By Michael Breen
Invest Korea Journal
May-June 2005

Confucius gets a bad rap.

When was the last time you heard someone complain, "Oh, that's so Zoroastrian." Or blame Buddha for bad stuff?

But Confucius always gets it in the eye for everything that Koreans themselves think is wrong with Korea.

He's accused of being behind discrimination against women. He's responsible for forced deference to undeserving elders. Authoritarianism and corruption? Blame Mr.C.You name it, it's his fault. Who rewards and promotes people according to their age and length of service rather than their abilities? Why are there 12 percent more boys than girls in the under-15s group? Who's the unseen presence in the house on holidays when the men sit around and get drunk while women slave in the kitchen? Mr.C, every time.

Confucius-bashers are on a roll. In March this year, the National Assembly agreed to abolish the country's patriarchal family registry system, the hojuje, after a 50-year-long dispute, adding to the sense that all things Confucian should be flushed away. Under the new system, to come into effect in 2008, women will no longer be legally subordinate to a male family head. Remarried women will be able to change their children's family name to their new husband's with court approval. With these change, the ideas of lineage and the family head, which inform extended family relations and impose obligations, especially on the wives of eldest sons, may dissolve.

Will this tinkering with the family change society, or is the law just catching up with anti-Confucian changes already underway? Before answering that, there's another question. How come people feel free to bad mouth the founder of this lasting faith, where they would hesitate to directly attack the founders of one of the other big ones? The answer seems to be that we don't see Confucius as a religious figure. He left the question of God up to the follower. If you follow "the way," he said, you will arrive at the answer to the question about God. He positioned himself as a teacher and a philosopher pointing the way, rather than as a holy man, prophet or messiah declaring himself as the way and his word gospel. His followers follow the philosophy, not the man. Translation: he's an ordinary man, so it's okay to be rude about him.

But is it reasonable? To answer this question, we need to figure what we're talking about when we say "Confucian."

That quest begins in the Korean psyche. If we dissect a representative Korean mind, we will find a mix of religious influences. The first ingredient is shamanism. The influence of this belief system is evident in Korean passions-to be fully human you had to give 110 percent, the shamans taught-and in beliefs about the spirit world.

Next is Buddhism, which was the predominant faith in Korea for several centuries up to the end of the 14th. The Zen concept of no past or future, just a constantly flowing present, can be seen behind the immediacy and impatience of Koreans of all faiths. Also, the Buddhist idea that the spiritual and physical worlds flow into one another is common, even among Christians, as indicated by the popularity of fortunetellers with all believers.

The next part of the mix is Confucian. It's important because it still informs family and social relations. Although an ancient faith, the Korean Confucian story really began in 1388, when the king sent his top general, Yi Seung-Gye, off to attack China. General Yi didn't like this idea. He changed his mind en route, turned his troops around and staged a coup. By 1392, he had declared himself king. His Yi dynasty lasted until 1910.

The intellectuals behind his regime embraced a philosophical version of Neo-Confucianism, a doctrine developed by the Chinese thinker Chu Hsi in the 12th century that emphasized the relationship between ruler and subject. They sought to create utopia, the perfect ethical society. Politics became the supreme pursuit. In some ways these zealots were like communists without the coercive advantages of the modern state.

Still, they imposed Neo-Confucianism so fully as the foundation for the country's religious ethic and state organization that Korea stood as the most orthodox Confucian dynasty in East Asian history.

Education -- of boys, because girls didn't matter -- was the core of the system, and it was primarily in Confucian ethics. Government officials were selected by examination, the theory being that with such an education system, the state would be selecting its most ethical young men as administrators.

Ethical education was central to the five Confucian relationships: loyalty to the ruler, as we have seen; a son's filial piety to his father; a woman's obedience to her husband; deference of youngsters to their elders; and honesty between friends. This type of education last well into the 20th century.

Despite their penchant for social engineering -- they divided society up into five main castes -- the Neo-Confucians thought that the perfect society began not with the system, but with the personal morality of the monarch. Further, they believed that social stability, not development, was seen as the measure of successful rule. Thus, went Confucian reasoning, an immoral ruler created instability. Looked at the other way round, instability was indication of flawed leader-ship, even when no obvious flaws were visible. A wise king's strategy was to select learned bureaucrats both for his own education and for the implementation of virtuous policy.

This way of thinking remains deep within Korean attitudes. Even a Protestant president like Kim Young-Sam (1993-8) once publicly apologized for his failings after a bridge and then a department store collapsed within a few months of each other under his watch.

When you look closely at the saying of Confucius, recorded by his followers in The Analects, you start to sense that perhaps he was not so Confucian himself. He clearly places great emphasis on the individual's responsibility to be virtuous. Rulers, Confucius taught, can be great only if they themselves lead exemplary lives, and are they willing to be guided by moral principles. If they do this, their states will inevitably become prosperous and happy.

He has some good practical advice, too: "Promote the honest over the crooked, and the people will obey. Promote the crooked over the honest, and the people will not obey."

But Confucius would argue that for such wise choices to come naturally, the leader must have a genuinely moral soul. Thus self-cultivation through education and practice lies at the heart of the Confucian ethic. A core concept was the centrality of family relations and the application to broader society. Not only was the ruler like a father to his subjects, but also the family provided a training ground for leadership: "It is not possible for one to teach others who cannot teach his own family," Confucius said.

From this perspective, Confucius comes across like a good man. He may not have been promoting democracy as such, but his context, lest we forget, was China some 500 years before Jesus Christ.

Some problems become apparent though:

* The state as family: Actually, society is not a family and while we might like our leaders to be upright, there's an element of personal morality that is irrelevant to administration. Bill Clinton, for example, might have been a better president than Jimmy Carter. Anyway, while family relations should be good and loving, they are necessarily unequal. A family is not a democracy.

* Family as the basic unit of society: This belief leads modern Koreans to bemoan the abolition of the hojuje. But, the basic unit of society is not the family. It is the individual.

* Women: They are naturally disadvantaged by the idea of the family ruled by men. It should be ruled by parents. Relative ethics This is a trickier area. My guess is that the Neo-Confucian state never got anywhere near goodness, let alone utopia, because it was based on the absence of absolutes. Without clarity about right or wrong, all was relative. Given this, it has always been tougher for the idea of an objective standard of law, essential for a developed society, to take hold in the Confucian environment.

* Relative ethics: This is a trickier area.  My guess is that the Neo-Confucian state never got anywhere near goodness, let alone utopia, because it was based on the absence of absolutes.  Given this, it has always been tougher for the idea of an objective standard of law, essential for a developed society, to take hold in the Confucian environment. Relative ethics -- all depends upon relationships -- sustains corruption. The result is an unjust society and an angry and mistrustful citizenry.

At home in Korea, Confucius is on the ropes. Elsewhere, he's been reduced to cute quotes in Christmas crackers and fortune cookies. Confucius the man, though, envisioned a society led by good, civilized people who were educated in ethics, proper government and family life, and sustained by a system of rites and rituals. It's just that it didn't seem to work.