Face-Saving Culture and Sense of Shame

In the Taoist culture, as mentioned previously, shame is a kind of reaction to one’s own conscience and is considered a necessary virtue essential for realizing oneself. The introverted disposition and individuation characteristic of Taoist culture underwent repression through conversion to extroverted inclination and collectivization. Such a trend was especially noticeable in the Yi (Chôson) dynasty, which lasted some 500 years (1392–1910) preceding modernization in Korea. Under the Yi dynasty, Confucianism was adopted as a reigning ideology. The ideal of Confucianism was to govern both home and the nation on the basis of self-cultivation.3 Confucianism, along with Buddhism and Taoism, which are all quite similar, laid the foundation of Taoist culture. However, Confucianism was politically abused and deviated from its core, the Tao. Confucianism propounds five cardinal morals in human relationships: righteousness between king and subjects; love between parents and children; distinction between husband and wife; trust between friends; and order between senior and junior. These five virtues have come to be criteria in evaluating human behavior. Accordingly, the most shameful behavior in Confucian culture is the violation of these five mores.

 

Originally, Confucian morals were derived from the concept of mutual equality based on individual conscience; however, this concept gradually deteriorated, favoring the stronger party over the weaker. Righteousness between king and subjects requires righteousness in each of their roles toward the other. However, this concept was degraded to become a principle of the rule of the king over his subjects. As a result, the loyalty and unilateral obedience of the subjects to the king was required. Even the reciprocal relationship between father and son became the son’s unilateral duty of filial piety to his parents. The connubial relationship turned into the submission of the wife to her husband, and the relationship between senior and junior changed into the junior’s duty to respect the senior.

 

Thus, disloyalty to king, lack of filial piety toward parents, disobedience to husband and disrespect to the elderly came to be regarded as the worst immoral behavior and the most shameful acts in social life. Such feelings of shame do not originate from the conscience of the individual, but from the moral coercion of the society. This is a shame forcibly imposed on the individual by the moral force of the society. If the feeling of shame arising from the conscience of an individual is called individual shame, shame caused by social coercion can be called ‘collective shame.’ Where collective shame is emphasized, the group is placed above the Transcultural Psychiatry 36(2) 186 individual and the latter’s life is bound to be group oriented. An individual in such a group behaves according to how others might regard his behavior, ignoring his self-determination. Such behavior contributes to the creation of a face-saving culture which is more concerned with formality than practicality, appearance than substance. In relation to face-saving culture, Koreans often use such expressions as ‘saving one’s face,’ ‘losing one’s face’ and ‘maintaining one’s face.’ As shown in such expressions, face-saving is a kind of a disguised mask characterized by social collectivity in our relationship with others. However, people are spiritual entities besides being social animals, which means that they must align themselves with others without entirely neglecting their own psychic nature.

 

On the one hand, people must orient themselves toward the outer world, the society, and on the other hand, they must look into their inner worlds, the mind. Face-saving culture, however, with its emphasis on exterior relationships, has not paid much attention to the inner world. The sense of shame in the face-saving culture arises from the loss of face. This is in contrast with the process that begets shame from the loss of conscience in the Taoist culture. Face-saving is a behavioral norm that a social group demands from its members – adult, husband, educator and doctor, each representing its own group. However, the most typical facesaving mode in Korea was through the family’s response. This was a common feature in the culture not only of Korea but also of China and Japan under Confucianism. For instance, in Japan, when a scandal occurred involving their children, parents went so far as to kill themselves. Society, too, often treated the family with a miscreant member all as criminals. Thus, western anthropologists once dubbed oriental culture a ‘shame culture’ while calling theirs a ‘guilt culture’ (Haring, 1956).

 

Guilty feelings and the sense of shame are often hard to differentiate but in general, we have guilt when we do something wrong, and shame when we realize that we do not measure up to who or what we would like to think we are. The major forms of shame in Confucian culture, as described previously, arose from subjects’ disloyalty to the king, the children’s lack of devotion to their parents, the wife’s disobedience to her husband and the junior’s disrespect to the elderly. The greatest shame of all was considered to be the child’s lack of filial piety to his parents and the wife’s disobedience to her husband. Both sources of shame arise from the family context. Confucian culture is a family-oriented culture with the family placed above its individual members. The individual is nothing but a means for the welfare of the family, thus face-saving meant saving face for the family, and shame meant a shame for the family rather than for its members. As a result, when discussing the traditional culture and the sense of shame in a Korean community, stress should be laid on the shame of the family in relation to face-saving culture.