The Useless Tree

Koeans, Stem Cells and Sincerity

    The news that Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, who appeared to be stem cell researcher extraordinaire, cheated, has cast a shadow over science generally (how could such fraud not be caught earlier?) and Korean science in particular.  I have blogged on Korean stem cell research once before and argued that Confucian philosophy provides a kind of intellectual support for such work – given its potential to serve broad societal goals – so I feel that I should return to the issue briefly today to make one point: Confucian thought, while supportive of socially-oriented research and public policy, would certainly condemn lying and cheating.

    I make this point in anticipation that someone out there, as the criticism of Hwang crescendos, will, at some point, hold him up will as an example of all that is wrong with "Korean culture," especially its Confucian lineage and practices.  Although this critique has not yet emerged (at least as far as I can see from some quick web searches), it would go something like this (I am drawing here on a template of modernist criticism of Confucianism so common in 20th century China): the emphasis on the group (in this case the research group tinged with nationalist pride) and the importance of patriarchy (in which the elder Dr. Hwang would never be directly criticized by younger colleagues) overwhelmed the integrity of the science.  It became more important to promote the interests of the group and the lead scientist, than it was to accept the empirical limitations of the research.  As Hwang’s reputation grew, and as he became more associated with "Korean science," the more pressure there was to validate the identity of the group and Dr. Hwang, science be damned.  In this view, Confucian values of collectivism and filiality contributed to the scandal.

   Now, as I argued before, "Confucianism" may well have had a background effect on Korean stem cell research, providing another cultural resource to justify the work.  But this effect is very much attenuated by the demands of modern science, with its instrumentalist ethics and rationality (which are most un-Confucian).  More importantly, however, even if we focus on whatever effect Confucianism might have had in supporting Korean stem cell research, we must recognize that the Confucian value of sincerity would certainly create an ethical limit on false statements.

    Sincerity, for Confucius, or "standing by your words," is central to the pursuit of Humanity.  If one simply goes through the motions of investing time and effort in social relationships, or, worse, if one ostentatiously creates an image of following Ritual but lacks a genuine internal commitment to those involved in Ritual and social relationships, then one is failing to live a Humane life.   

    Dr. Hwang was fundamentally insincere in his science, all the while professing that he was contributing to human good.  In this manner, he not only betrayed the ethics of science, but also the ethics of Confucius.

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7 responses to “Koeans, Stem Cells and Sincerity”

  1. The Marmot's Hole Avatar
    The Marmot’s Hole

    Your daily Hwang Woo-suk update

    UPDATE 2: Don’t pin this scandal on Confucianism, says the Useless Tree. UPDATE 1: The Hwang Woo-suk Cult of Personality lives on! ORIGINAL POST: I’m getting a little sick blogging about the Hwang Woo-suk saga, as intiguing as it may

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  2. The Marmot's Hole Avatar
    The Marmot’s Hole

    Your daily Hwang Woo-suk update

    UPDATE 3: Gord over at eclexys has a lot of intelligent things to say (as always) about Hwang and stem cell research. UPDATE 2: Don’t pin this scandal on Confucianism, says the Useless Tree. UPDATE 1: The Hwang Woo-suk Cult

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  3. gordsellar Avatar
    gordsellar

    Aidan,
    You’re speaking of Confucianism as if it were a pure philosophy outside of culture. I understand, since I do the same with philosophy that I like. But it is problematic.
    The problem with this is you’re missing out on what actually matters here, which is NeoConfucian practice in everyday Korea. I’d put Korean virtues soemwhere akin to the Ten Commandments: nice moral ideas which everybody sorta knows, but which aren’t the basic determinants of ethics. I mean, when I refrain from killing someone, it’s not because of the Ten Commandments, or a Christian exhortation to love one another. I refrain from it because of deep-seated cultural norms and because of my own sense of ethics which was developed within a culture. The fact of the matter is that Hierarchy (pecking order) is the part of Confucianism that is most dominant in modern Korean practice, and the Virtues have been taken off the stove to make way for Business and Profit.
    Now, I won’t blame Hwang’s actions on Confucianism, because there are more sensible sorts of blame to place on him. But people will, eventually, start to use Confucianism as a defense for those working under Hwang — it’s already begun in the comment sections of different websites — and that would be extremely unfortunate. Those working beneath him should have known better than to go along with the ruse.
    Somewhere in the Analects, it explicitly says that an older man isn’t an authority just because he’s elder; there are older men who are idiots, too. However, this doesn’t seem to have survived the transition to Korean Neo-Confucianism (or, perhaps, the dictatorial period earlier in this century; unsurprisingly, since this kind of thinking would invite criticism that is suppressed both in classrooms, where a lot of this is learned, and in political life, where criticism was pretty harshly suppressed for many years). Unfortunately, a culture that doesn’t include license for loud, vocal criticism of ideas and claims regardless of who is making them cannot effectively practice science. It can try, but everything will take much longer and the effort will be pointless if one is competing with societies that aren’t fettered by so much critical limitation. It’s as simple as that.

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  4. James Avatar
    James

    Good insights on this story. Just keep the parentheses out of your writing. You can say whatever you needed to say in the above post without them. It makes reading easier on the head and eyeball. Keep up the good blogging.

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  5. Sam Avatar
    Sam

    Much of what we call Confucianism is really a mixture of the ideas of Confucius and Legalism that emerges after the Qin dynansty. So, yes, Korean “neo-Confucianism” does reflect a different politico-cultural context than either the US or pre-Qin China. But Confucius’s thought is capacious enough to allow for a variety of interpretations. And I would like to resuscitate (rescue?) the non-Legalist, and thus less hierarchigal, Confucianism of the original Analects. I know this kind of project is open to a variety of critiicsms, but, hey, if there can be a variety of Marxisms, and Christianities, and Islams, and Liberalisms, and Conservatisms, why can’t there be a modernized Confucianism?

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  6. Sperwer Avatar
    Sperwer

    If your objective is to create a modernized Confucianism, based on the purportedly non-Legalist and thus [sic!] less hierarchical confucianism of the original Analects, perhaps you should stick to adumbrating what that might look like. The principal problem with your views on the connection, or lack thereof, between Confucianism and [pick a dysfunctional element of] Korean society, is that it flies in the face of too much history. Sure, there’s no one-to-one causal link between “Confucianism” and the inanities of Korea; most, likely all, phenomena, are heavily overdetermined. But the facts remain that Confucianism, in particular a particular brand of neo-Confucianism, was very deliberately adopted by the founder of the Chosun dynasty as the new state ideology and forcibly imposed on what previously had been in many fundamental respects a matrilineal tribal society. In the process, in order to be made workable as a mechanism of political ordering, it clearly had to taken on many of the elements of Legalism – which suggests more than a few questions about the viability of the echt Confucianism that you esteem as a political philosophy. Moroever, in modern times, the habits breed into society by centuries of stae-sponsored and enforced neo-Confucianist indoctrination, were hijacked and even more crudely used by various authoritarian regimes to achieve their political and economic objectives. So, yeah, one could say, it’s not confucianism that’a at work here, but only by pointing to the lodestar of bell jar philosophy – one which, moreover, like so-called moderate Islam, has been singularly silent in all of its homelands in mounting even a theoretical challenge to such supposed abuses of the original creed.

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  7. hemanathan Avatar
    hemanathan

    when can stem cell grow a eyeball for those lost it by accident, when they can finish studies about this.

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