Face

We used to think about face a lot. The cliché is that Asians take giving face and having face very seriously. I used to think that this was particular to East Asians – particularly Chinese Japanese and Koreans.

That was until I found out about honour killings in the Muslim world. Not only the Arabs, but also North Africans, Iranians, Turks, Pakistanis, Central Asians have that to some extent. Being a terrorist is also an act of honour. Just as it used to be honourable to die for your country, so is it honourable to die for your 72 virgins. People in Gaza Strip used to boast about how there were more suicide bomber martyrs in our family than yours.

So, why don’t these angmohs have a concept of face? They don’t really have that much now, except – when you think about Vietnam, it was an unwinnable war, and was carried on because the Americans didn’t think it was good to be weak in front of the Russians. Putting that man on the moon was also about face, because it surely didn’t accomplish anything else. But that is on a national level. On an individual level there is less of this going on.

Except – when you open the history books and read about the courtly tradition, about knights and all that. People challenged each other to duels, with the expectation that one of the duellists was going to die. That was definitely about face. Sometimes duellists would meet up and agree to both miss each other, so that they could both consider their honours restored and nobody would have to die. Sometimes one person would show up and hope that the other wouldn’t, so that he could leave with his honour intact. You can also note that duelling went on in the wild west in America 100 years ago.

I suppose, then that the question to ask is: what went on in the last few hundred years, that made westerners feel that face was not so important anymore.