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MARGARET N. NG
than to cultivate inner piety, to attempt to pacify an uneasy conscience with external acts of penance rather than to uproot the evil in their hearts, to make up for the lack of feeling of charity in occasional works of mercy or donations of money. In short, the subterfuge of internal saintliness is external acts of conventional piety,
Clearly, just as Confucian scholars are aware of the subterfuge of the small man, the Catholic Church has been aware of this as a problem. The setting up such images as St. Thérèse the Little Flower who never did an extraordinary thing but converted all her ordinary actions into acts of devotion by her pious intentions, is possibly an attempt to counter it. But the Little Flower, for all her inwardness, is a pressure to attain a high standard, and so cannot remove the need for a subterfuge. To achieve this, what is needed is perhaps to lower the standards to some more easily attainable level. Here Catholicism is in a better position than Confucianism, since it is not essentially elitist, and has no need to maintain superiority by maintaining a superior ideal of conduct.
Face, Li and the Two Levels of Pride-Shame
What I have been arguing, I hope, also bears upon a broader question: how far is pride-shame an external sanction? It has been pointed out, thus refuting the earlier and very popular theory that shame is an external sanction in operation only when there is an audience, that shame can be internalized. Without recognizing internalized pride-shame we cannot understand Confucian or elitist Chinese culture as a pride-shame culture, because Confucian Chinese culture depends on the loyalty to li, not face, and li is internalized, not only an external sanction. That li is felt to be honorable by the modern Chinese who are quite willing to attack face as something silly and obstructive shows us how much more deep-seated is the pride in li.
In the light of the main thesis of Agassi and Jarvie, this loyalty to li is also much more dangerous. The main thesis of the paper is, what hinders a Chinese society such as Hong Kong from westernization, and thus progress, is the sense of cultural superiority of the Chinese. The another locate this sense in their complacency in upholding this very troublesome system of face, and so hold implicitly the optimistic thesis that if face goes, progress will be possible.