the principles of survival of the fittest: they form symbiotic alliances with other memes (for example, the way guilt and grace make such a harmonious pair in atonement theology), and sometimes, the way a drought, or a pack of wolves culls the herd of its sickly or unfit deer, some idea comes along with the force of a wrecking ball, and forces every other meme to either adapt or perish.
Like every other institution, religious prinicples have followed the same Memetic Natural selection; what we accept as religious truth is much more fluid than we realize. For example, the idea of the rapture and tribulation actually only became widespread in the 1800s, and you can bet that while before the revolution, the French clergy demonstrated biblically that the people needed to obey the monarch God had placed above them, after the guillotine blades started dropping, they demonstrated biblically that liberty, equality and fraternity were, and had always been, precious Christian values. The way the holy texts are taught and religion is practiced has changed constantly through the ages, to suit different cultures at different times.
If you don't think religious practice has changed over the years, or that religious thought has been subject to the same memetic natural selection as the rest of human thought, ask yourself when you last saw a witch trial, or paid an indulgence to get your Grandpa out of purgatory, or heard someone say that God made whites the rightful masters of other races, as shown in the story of Noah and his three sons (Genesis 9).
In fact, two of the best examples of real boss wrecking-ball memes were Martin Luther's 95 Theses, and the teachings of Jesus Christ. It was a painful and bloody process for Luther's 95 theses, and the memes that followed from them, to trim all the fat out of the complacent, corrupt European church, but the church was much healthier in the end, and the Protestant and Catholic churches have kept each other accountable ever since. Jesus deliberately taught in the "you have heard it said. . . but I say to you" format, like a leopard-meme pointing out the fattest, laziest, sickliest deer-memes in the herd one by one, saying, "First I'm gonna get that one, then that one, then that one. . . " It was a bloody and ugly transition for the early Christians, too, before Jesus and Paul's teachings started gaining widespread consent.
All these words to establish: the world changes. Organizations and institutions and prevailing thought patterns change, constantly. Yeah, the basic human dilemmas are same in a lot of ways as they always have been, human nature remains muddled and imperfect, but generally, as time goes by, we seem to be getting closer to the mark, both in organized religions and in society at large. Whether you credit it to the Holy Spirit (or the will of Allah, or the continual karmic purification of souls, or what have you)'s guidance, or (if you aren't into that Higher/Other Power stuff) to the natural process of memetic selection, the conclusion is the same: religious practice is just as liquid as the rest of human social behaviour. It would help our case to acknowledge that, and maybe to trust that the flexing and changing of ideas is generally moving (with hiccups, snares, and the occasional rabbit trail) in a consistent direction toward increased freedom and empowerment of all people.
When a set of memes gets too rigid or inflexible (like, say, the idea of a Monarch's right to absolute power), it eventually gets discarded, like an organism that refuses to adapt to its environment: it simply can't compete with other, more supple frameworks.
Why is this a challenge for the modern religion?
As more people gain access to education and information, the speed at which prevailing ideas change increases. Every time communication speeds up, society changes faster, as ideas take less time to disseminate and gain consensus. That rock tumbler is rattling around now at a speed and ferocity that would shock scholars from the days when monks spent years copying Bible manuscripts, and it took decades or even generations for some ideas to travel from a philosopher-monk in Lisbon to a Sufi mystic in Damascus, or vice versa.
Information travels so quickly these days that religious authorities can no longer control, or spin it the way they used to when they basically controlled every aspect of the information infrastructure. Moreover, people are no longer WILLING to submit to some authoritative Source Of Wisdom: this is the completion of the movement started (in the west) with the Gutenberg Printing Press and the Protestant Reformation: the reformation was Martin Luther saying, "I don't WANT to just take it from the Pope; I'd rather read the bible myself." Now, that preference to see for ourselves has reached its logical conclusion: countries where almost everyone has the education and access to check their own references, and test what they've been taught, the same way Luther did.
Yeah, in the days when the priest was the only educated person in the village, it made perfect sense for him to be the main authority on morals and everything else that involved ideas instead of farm implements and brains instead of blacksmiths' bellows, but these days, everybody has access to the same information, and many of us have been trained to understand and interpret it. It's natural that we're a little less willing to let somebody say, "this is the meaning of all the facts," than we were back when the guy saying "I'll tell you how it is" was the only person in town who'd finished university.
Next Obvious Truth: knowledge of all kinds is decentralizing, and institutions that do not realize that will find themselves circumvented and ignored, like a boulder in a river that used to be a stream, complaining that it no longer changes the whole stream's course the way it used to.
So what does that have to do with the current attack on faith?
Well, the first step organized religions must take in finding a viable framework for interacting in a relevant way with society at large is to embrace the fact we have changed to suit the spirit of the times before, and CAN CHANGE AGAIN without losing our identity. Next, we need to recognize that we are no longer considered the main authority for truth, the way we were back before public education, science, sociology, modern democracy, and clinical psychology were invented, and added their two, four, six, or seventeen trillion bits to the discussion. We are one of many voices competing for attention, in the information age, and the sooner we come to grips with that, and start to adjust, the better off we'll be.
On to Essay 4, proper: The Crisis in Moral Authority
To read the other essays in my Richard Dawkins series:
The previous essay. Table of contents. The next essay.
(an immaculate confection)
This is the companion piece to my essay here: how to regain a relevant voice.
To read the other essays in my Richard Dawkins series:
The previous essay. Table of contents. The next essay.
Ever since humans started thinking, ideas have smacked up against each other, like rocks in a tumbler, or plants and animals competing for resources on the savannah; eventually, the better ideas gained consensus, while the weaker ones faded into irrelevance. Though they forced him to drink poison, Socrates' ideas have survived, and their worries that he corrupted young minds couldn't stop them from spreading. It's impossible to keep a good idea down. It's also impossible to prop up a weak idea indefinitely. The great rock-tumbler of ideas will eventually grind weaker ideas into dust, though the excision might be painful, and even bloody (those remaining despots sure kick up a fuss, even as the free world makes them less and less relevant).
Dawkins talks about this when he discusses the changing moral zeitgeist; he even has a name for these little units of information and ideas that circulate, combine with other ideas, change with the times, or fade away: he calls them memes. The idea that “All men are created equal” became an important meme in the American, and French Revolutions. Its influence grew, and led to the civil rights and suffragist movements. Like creatures in an ecosystem, memes generally follow the principles of survival of the fittest: they form symbiotic alliances with other memes (for example, the way guilt and grace make such a harmonious pair in atonement theology), and sometimes, the way a drought, or a pack of wolves culls the herd of its sickly or unfit deer, some idea comes along with the force of a wrecking ball, and forces every other meme to either adapt or perish.
Like every other institution, religious prinicples have followed the same Memetic Natural selection; what we accept as religious truth is much more fluid than we realize. For example, the idea of the rapture and tribulation actually only became widespread in the 1800s, and you can bet that while before the revolution, the French clergy demonstrated biblically that the people needed to obey the monarch God had placed above them, after the guillotine blades started dropping, they demonstrated biblically that liberty, equality and fraternity were, and had always been, precious Christian values. The way the holy texts are taught and religion is practiced has changed constantly through the ages, to suit different cultures at different times.
If you don't think religious practice has changed over the years, or that religious thought has been subject to the same memetic natural selection as the rest of human thought, ask yourself when you last saw a witch trial, or paid an indulgence to get your Grandpa out of purgatory, or heard someone say that God made whites the rightful masters of other races, as shown in the story of Noah and his three sons (Genesis 9).
In fact, two of the best examples of real boss wrecking-ball memes were Martin Luther's 95 Theses, and the teachings of Jesus Christ. It was a painful and bloody process for Luther's 95 theses, and the memes that followed from them, to trim all the fat out of the complacent, corrupt European church, but the church was much healthier in the end, and the Protestant and Catholic churches have kept each other accountable ever since. Jesus deliberately taught in the "you have heard it said. . . but I say to you" format, like a leopard-meme pointing out the fattest, laziest, sickliest deer-memes in the herd one by one, saying, "First I'm gonna get that one, then that one, then that one. . . " It was a bloody and ugly transition for the early Christians, too, before Jesus and Paul's teachings started gaining widespread consent.
All these words to establish: the world changes. Organizations and institutions and prevailing thought patterns change, constantly. Yeah, the basic human dilemmas are same in a lot of ways as they always have been, human nature remains muddled and imperfect, but generally, as time goes by, we seem to be getting closer to the mark, both in organized religions and in society at large. Whether you credit it to the Holy Spirit (or the will of Allah, or the continual karmic purification of souls, or what have you)'s guidance, or (if you aren't into that Higher/Other Power stuff) to the natural process of memetic selection, the conclusion is the same: religious practice is just as liquid as the rest of human social behaviour. It would help our case to acknowledge that, and maybe to trust that the flexing and changing of ideas is generally moving (with hiccups, snares, and the occasional rabbit trail) in a consistent direction toward increased freedom and empowerment of all people.
When a set of memes gets too rigid or inflexible (like, say, the idea of a Monarch's right to absolute power), it eventually gets discarded, like an organism that refuses to adapt to its environment: it simply can't compete with other, more supple frameworks.
Why is this a challenge for the modern religion?
As more people gain access to education and information, the speed at which prevailing ideas change increases. Every time communication speeds up, society changes faster, as ideas take less time to disseminate and gain consensus. That rock tumbler is rattling around now at a speed and ferocity that would shock scholars from the days when monks spent years copying Bible manuscripts, and it took decades or even generations for some ideas to travel from a philosopher-monk in Lisbon to a Sufi mystic in Damascus, or vice versa.
Information travels so quickly these days that religious authorities can no longer control, or spin it the way they used to when they basically controlled every aspect of the information infrastructure. Moreover, people are no longer WILLING to submit to some authoritative Source Of Wisdom: this is the completion of the movement started (in the west) with the Gutenberg Printing Press and the Protestant Reformation: the reformation was Martin Luther saying, "I don't WANT to just take it from the Pope; I'd rather read the bible myself." Now, that preference to see for ourselves has reached its logical conclusion: countries where almost everyone has the education and access to check their own references, and test what they've been taught, the same way Luther did.
Yeah, in the days when the priest was the only educated person in the village, it made perfect sense for him to be the main authority on morals and everything else that involved ideas instead of farm implements and brains instead of blacksmiths' bellows, but these days, everybody has access to the same information, and many of us have been trained to understand and interpret it. It's natural that we're a little less willing to let somebody say, "this is the meaning of all the facts," than we were back when the guy saying "I'll tell you how it is" was the only person in town who'd finished university.
Next Obvious Truth: knowledge of all kinds is decentralizing, and institutions that do not realize that will find themselves circumvented and ignored, like a boulder in a river that used to be a stream, complaining that it no longer changes the whole stream's course the way it used to.
So what does that have to do with the current attack on faith?
Well, the first step organized religions must take in finding a viable framework for interacting in a relevant way with society at large is to embrace the fact we have changed to suit the spirit of the times before, and CAN CHANGE AGAIN without losing our identity. Next, we need to recognize that we are no longer considered the main authority for truth, the way we were back before public education, science, sociology, modern democracy, and clinical psychology were invented, and added their two, four, six, or seventeen trillion bits to the discussion. We are one of many voices competing for attention, in the information age, and the sooner we come to grips with that, and start to adjust, the better off we'll be.
On to Essay 4, proper: The Crisis in Moral Authority
To read the other essays in my Richard Dawkins series:
The previous essay. Table of contents. The next essay.
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