The Much-maligned Hojuje (戶主制)

[Note: Even if you are not interested in Korean society, read the extensive quote at the bottom of the post and the article that it's from. It's a must-read about the issue of authority and tradition.]

Re: Individual Registry System as an Alternative to Family System?

Hojuje is the sytem by which South Koreans register officially as memers of a household, not as individuals. Each household has a head (hoju), usually the father. Thus, it is patriarchal. (Since I am not a Korean citizen, my wife is the legal hoju of our household.)

The system is under attack by feminists and others, including members of the "Our Open Party" (열인우리당) of President Roh Moo-hyun (think Lula without the charm or Zapatero without the creepiness). The hojuje poses some problems when it comes to the family name of children whose parents divorce and enter into another civil marriage. The hojuje draws the ire of many Westerners living in Korea, who see it as incomprehensibly backward and as an example of Korean obtuseness.

The hojuje is a manifestation of Confucianism, the social philosophy that provided East Asia with 2500 years of relative stability without recourse to Revealed Truth, allowing the region to become second only to the West in terms of material, cultural, artistic, and scientific development. The hojuje should not be thrown out because it causes some inconvenience to some moderns in their pursuit of individual autonomy.

Perhaps the hojuje could be modified to reflect changes in modern society. That does not mean throwing it out altogther, however, as its enemies have suggested.

Here are some words in defense of tradition by Edward Feser, echoing social theorist Friedrich A. Hayek, in Does Islam Need a Luther or a Pope? (a must-read article):

[T]he hoary and impersonal products of tradition, though they may seem superficially to be less rational than the novel insights of individual intellectuals, poets, and artists, are in fact far more rational, for, reflecting as they do the experience of millions of individuals over many generations, and having survived the winnowing forces of cultural evolution, they embody far more information about the concrete details of human life than any individual theorist can hope to acquire. Traditional practices and institutions must, then, get the benefit of the doubt. If they are ever to be altered -- and Hayek doesn't deny that they sometimes can and must be -- the burden of proof must always be on the innovator rather than the conserver of tradition, and (especially where the institution or practice is very ancient and widespread) the change can never be more than piecemeal, a tinkering around the edges that leaves the core of the practice or institution intact.