Optimism and hope for South Koreans

I sometimes receive emails from Koreans asking why I don’t consider some of the more troubling social issues their country faces when I am planning my classes and making my videos.

It’s a good question to ask because, as a sociologist, I’ve been trained to focus my attention on the disruptive and dysfunctional parts of societies. In fact, throughout the first half of my four-decade-long teaching career, I embraced the idea that young people need to be educated about social problems so that they will be motivated to solve them.

But over time I changed how I see my role as a professor so that today, my teaching is mostly inspired by wonder and amazement about the things I observe in the world around me. I would be forgiven if I overlooked these things and instead focused on all that is wrong with the world because this is what is so often shown to me by media organizations and social media platforms around the web.

But I regularly remind myself that events are newsworthy when they are rare and uncommon, and so the headlines and lead stories that I see are often those of human depravity, dishonesty, and even violence — all uncommon occurrences. In this sense, our news media offer a great sociological service to me by reporting on events that I and others around me never see in daily life.

FOR THE COMMON GOOD

The problem I face in my classroom is that I can say this to my students and in that moment, they understand and believe it. But since there is no shortage of negativity and fear to encounter as they surf the web and consume social media, it is easy for them to forget my words and instead embrace a low-grade pessimism about their futures.

So if I were to walk into my class and offer students my critical sociological interpretation of their bleak future, I’m reasonably certain that the result would not be to inspire them to work together and fix the world they are reminded of daily is broken. The actual result would be to lure them into an even more isolated and disempowered world than the one so many of them already inhabit.

And this is precisely the dilemma because effective responses to complex human problems always require people to act in concert with others who do not necessarily share their own immediate and personal interests. Divided and distrustful humans tend to destroy what is around them; they do not respond together and build for the common good.

On my recent trip to Seoul, I spoke about this issue in two of the talks that I gave. In one talk, I discussed climate change and how we will only mount an effective response if humans work collaboratively and at times put the planet's future ahead of their own households, businesses and nations.

For a different series of public service announcement videos that my wife and I recorded, we discussed how advanced nations can only thrive if they have functioning social and economic welfare programs that are built upon trust in a personal future that is tied to the future well-being of strangers.

UPLIFTING OPTIMISM

I expect these Korean audiences to be just like my students and so, just like I do in my classroom, I cast the message in the most positive way that I could and not as one of darkness and doom. And here is why I know that this matters.

Every day I receive one or two emails from Koreans and for each person who asks why I don’t discuss Korean social problems more often than I do, there are about fifteen people who either thank me for my words or tell me that I have inspired them to improve themselves and their nation. The same 1:15 ratio seems to be evident in the many thousands of comments on my videos that are written in Korean.

And here is what is newsworthy about this. I speak about many countries in my class, and not just Korea, and I travel and give talks to audiences around the world. Regardless of where these talks take place and the issues I am discussing with my students, my positive curiosity takes over and I usually leave people with an uplifting optimism about their nation and culture. But I never have people respond with pride and personal uplift in the way that Koreans do.

There are many historical and sociological reasons for this but it’s great news for Korea because it means that your personal connections to your country are as deep as they are profound. And your desire to take the miracle of the Han River into the 21st century is still strong, even if it’s not obvious to you.

By Sam Richards

Dr. Samuel Richards is an award-winning sociologist, speaker, and teaching professor at Penn State University and an honorary chair professor at Konkuk University in Seoul, Korea. With nearly 800 students each semester and a 30-year legacy, his SOC 119 course is the largest race and cultural relations course in the United States and was the subject of an Emmy Award-winning television broadcast called, “You Can’t Say That.”