In Martin Scorsese’s Silence, a new movie based on Shusaku Endo’s novel of the same name, Jesuit priests try to smuggle Christianity into 17th-century Japan. It’s futile, say their opponents, because the locals don’t have the Western mentality required to follow Christ. Nature-worship is so ingrained in the Japanese that they “can’t conceive of anything that transcends the human.”
This idea—that people can’t look past their disparate upbringings to share universal truths with one another—has become an insistent refrain in American political and cultural discourse. It’s used to discredit such allegedly antiquated notions as assimilation and the post-racial society. It proves itself to be just as hollow and baseless in Silence as it is in real life.
Last summer, students at Yale University petitioned the English department to assign fewer white male authors. A syllabus highlighting Milton and Shakespeare was deemed “hostile to students of color,” because its content was not relevant enough to non-whites. Meanwhile, when racial tensions surged over police killings, some people claimed that, in the words of one Huffington Post article, “white people will never understand the black experience.”
The reasoning behind these statements is the same as the logic presented in Silence: barriers of nationality, class, and ethnicity are insurmountable, and truth is not communicable across them. Shakespeare’s view of the human spirit isn’t real or compelling for anyone who doesn’t share his European heritage. Christ is inconceivable to a Japanese mind.
The protagonist of Silence, a missionary named Father Rodrigues, initially rejects this philosophy. Truth is universal, he argues. If love is patient and kind in Portugal, then it is so in Japan as well. And if a tradition expresses these universal truths—if, for example, Christ’s self-sacrifice embodies God’s mercy for all mankind—then anyone can learn to comprehend and adopt that tradition.
In reality, of course, shared principles can indeed trump demographic differences. Whenever that happens the bizarre counterargument is the same: it’s not really happening. Senator Marco Rubio puts his belief in border security before his Cuban background, so he got called a “coconut” by NBC’s Donny Deutsch—brown on the outside, white on the inside. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ commitment to constitutional originalism supersedes his allegiance to the black community. This earned him the label of “Uncle Tom” from U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson, implying that Thomas’ policies represent not a sincere conviction but a ploy to curry favor with whites. And because homosexual tech billionaire Peter Thiel is a conservative, says the Advocate, he’s not truly gay. Simply put, if someone’s beliefs transcend his cultural identity, then either that identity or those beliefs must not be genuine.
So, too, in Silence. Father Rodrigues’ erstwhile mentor, Father Ferreira, persuades Rodrigues that the peasants to whom he’s been ministering aren’t actually Christians. They’ve mistaken the rosaries and crucifixes Rodrigues gave them for magic talismans rather than symbols of a higher power. They’ve endured starvation and torment in the name of Christ, but they don’t understand that Christ isn’t a wooden sculpture. Because evidently you can’t be Christian and Japanese.
It’s a rotten argument on two counts. First, mistaking physical symbols for the spiritual realities they represent isn’t unique to the Japanese. It’s called idolatry, and everyone, from peasant to priest, is susceptible to it. Second, what really makes Ferreira’s claims so incoherent is the film’s portrayal of the Japanese Christians themselves. Halfway through the movie three of them are crucified for their faith. They die praying and singing hymns, testifying to their belief that God’s love is stronger than death.
I’ll leave it to the theologians to rationalize that martyrdom away. People who trust in the resurrection when faced with torture are by definition people who have received the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Rodrigues’ and Ferreira’s judgment that their parishioners didn’t understand what they did is naked condescension. Scorsese himself never delivers a verdict for or against the validity of the Jesuits’ conclusions. He doesn’t have to. The film’s own storyline puts the sophistry of its main characters to shame.
When white supremacist Dylann Roof committed a vile mass murder in a black church, the bereaved survivors were inspired by their towering faith to publicly confront and forgive him. In other words, black Americans in 2015 claimed irrefutable and absolute ownership of ideas proposed by a Jewish carpenter in Ancient Israel. Plainly, then, the wisdom contained in our great traditions transcends time and race. The case for cultural relativism meets the same stumbling block in Silence that it meets everywhere else: the facts on the ground contradict it entirely. It’s manifestly false to claim that the texts of white authors can’t speak to the hearts of black students or that Japanese people can’t worship the same god Jesus did. Today and every day, they can and do.
The post ‘Silence’ and the Challenges of Cultural Relativism appeared first on Acculturated.