Shaking off the Nacirema hypnosis

Lee Ha-kyung
The author is a senior columnist of the JoongAng Ilbo.

A tribe called Nacirema performs laborious and harsh daily rituals with their obsession to stave off ugliness, debility and disease. For instance, men scrape the surface of their faces with a sharp instrument, and women bake their heads in an oven. Both men and women go through a more revolting mouth-rite, sticking a bundle of hog hairs into the mouth and rubbing them off with a special magical paste. The description of the queer tribe nestled in the North American territory — whose primary focus and ceremonial activities revolve around appearance and health — is a satire on Americans of the 1950s who engage in the practices of shaving, getting a perm and tooth-brushing on a regular basis.

Nacirema — or the word “American” spelled backward — is a fictional tribe that appears in anthropologist Mitchell Miner’s sensational book “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” to satirize the prejudice and misunderstanding of a people about “other cultures.”

As Professor Edward Said observed in his 1978 book “Orientalism,” Westerners have long distanced themselves and justified colonialism and imperialism with racist or romanticized stereotypes dominating their world perspective. The Westerners have formed the belief that they rule the human civilization as the Eastern people are inferior, subservient, and in need of saving.

Under the viewpoint imposed on them, Easterners have come to see themselves in the warped eyes of Westerners. They strive to emulate Western standards. Koreans have ascended from the lowest to the highest ranks by amassing national power in their painful yet dramatic transition.

Kim Se-jik — a professor of economics and a member of the education reform task force under the Institute of Future Strategy at Seoul National University — underscores the need for creative education for college students in Korea in the first symposium hosted by the task force on Thursday at the university. [JANG JIN-YOUNG]

But the sustainability of that tribe has come under question. The growth rate that reflects the actual growth capacity of the Korean economy has been sinking since the mid-1990s. Kim Se-jik, a professor of economics at Seoul National University (SNU), observes that economic capacity has been trapped in the ominous formula of losing 1 percent every five years. Decent jobs are lost along the way, which explains why young Koreans are increasingly giving up marriages and births.

Robert Lucas Jr., a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, pointed to the successful accumulation of human capital as the reason for Korea’s fast economic advancement. Korea’s founding President Syngman Rhee institutionalized free elementary schooling in a poor, fledgling democracy. During the three-year Korean War (1950–1953), the southerners did not stop schooling under makeshift tents. Although their education involved mostly learning the ways and knowledge of Western societies, Koreans proved themselves to be fast followers and became wealthy. But copying alone cannot help their further advancement under the intellectual property walls built over the last 20 years. To stay on the forward-moving path, Koreans must turn themselves into first movers, according to Prof. Kim.

Kim is a member of the education reform task force under the Institute of Future Strategy established by former SNU president Oh Se-jung. Kim has launched creative lectures under the support of former SNU President Chung Un-chan and kept up unconventional classes for 18 years. To his students, Kim poses open questions that need more than one answer. He once asked them to imagine a currency that does not exist. If one of them had come up with a plausible monetary system before the advent of Bitcoin in 2008, the student could have become superrich, he ruminated. More than 90 percent of his students admitted that their sense of creativity improved after taking his class. The debates on open questions have helped shape the mind to respect the ideas of others.

He preaches an entire makeover of the college entrance system. Instead of a scholastic ability test system based on memorization to answer a set of questions, he argues that students should be tested on their creativity to pursue higher study to breed creative CEOs like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. If rote learning were less prioritized, Koreans would not have to spend the world’s biggest money on private education.

Creativity is also being promoted in engineering classes. Kim Yoon-young, a professor of mechanical engineering and also a member of the task force, tries to talk less to encourage students to ask questions and think for themselves on his belief that engineering is a study that advances civilization with technology.

Korea has now become a country Westerners may envy. But in order not to stay self-indulgent — and to become truly advanced culturally as well as economically — we must build a standard for our civilization with our own language through creativity instead of mimicking others. Individuality and indigenousness must be appreciated. The Huayan school of Buddhism teaches that there is a universe even in a speck of dust.

Humans feel happy when they live in a true form without caring for what others think. Creative energy simmers in a free environment. When one different from others peacefully coexists, the society can build inner unity to survive in the worst geopolitical conditions and strengthen democracy sickened by ideological disputes.

The education reform drive by SNU to breed talents who can build independent talents is a revolt against the long-standing state-guided traditions in the academy. The crusade must resonate through our society to shake itself out of the curse of tribalism. Only when that happens can we solve all the challenges lying ahead.