Moral Cultures: East Asian Edition, Part 1

On the nature of face culture

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I’ve been staying in Korea for a month now, giving talks at some universities as well as visiting family and friends. One friend told me a story he thought indicative of victimhood culture on the rise in these parts. I started this post to talk about that story and it’s implications, but then I realized we need some more context.  

Bradley Campbell and I have written a lot on moral culture, but so far it’s almost all focused on the Western context. When we talk about the shift from an honor culture (“I challenge you to a duel over this insult!”) to a dignity culture (“whatever, sticks and stones, man”) to a victimhood culture (“this is literal genocide, fire him now!”) we’re describing the cultural evolution of the West — and even there we mostly focus on the English-speaking world. We explicitly avoided talking about East Asia, which previous scholars classify as having a fourth type of moral culture altogether: face culture.

Since context is needed, I’m going to break up the East Asian Edition of the moral cultures series into two parts. In this first one I’ll consider the nature of face culture in relation to the other types. In the next post I’ll talk about the possibility of victimhood culture growing in Korea.

Before we go on, a disclosure: I don’t have a very detailed knowledge of Asian history and culture.  It’s quite likely some of my readers know more. Comments are open if anyone has anything to add.

Eastern Honor

First let’s consider honor culture, which we put earliest in our sequence. Honor cultures generally arise where systems of settlement by authority (e.g., law, police, courts) are weak or absent. It was more common earlier in history because law was less dependable for settling dispute and deterring predation.

You find honor at the top of society among aristocrats with no central authority strong enough to bring them to heel. This is all the more so if they’re a warrior caste for whom toughness is central to their social station.  

Thus we see clear elements of honor culture among the samurai of Japan, who did indeed live by duels and vendettas, much like the knights and nobles of Europe. Samurai honor had a different flavor than Western honor — for instance, they seem to have carried “death before dishonor” to an extreme where suicide was way more reputable than in the West or Near East. But you can still recognize it as a variation on the same theme.

Even as states expand their police power, honor cultures also tend to crop up and persist in places at the margins where state authority rarely penetrates, such as the frontiers and remote hill country. And one can find them even within the urban hearts of states among social locations where the law is a hostile, outside force, such as in the criminal underworld. Though I have little information about this, I imagine one can surely find some degree of honor culture in such settings throughout the East.

But my general impression is that honor culture receded much earlier and played a much smaller role in China and Korea. Even in premodern times it was less influential among the elite as well as among commoners. For the thing about this region is that, despite periods of fragmentation and conquest, it’s spent far more of its history administered by bureaucratic states, typically in conjunction with local hierarchies that kept peace in stable, densely populated communities.

The realm of the Chinese state waxed and waned, but the core bureaucracy was so resilient that Razib Khan describes China as a civilization without amnesia — it never had a dark age where the records just stopped for a few centuries.

For a millennium and a half, even if occasional conquests changed who was at the top of the pyramid, China was administered by officials chosen not for being badasses, but for doing good on their civil service exams. This is not the sort of system that breeds reckless and boastful men desperate to prove their bravery, as one sees among European gentlemen or Southern planters.

Korea, something of vassal or little-brother state to China, also adopted the Confucian system, and was for centuries administered by a class of scholar-bureaucrats. Watch a Korean historical drama and you see courtiers handling their differences not by swords at dawn or calling the banners, but by beseeching their king to execute one another as they all bow on the floor before him.

Over in Japan things more closely resembled Europe’s feudal system and the samurai ruling caste were still swaggering around with swords well after the rise of Confucian exams on the mainland. But by the 1600s the country was unified under the Tokugawa Shogunate, and though they retained a warrior ethic, the samurai no longer had wars to fight. The strong central government disarmed the commoners to prevent rebellions and even made private vengeance between samurai something legally regulated — you could still do it, if you filled the proper forms and obtained permission.

By the time American gunboats showed up in the 1800s, the samurai were increasingly channeling their warrior code into performance of official administrative duties. Seppuku went from being a battlefield expedient to something done when you couldn’t bring the government dam project in on time and under budget.

Face Culture

If honor played a less role in traditional China and Korea, and was already being tamed in Japan on the eve of their breakneck modernization, does that mean they had transitioned to a dignity culture? Perhaps not.

Various scholars characterize East Asian cultures as face cultures. The concept of “face” is said to be difficult to translate, but it has to do with one’s reputation and relationships with others — a form of social worth based on other people’s evaluations. To be negatively evaluated is to lose face. (English speakers might now take this term for granted, but it was originally a translated loan-term from Chinese). Those who lose face feel shame, and face cultures cultivate sensitivity to shame.

So far this sounds a lot like honor, in that social evaluation and reputation are of exaggerated importance. And indeed, some anthropologists lump honor and face cultures together as “shame cultures” as distinct from the “guilt culture” more typical of the West. Guilt cultures focus on inculcating standards policed by either your own internal judgements or perhaps God Himself — “character is what you are in the dark.” Shame cultures focus more on adapting oneself to the group’s ongoing demands, held in line by the threat of social ostracism. Character is how you react to others, and the great sin is to be shameless.

(Tangential little story: My wife and I were once staying at a hotel and wandered into what we thought was the complimentary breakfast. It turned out to be a catered breakfast for a church group on a trip. We realized this about halfway through eating their eggs and bacon. She, a Korean, had a powerful urge to flee at once. I, an American, said the damage is already done, we might as well finish our plates and find some way to make redress. After we left her anxiety much subsided, what with no one around to look judgmentally on her. But mine was increasing with the danger of getting away with it. I didn’t feel better until I located the church’s online donation page and sent money with a note apologizing for the error.)

But despite both being rooted in external judgement, there’s a pretty good reason to distinguish face from honor: People from China and Korea don’t usually shoot or stab each other over losing face. Honorable men from Arabia to Greece to early modern England to the Antebellum South do exactly this over losing honor. Men of honor are sensitive to shame, indeed, but they protect themselves from it by boldly advertising the size of their balls and responding to slights with aggression.

Psychologists Angela Leung and Dov Cohen describe the differences:

Like honor, face also can involve a claim to virtue or to prestige. However, the settings—and consequently, the role expectations—are quite different for cultures of honor and cultures of face. Whereas honor is contested in a competitive environment of rough equals, face exists in settled hierarchies that are essentially cooperative. Ho (1976, p. 883; see also Heine, 2001) defined face as “the respectability and/or deference which a person can claim . . . by virtue of [his or her] relative position” in a hierarchy and the proper fulfillment of his or her role. Thus, everyone in the hierarchy can have some face, though some may have more than others due to their position. Implicitly, people have face—unless they lose it….

Because face exists within a stable hierarchy, it is not competitive or zero sum. In an honor culture, one person may take another’s honor and appropriate it as his or her own; however, one cannot increase one’s face by taking another’s. In a face culture, people are obliged to work together to preserve each other’s face, and because it is bad form to cause another to lose face, formalities are carefully observed, and direct conflicts are avoided….

If one person openly aggrieves another, it disrupts the harmony and order of the system. And unlike in honor cultures, it is not incumbent on the victim to directly redress the grievance him- or herself. Direct retaliation by the victim is unnecessary because the group or a superior is able to punish the offender; in fact, direct retaliation would be undesirable because it would further upset the harmony of the system. The 3 H’s of a face culture are thus hierarchy, humility, and harmony….

People are supposed to show appropriate deference to hierarchy. They are supposed to display humility and not overreach on status claims (lest they learn a painful and humiliating lesson about how much status others are willing to accord them). And they are to pursue, or at least not disturb, the harmony of the system.

The sorts of bragging and boasting common in honor cultures – from the planters of the Old South to gangsta rappers — would also be shameful.

There’s more contrasts in a paper by Young-Hoon Kim, Dov Cohen, and Wing-Tung Au:

Honor—like face—must be claimed from other people, and thus honor, too, is in some ways dependent on others. However, unlike the settled hierarchies of a face culture in which harmony is prized, honor cultures tend to involve competitive environments of rough equals within a status category. Honor is always potentially in flux, because people (and groups such as families, tribes, or clans) can establish their public reputations through challenge, competition, and cycles of “insult and riposte”

And from another paper by Kim and Cohen, a contrast with dignity culture:

For people from a Face culture, “success” or “failure” must be seen through other people’s eyes in order to count: In a Face culture, my worth is social worth, and my estimate of myself must align with the worth that other would recognize in me. Evaluating myself without these constraints would be, as Robert Frost might say, like “playing tennis without a net.”

In contrast, Anglo-Americans are described as having a dignity culture, in which an individual’s worth is intrinsic and is explicitly not supposed to be defined by others’ evaluation of him or her….

In practice, this gives the individual a considerable amount of autonomy in defining himself or herself. To the extent that individuals want to preserve this autonomy, they may jealously guard it, sometimes ignoring other people’s perceptions of them or sometimes defining themselves in a certain way in spite of rather than because of others’ perception.

Thus, when they ran experiments looking at whether success of failure on quiz questions led to changes in the participants self-ratings, it mattered a lot for East Asian participants whether the quiz had witnesses:

In Experiment 1, for dignity culture participants, it made little difference whether they had failed to answer questions in private or in front of three other people. In contrast, for face culture participants, public failure was associated with dramatically lower self-evaluations, whereas private failure did not lead to a significant decrement in self-evaluation; further, the number of questions answered in private was completely unrelated to face culture participants’ self-evaluations.

So, compared to dignity culture, face culture is one in which reputation is more important as a source of moral worth. But compared to honor culture, it is one in which reputation is maintained more by humility and harmony than assertiveness and aggressiveness.

Even the quiet confidence of someone presuming to march by the beat of his own drummer against the advice of his betters might be suspect. Who are you, Thoreau, to go off and live in the woods on your own accord? You create awkwardness for your family. 눈치 없어요.

Face and Victimhood

But what of the shrill demands of an American student activist? How different is face culture from victimhood culture?

As a reminder, Campbell and I defined victimhood culture as having high sensitivity to slight, high reliance on authorities or other third parties to handle grievances, and a strong tendency to emphasize or exaggerate the victimization (oppression, fragility, neediness) of one’s self or allies. All of these things are matters of degree, and all the various moral cultures have points of overlap. We contrast them according to things that are most extreme and distinctive in one culture but not the others, such as dueling in honor settings or hate crime hoaxes in victimhood settings.

Regarding sensitivity to slight, face culture breeds more sensitivity than dignity culture just by virtue of cultivating more sensitivity to public opinion and shame. But the baseline sensitivity would seem lower than either honor or victimhood culture (something Saroush Aslani and colleagues claim in this article). For the emphases on harmony and humility mitigate against making too big of a fuss.

It seems like loudly proclaiming fragility and demanding special protections would be likely to come across a claim for special importance, possibly claiming rights above one’s station. And loudly denouncing others is a disruption to harmony, causing a loss of face for both individuals and institutions. As in dignity culture, popular sayings emphasize the tolerance of minor slights. From Aslani and colleagues:

Overall some famous Face cultures’ maxims discourage direct and emotional confrontation that jeopardizes harmony and approve of indirect handling of conflict, for example “tooth for a tooth, lose-lose” (Chinese proverb) and “You can avoid even a murder if you try to be patient three times” (Korean proverb).

A student activist might find it worth complaining in public and to the university administration that someone accidentally mispronounced her name, conceptualizing this as an aggression that oppresses her. This level of fuss would be out of place in a strong face culture, where someone might be hesitant to even politely correct the mistake lest they cause embarrassment all around.

It’s notable that studies of negotiation styles finds that negotiators from face cultures are less aggressive and generally try to avoid points of open conflict while emphasizing compromise. I can vouch for Korean (and, I’ve heard, Japanese) culture not valuing directness, and in fact finding it rude. Even polite linguistic forms in Korean are indirect.

Face culture eschews unilateral aggression in conflict, even making direct complaints less likely. The proper way to handle problems that one cannot tolerate is with appeal to a social superior for help with the matter. This is in kind the same as both dignity and victimhood culture. The main distinction between victimhood and dignity is a matter of a degree: Dependence on authorities (or sometimes just the general public) is even higher, partly because the greater sensitivity means a far wider range of grievances are deemed worthy of their attention.

Resort to authority is more common in face culture than dignity culture, but generally less than in victimhood culture, partly due to the emphasis on preserving harmony. Also, it seems like the concern with avoiding loss of face leads to a lot of informal and quiet settlement rather than formal, public, or authoritative proceedings. If youngest brother has a conflict with middle brother, instead of openly challenging him, he approaches eldest brother to mediate. But you don’t let the breach out into the open, where it could cause the whole family to lose face.

In From the Soil, Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong makes much of the long tradition of localism in Chinese government, with each small farming village handling its own internal affairs. Social control in the Chinese sphere seems to have this through and through, with fairly strong but informal systems of settlement within every family and level of organization.

Finally, there’s the emphasis on victimhood.

Face culture’s emphasis on humility is less about advertising one’s marginality or neediness and more about acting just a notch or two less important than one could realistically claim to be, just to be on the safe side.

But there doesn’t seem to be much positive valuation of suffering or poverty or lowliness as such — no one is trying to falsify their background to look like they came from a poorer or more oppressed family. Indeed, humble backgrounds are shameful and best left unmentioned by all, so as to avoid losing face.

If anything, difficulties and disadvantages might be more shameful in face culture than in dignity culture. My experience with Korea is that physical handicaps and mental illnesses are more stigmatized than they are in the US. They’re certainly not the sort of thing one leads with on college admission essays.

None of this is to say that East Asians don’t make victim claims or have public protests — or for that matter, riots, wars, or any of the other forms of conflict one finds in just about every large society. Heck, some of the more alarmist takes on victimhood culture compare it to Mao’s cultural revolution.

But we’re talking about what norms are upheld in day-to-day social life and what’s most distinctive about one time and place versus another. And while different moral cultures all have points of overlap, I think victimhood culture is about as distinct from face culture as it is from dignity culture.

Which raises some questions: If dignity culture can transition to victimhood culture, can face culture do so as well? Is it happening now? What would it look like if so?

As I said at the beginning, I started writing about this because some people suggested to me that victimhood culture is indeed blossoming in the East, or at least in Korea. I’ll consider these arguments in the next installment.

This post is part of a series considering aspects of moral culture. See also:

1. Honor and Dignity

2. Victimhood

3. The Morality of Star Trek TNG

4. Moral Dependence

5. Who Counts as a Victim?

6. The Concept of Dignity