Max Weber: Protestant Ethic Revisited

Poor With Us Always?
Christianity Today

Lincoln Lau and Bruce Wydick tell us that "The 'Protestant Work Ethic' Really Does Fight Poverty (Christianity Today, July/August 2018). I have cut-and-pasted from their report:

[Max Weber famously argued that] Protestant religious beliefs led inevitably to Europe's work ethic, to its attitude toward wealth and specialized labor — and, in short, to modern capitalism: Europe experienced economic growth largely because of its Protestant beliefs.

A randomized controlled trial by leading development economists, among 320 villages and 6,276 low-income families in the Philippines, provides a scientifically rigorous test of the causal effects of Christian beliefs on economic outcomes . . . . The results . . . appear to confirm that the Protestant ethic causes economic change. Participants in the study who were randomly selected for a curriculum teaching Christian values subsequently showed increases in household income relative to a control group. The implications of this pioneering study could be vital for Christians and others trying to do effective work among the poor. This is a reminder that teaching Christian doctrine and values does not need to be separated from community development. In fact, combining the two may have better results.

Protestants can rejoice. There is a healthy biblical balance to the Protestant ethic (see, for example, Col. 3:23 and Eph. 4:28) . . . . At the same time, a biblical understanding of human agency, and its possibilities and responsibilities, has helped reverse the fatalism that is often associated with poverty in the developing world.

This report is interesting to me because one of the first monographs I read in grad school was Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which was also linked to the rise of science and technology in the West, partly due to the work of the sociologist Robert K. Merton. Works such as these come around and around . . .

Princelings, Princelings . . . Whom to Believe?

Bo Xilai

Wikipedia

Most of us who keep up with the news have read more than we even want to know about Bo Xilai and China's so-called 'princelings' . . . so let's read some more. Eric X. Li, a venture capitalist in Shanghai who often writes for the Korea Herald, tells us in "The myth of the princelings in China" (May 6, 2012) that there's nothing truly amiss in contemporary China:

The Bo Xilai saga of power, wealth, corruption and murder has brought the issue of China’s princelings (offspring of the Communist Party's former and current senior leaders) to the front and center of the international discourse on contemporary China . . . . Many commentators, including some leading political analysts on China, are framing the princelings as if they are . . . influencing policies in their favor and pushing for promotions of candidates who represent their interests. There is no empirical evidence to support such a conceptual framework . . . . [T]hey are nothing like . . . the oligarchs of post-Soviet Russia . . . . Among the ones who are successful, many have indeed excelled on merit [and some have] moved up the ladder through apparently only hard work and merit . . . . [U]pward mobility, both political and economic, is the underlying force of China's vitality. The current Politburo, the country’s highest ruling body, consists of 25 members. Only five of them come from backgrounds of power. The remaining 20, including the president and the premier, come from completely ordinary families. In the larger Central Committee, those with privileged backgrounds account for a much smaller percentage . . . . In economics, if one goes down the list of China’s richest, a vast majority of them are entrepreneurs who started with nothing . . . . Chinese society in general is rather sanguine about the privileges of princelings and the newly rich alike. Perhaps it is a sign of maturity . . . . A healthy society exercises moderation and tolerance towards privilege as long as mobility is sufficient, which is certainly the case for contemporary China.

Well, that's all good to know, i.e., that Chinese society is largely a meritocracy, the Communist Party, the Politburo, and the Central Committee included. Mr. Li is so persuasive -- and an expert, too, as one who has undoubtedly risen on merit alone as a venture capitalist in Shanghai -- that we probably need not venture beyond his expertise in asking questions . . . but let's do it anyway. Minzin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, tells us in "The myth of Chinese meritocracy" (JoongAng Daily, May 17, 2012) that much is amiss in contemporary China:

Political scandals sometimes perform a valuable function in . . . . debunk[ing] political myths central to the legitimacy of some regimes . . . . One enduring political myth that went down with Bo [Xilai], the former Communist Party boss of Chongqing municipality, is the notion that the Party's rule is based on meritocracy . . . . Bo personified the Chinese concept of "meritocracy" -- well-educated, intelligent, sophisticated and charming (mainly to Western executives). But, after his fall, a very different picture emerged. Aside from his alleged involvement in assorted crimes, Bo was said to be a ruthless apparatchik, endowed with an outsize ego but no real talent. His record as a local administrator was mediocre . . . . Unfortunately, Bo's case is not the exception in China, but the rule. Contrary to the prevailing perception in the West (especially among business leaders), the current Chinese government is riddled with clever apparatchiks like Bo who have acquired their positions through cheating, corruption, patronage and manipulation . . . . [M]any Chinese officials use fake or dubiously acquired academic credentials to burnish their resumes. Because educational attainment is considered a measure of merit, officials scramble to obtain advanced degrees in order to gain an advantage in the competition for power . . . . Of the 250 members of provincial Communist Party standing committees, an elite group including party chiefs and governors, 60 claim to have earned PhDs . . . . [O]nly 10 of them completed their doctoral studies before becoming government officials . . . . If so many senior Chinese officials openly flaunt fraudulent or dubious academic degrees without consequences, one can imagine how widespread other forms of corruption must be . . . . [One] common measure used to judge a Chinese official's "merit" is his ability to deliver economic growth. On the surface, this may appear to be an objective yardstick. In reality, GDP growth is as malleable as an official's academic credentials [and i]nflating local growth numbers is so endemic that reported provincial GDP growth data, when added up, are always higher than the national growth data, a mathematical impossibility . . . . [A]s competition for promotion within the Chinese bureaucracy has escalated, even fake academic credentials and GDP growth records have become insufficient to advance one's career. What increasingly determines an official's prospects for promotion is his guanxi, or connections . . . . [P]atronage, not merit, has become the most critical factor in the appointment process. For those without guanxi, the only recourse is to purchase appointments and promotions through bribes . . . . [a] practice . . . called maiguan, literally "buying office" . . . . Given such systemic debasement of merit, few Chinese citizens believe that they are governed by the best and the brightest. But astonishingly, the myth of a Chinese meritocracy remains very much alive among Westerners who have encountered impressively credentialed officials like Bo. The time has come to bury it.

Whom to believe? Personally, I trust the venture capitalist in Shanghai, Mr. Eric X. Li, who's living, working, and investing in what Alan Greenspan might call China's 'exuberant' economy, rather than some elite fellow like Professor Minxin Pei, who's living, teaching, and writing columns in the United States, a corrupt country where, as Mr. Li notes, "advantages are even institutionalized, such as legacy admission programs at U.S. Ivy League universities"

An easy call . . .

The West's Success: 'Caesarean Section'?

Julius Caesar

(Image from Wikipedia)

Not so long ago, I blogged about Niall Ferguson's book Civilization: The West and the Rest, which I've not read, of course, but I did read up on Ferguson's views and learned about his 'killer apps' -- as readers will recall.

More recently, my friend Malcolm Pollack blogged on Ferguson's report from China (which may appear in his book), posting a passage on what a scholar from the Chinese Academy of the Social Sciences wrote about the West's success:

We were asked to look into what accounted for . . . the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past 20 years we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion. Christianity.

I had posted some words on this quote myself, so I was ready to discuss it some more if anyone should express interest. Others do appear interested, for Malcolm noted that Dennis Mangan is also curious about the passage. Malcolm even posted a comment to Mangan's blog entry on the topic:

I wondered if the Chinese scholar himself had said any more about why this should be so: about what, exactly it was about Christianity that they thought best explained. As it turns out, the next line of the quoted passage reads . . . "The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this" . . . . I'd still like to know more. In what way, specifically -- by what mechanism -- did these scholars think that Christian morality accounted for the West's flamboyant (and flamboyantly capitalistic!) success?

There are two parts to this. First, the "emergence of capitalism". What about Christian morality uniquely fosters capitalism?

Then there's the "transition to democratic politics". Implicit in this is the remarkable assertion (for a Chinese scholar to make in public, at least) that democracy is a key factor in our global domination. And of course Christianity explicitly distinguishes between God and Caesar. But again: why do you suppose the Chinese Academy of the Social Science concluded that Christian morality is more conducive to democracy than to collective socialism?

I don't know why this academy drew this conclusion, but I have my own theory about how Christianity contributed to the West's secular success, and I think that this success turns upon the point noted by Malcolm, the crucial distinction between God and Caesar, so I commented:

I think that embedded in Christianity -- it's there in the foundational texts -- is a distinction between the sacred and the secular, and thus religion and state, in which the secular is allowed its legitimate place, a distinction that enabled the development of secular laws not subject to religious control, and therefore amendable according to what would work pragmatically, the long-term result being the rise of a powerful, free society that rested upon religiously based legitimacy and was therefore free from religious challenge . . . in principle.

How do other religions compare?

Islam is surely the prime example of a religion that refuses legitimacy to the secular, and look at the results.

Even Confucianism -- let's take it as a religion -- imposes a morally based system of ritual upon all of society, including the state, from which no detail escapes.

I leave a full comparison to these and other religions as homework.

One might object that this analysis implies that not Christianity, but rather its absence, is responsible for the power of the West. That objection fails to grasp that this outcome was the consequence of a deeply Christian principle, the already noted distinction between God and Caesar.

Or so I think . . .

In other words, the West's success rests upon a religiously sanctioned absence of religion, an absence that depends upon a particular religion, specifically Christianity, for the divinely granted condition that provides the absence its legitimacy, the condition being that so long as God gets what is owed Him, Caesar gets what is owed him.

The operative question is that of what, in both cases, is owed, which is where things get complicated, but in principle . . .

Dances with Viperwolves

Avatar

(Image from Wikipedia)

I took my 13-year-old daughter out yesterday afternoon to see the 3-D version of Avatar, also known as Dances with Viperwolves.

The story is already well known (so no need to summarize it here), and the characters are stereotypes (albeit interesting stereotypes with enough complexity to keep one's attention), so the real attraction is the 3-D visuality of a primeval world filled with wild nature of the sort that Kaczynski would surely love and of a motion-capture technique so highly developed that it has even succeeded in capturing and depicting lifelike eyes.

The visual effects were so good that I could almost ignore the attempts at topicality. Almost. I couldn't quite ignore Colonel Miles Quaritch's remark about using "shock and awe" to cow the native tribes of the planet Pandora into submission so that the 'sky people' (i.e., the earthlings) can obtain the mineral 'unobtainium' (as if that were possible!). I mean, in 2154 AD, some hundred and fifty years after the Iraq War, the US military is still using that failed Rumsfeldian expression? As if the military never learns anything about how to deal with counterinsurgency?

Despite the crudity of the anti-American, even anti-Western stereotypes -- especially of ruthless capitalist corporations and brutal military techniques -- I (and my daughter) enjoyed the film and just couldn't help siding with the Na'vi, the local Pandoran tribe that the main character Jake Sully in his avatar form joins.

But I suppose that I and my daughter (Sa-Rah Ahyoga Hwang) aren't entirely Western.

Regret Over Missing November 9, 1989: The Whinge of History?

Professor Niall Ferguson

(Image from Wikipedia)

Professor Niall Ferguson, a Harvard historian who knows a lot more about money than I do, also knows a lot more about history than I, for he knows that the fall of the Berlin Wall, celebrated for its twentieth anniversary this past week, was not the world-shaking event that it's commonly thought to be:

Was the fall of the Berlin Wall not really History with a capital H, but just news with a lower-case n -- a wonderful story for journalists but, 20 years on, actually not that big a deal? Could it be that what happened 10 years earlier, in the annus mirabilis 1979, was the real historical turning point?

Ferguson may sound as though he's merely raising the question here, but he's already persuaded himself, or he wouldn't be writing this article, "The Year the World Really Changed" (November 16, 2009), for Time Magazine.

So when did the world really change? Ten years earlier:

[T]he events of 10 years earlier -- in 1979 -- surely have a better claim to being truly historic. Just think what was happening in the world 30 years ago. The Soviets began their policy of self-destruction by invading Afghanistan. The British started the revival of free-market economics in the West by electing Margaret Thatcher. Deng Xiaoping set China on a new economic course by visiting the United States and seeing for himself what the free market can achieve. And, of course, the Iranians ushered in the new era of clashing civilizations by overthrowing the shah and proclaiming an Islamic Republic.

He has a point -- or, more precisely, four of them, which he emphatically expounds upon:

Today it is the Americans who now find themselves in Afghanistan, fighting the sons of the people they once armed. It is the free-market model of Thatcher and Reagan that seems to lie in ruins, in the wake of the biggest financial crisis since the Depression. Meanwhile, Deng's heirs are rapidly gaining on a sluggish American hyperpower, with Goldman Sachs forecasting that China's GDP could be the biggest in the world by 2027. Finally, the most terrifying legacy of 1979 remains the radical Islamism that inspires not only Iran's leaders, but also a complex and only partly visible network of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers around the world.

Ferguson is obviously a pessimist, intent on proving that the world is far worse off today than twenty years ago and that it is worse because of watershed events thirty years ago. But I'm willing to consider his position for we have something in common. Both of us missed the breaching of the Berlin Wall, a gap in our life experiences that I, for my part, have long regretted and that Ferguson, for his part, initially admits to having regretted:

What exactly was the historical significance of Nov. 9, 1989? Having spent much of the summer of that year in Berlin, I have long bitterly regretted that I was not there to join in the party the night the wall came down. I mean, what kind of an aspirant historian misses history being made?

But rather than wallow in the mire of bottomless regret, he constructs a ladder of interlocking counterfactual questions and climbs out. I should perhaps borrow his ladder and climb out as well.

I can then stop kicking myself for going to bed instead of to Berlin that Tuebingen night of November 9, 1989, for like Ferguson, I didn't miss history after all.

Liao Yibai: "Top Secret Hamburger"

Top Secret Hamburger

Liao Yibai

(Image from Mike Weiss Gallery)

I learned about the Chinese artist Liao Yibai by reading a New York Times article reprinted in yesterday's International Herald Tribune as I was riding Seoul Subway Line 6 and headed for Bonghwasan Station . . . not that my geographical whereabouting makes any difference to what I was reading, but it does give my report that anecdotal feeling, that raw sort of graininess so quintessentially bloggy.

Anyway, I'd never heard of Liao Yibai, but he has a fascinating life that began in a most unusual way:

"I was born, unfortunately, in a top-secret missile factory during the Cold War."

You can read online about this life of Liao in Dan Levin's article, "The Fantasies of a Cold War Child," available on The New York Times website for May 7, 2009. Levin writes of Liao growing up in a factory that came to inspire his modern art in a manner rather different than Warhol's or Cosmo's factory inspired artists:

The son of a prized cruise-missile engineer, Mr. Liao grew up playing with machine guns, surrounded by speakers blaring Cultural Revolution propaganda by day and air raid drills by night. Almost as frequent were the accidents that sent shards of tools and weaponry exploding into the sky.

"They looked like beautiful fireworks,” he said. “Except our fireworks killed people."

Even the "Top Secret Hamburger" shown above derived from Mr. Liao's childhood experience in the factory:

In kindergarten Mr. Liao began learning the ways of the wicked Imperialists, including the notion that American and Taiwanese children had no food or clothes. He learned one English word a day, but when his teachers taught the word "hamburger," they were unable to explain its meaning, only that it symbolized America's "decadent and evil nature."

When a classmate's father made a trip to the United States, the children begged him to bring back a sample of the mysterious dish. Upon his return, the scientist called the youngsters into his home and, after closing the curtains, pulled out from his suitcase an envelope emblazoned with the words "top secret." Inside was a hamburger.

"It looked like an alien," Mr. Liao recalled, adding that the rotten burger "tasted disgusting, so we believed our teacher that capitalism was horrible."

Reading that anecdote, I had to laugh out loud (disturbing my fellow passengers, undoubtedly, but they had opted to sit next to a foreigner, so what could they expect?). This symbol of America's "decadent and evil nature" was apparently a McDonald's hamburger, which is indeed -- as everyone knows -- the symbol of American consumerism, capitalism, industrialism, imperialism, colonialism, anti-environmentalism, and . . . um, "dead-end-jobism." In fact, it's more than a symbol! It's a synecdoche! Every McDonald's hamburger is a propaganda piece from America, and every McDonald's outlet is a little bit of American territory. Like an embassy or a consulate. That's why any anti-American demonstration worth its salt will have mustered up its spirits to march into a McDonald's franchise and trash the place, taking care to pick up a few decadent hamburgers as evidence on the way out. Maybe some fries, too.

As for Mr. Liao, his artworks are as hot as McDonald's hamburgers these days, "with collectors snapping up sculptures based merely on conversations and photos," so perhaps the popularity of his "Top Secret Hamburger" implies the 'decadence' of American capitalism playfully expressed through the 'decadence' of modern art.

Edward Friedman: "Living Without Freedom in China"

Huang Di

A Communist Hero?

(Image from Wikipedia)

I'm on the e-list for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) -- partly because one of my former Berkeley professors, Walter McDougall, heads the place -- so I regularly get interesting poli-sci documents dealing with themes relevant to U.S. foreign policy. The FPRI is a conservative institute, but less of a neoconservative sort and more of the paleoconservative type, McDougall being one of the latter.

Yesterday, an informative article on China arrived: "Living Without Freedom in China," Edward Friedman, The Newsletter of FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, June 2007, Vol. 12, No. 20.

The Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education was set up by the FPRI in 1990 and aims at developing international and civic literacy among Americans, but all of my non-American readers are free to read and learn as well. Of course, only we Americans are so ignorant as to need such a newsletter...

Anyway, Friedman's article is interesting because it begins by acknowledging a problem -- or, rather, a couple of problems -- confronting us in our attempt to understand China.

First, as the article says, "[i]t’s not easy for American students to know what it means to live without freedom." I think that this point is entirely correct, and it's true not only of American students but of students in any free society, and that would probably include younger Korean students, who recall only a democratic Korea.

Second, and more to the point of the article:

The hardest place to understand what the lack of freedom means is China, which is nothing like the Stalin model or Cuba or North Korea. It’s by no stretch of the imagination a totalitarian society. In post-Mao China, Chinese travel abroad in huge numbers. The country has the fifth largest tourist population in the world, on its way to being number one. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are abroad; in internet use, China is about to overtake the U.S. as number one in the world. It’s a market society, brutally competitive; the economy is less state-owned than France or Austria's, for example. Life is not dominated by communist block units; you can buy your own house or car, there's no forced labor. [Well ... none aside from the occasional slave forced to work in a brick kiln.] You can choose your physician freely; most young Chinese would say they live in a free, democratic society.

For those of us expats living here in South Korea and looking north at Kim Jong Il-Land, North Korea's conditions can indeed make the enormous Chinese empire to our east look like the model of a free society. Given this contrast, Friedman asks:

So what does it mean to say that Chinese people live without freedom? First, it is a brilliant system at making people complicit with the unfreedom. For days after the June 4, 1989, massacre in Beijing of democracy supporters headquartered in Tiananmen Square, there was great tension in the city between people who live there and the occupying army. How did the party respond? Teachers were ordered to teach their students a new song: "The Army loves the people, the people love the Army." Parents couldn't say the song was untrue lest their children repeat this back at school. You can't bring up your children the way you want to.

Okay, we understand that this was bad, but Tiananmen was nearly twenty years ago, and China is certainly freer now, some two decades later. Yes, says Friedman, but the Party remains in power, and despite China's remarkable economic development into a capitalist society, it remains politically unfree, and this has consequences that the Chinese live with daily and that have even begun to affect the world outside of China:

China is not the worst stable authoritarian regime in the world: a North Korean might consider it free. Even foreigners who go to North Korea and then come back to China feel they are returning to a free country. But you get faced every day with decisions that bring it home to you that you're not. If your child is ill, should you go to the pharmacy and buy some medicine? Of course, but medicines are often frauds in China. There have been cases where baby formula is bogus and children have died from receiving no nutrition. China has a ruthless free market, no regulation, no safety standards, no FDA, no CDC, no NIH. It's also the world leader for people dying in industrial accidents, and about 400,000 each year die from drinking the water, which is unpotable. A Chinese journalist recently went to 10 Chinese hospitals wanting to get his blood tested. So he complained of certain aches and pains that he knew would cause them to test his blood. But he didn't give them his blood, he carried in a thermos with tea and poured that into the cups. Eight of the ten reported to him that he had the most serious blood disease and that it would cost them endless money for treatment.

This poses a problem for China, and one might expect it to put pressure on the Communist Party. Doubtless, it does. How, then, is the Party responding? By resurrecting a very authoritarian Confucianism:

[I]t's pushing essentially its own state religion, a combination of Han chauvinism, in which Chinese worship the yellow emperor [sic.: Yellow Emperor, or Huang Di (黃帝)], and an authoritarian Confucianism. The state is building Confucian temples. The vision is that China is going to explain its extraordinary rise to its own people and to the world as the result of its unique ethical religion, its Confucianism. It's going to spread Confucian societies all around the world, it's going to teach everybody that China produces a better quality of people because it has this moral authority and all others are inferior. Confucianism is the only way to raise people, and the world is properly hierarchically ordered with Confucian Chinese at the center of it.

Confucianism as an ethical system has some merit and can produce virtuous individuals, but Friedman is speaking of Confucianism in the service of an authoritarian state, and this poses problems because it is means that Confucianism is being used to mold Chinese nationalism with the aim of suppressing dissent and encouraging suspicion of freedom:

The Chinese regime has fostered a nationalism to trump democracy. People are taught that they are threatened by democracy, that democracy would make people weak. Party propaganda has it, "How did Rwanda occur? Because they tried to build a democracy. If the Hutus had simply imposed their will, they never would have had that problem. If it moves in a democratic direction, China is going to fall apart; it will be like what happened to Russia, to Yugoslavia. Do you want to end up like Chechnya and Bosnia? That's what the Americans really want. You are fortunate to be a Chinese living in an ethical, authoritarian system." The TV will show pictures of say the Los Angeles riots, the Sudan, and people are made frightened and confused. They're proud to be Chinese and want to raise ethical kids. They want a country they can be proud of, certainly not like American kids. The Chinese are taught that American youth are smoking at an early age, use pot, have babies in their teens, watch pornography on TV, spread AIDS, get divorced, and don't care what happens to their elderly parents. Why would you want to live in such an immoral way? This propaganda seems to work with many Chinese.

The upshot? Friedman offers this scenario:

So what is growing in China is an authoritarian, patriotic, racially defined, Confucian Chinese project which is going to be a formidable challenge not just to the United States but, I think, to democracy, freedom, and human rights all around the world. China is going to seem quite attractive to many people. That is why it is so very important to understand what living without freedom really means.

Well, "an authoritarian, patriotic, racially defined, Confucian Chinese" nation may be what the Communist Party would like to see develop, but some things are going to work against this.

Friedman notes the large numbers of tourists and students that China sends abroad. These people will have tasted more freedom than China offers, and they might push for more of this same freedom within China itself.

The Confucianism that the Party is pushing from the top down will find itself in competition with other religions, such as the phenomenal growth of Christianity and Buddhism, so state-ordered Confucianism might not be so easily grafted onto the populace as the authorities hope.

The capitalism that China has adopted requires a freer flow of information than is currently allowed, and China is currently learning some hard lessons. The pet-food scandal in the U.S. and medical scandals throughout the world have been traced to the use of tainted or worthless Chinese products, and this makes consumers outside of China less willing to purchase goods from China. As the Chinese become aware of this problem, they may press the state for more free expression and actually succeed because the necessity for freer information will be obvious to all.

China, therefore, might develop in a more democratic direction ... but things could instead go horribly wrong, and that's something that I think about, living here in the lengthening shadow of a rising China.

"Ontology, a branch of philosophy based on capitalism..."

René Descartes's Illustration of Ontological Dualism

(A Self-Image from Wikipedia)

I learn something new every day. Just yesterday, I happened upon an article, "One's true image is what others see," by Lee Se-jung, business news editor at the JoongAng Ilbo. Lee has been reading some writings by Sungkonghoe University Professor Shin Young-bok, a man who had the unfortunate experience of being arrested by the Park Chung-hee regime in 1968 and sentenced to life imprisonment for "being involved in a political party that a North Korean spy had formed to make South Korea communist."

The prison didn't take all of his life -- after all, he's been teaching at Sungkonghoe University -- but it took twenty years until his release on August 15, 1988. The very next year, he began teaching at Sungkonghoe, where he is "an expert on Marxist economics and ... Eastern classical literature as well."

Hmmm...

Well, what does Professor Shin have to teach us? I don't directly know. But here's what business news editor Lee summarizes:

Probably because he has gone through all manners of hardship, Professor Shin emphasizes relations with other people. He goes beyond ontology, whose goal is to maximize each individual's or each group's interests. He instead emphasizes relations and argues that relations with others and other creatures or objects are the core of human life.

Ontology, a branch of philosophy based on capitalism, always demands competition and winning. Mr. Shin maintains that an emphasis on relationships is a new alternative to build a more humane society. He also explains that a basic factor of European modern history is ontology, while Asian society is based on relationships.

Ontology is based on capitalism, demands competition and winning, and aims to maximize interests?

Sigh...

Professor Shin may be an admirable man, but if Lee's summary is accurate, then his students have some un-learning to do.

Ontology is not based on capitalism, does not demand competition and winning, and does not aim to maximize interests.

That would be rational actor theory.

Ontology, rather, is the study of being or existence.

If that sounds rather abstract, it should, for ontology is abstract, so abstract that any links between its abstract, etherial realm and the concrete, material realm of competing, winning, and maximizing interests will be rather tenuous.

As for the remark that "a basic factor of European modern history is ontology, while Asian society is based on relationships," this sounds like a variant on the claims asserting the superiority of group-based "Asian values" over individualistic Western values, which we heard a lot about back in the 1990s ... until the market crash of 1997. But Shin also seems to be taking a page from the volumes of criticism indigenous to the modern West itself that blame, for instance, Descartes's ontological dualism for everything from the mistreatment of animals to the evils of capitalism.

Korea's relationship-based society, of course, treats animals very well and is not at all competitive.