Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 213

F-35s Make Their Debut In Europe

The Air Force’s beleaguered flagship fighter jet program will make its debut in Europe this weekend, Defense News reports:

The U.S. Air Force’s F-35A is deploying internationally for the first time this weekend, heading to Europe to conduct training exercises with NATO allies, the Pentagon announced Friday.

The Defense Department offered sparse details about the event, which will involve deploying a “small number” of F-35As from the 388th Fighter Wing at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, to an undisclosed location in Europe.

The joint strike fighters will take off sometime this weekend. After landing, they will then spend several weeks in the region as part of the European Reassurance Initiative, the department’s effort to strengthen military ties with European allies to help deter Russian aggression on the continent.

The F-35 stealth jet program has had a long and troubled history, with much-publicized cost overruns, procurement woes, and design flaws creating the popular impression that the program was a white elephant. Even President Trump joined the pile-on in December, taking to Twitter to attack the “out of control” costs of the most expensive weapons program in the Pentagon’s history.

Lately, however, the critics have been eating crow. They said the F-35 would never fly—but today it is not only flying, it is making its debut as a factor in diplomacy. The European deployment certainly sends an unwelcome signal to Putin, as a host of advanced American fighter jets move to reassure European NATO members on his doorstep. And Russia will need to adjust to that reality in the long term, since the jets are expected to be permanently based in Europe beginning in the early 2020s.

Whatever the past problems and inefficiencies of the F-35 program—and there are many—the news that the fifth-generation fighters are finally getting off the ground and serving a strategic purpose should be welcomed.

The Glory of God and the Refreshing of the Mind

In Death On A Friday Afternoon: Meditations On The Last Words Of Jesus From The Cross, Richard John Neuhaus wrote that:

[T]he evangelists do not give us a psychological portrait; they do not, in the manner of a modern novelist, tell us what Jesus was thinking and feeling. The Gospel accounts, especially Mark and Matthew, are disciplined, astringent, almost minimalistic. This happened and then that happened and then something else happened. Vast spaces are left to be filled in by our imagination. In a sympathetic and imaginative reading of the passion narrative, we are invited to enter into the sufferings of Christ.

Two of the most exalted attempts to do this in the history of Western Civilization came from J.S. Bach, in the form of the St. John Passion and the St. Matthew Passion. Bach wrote both as the cantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, for use in Good Friday services. Both are settings of the passion, or crucifixion, account in the Gospels according to St. John and St. Matthew, respectively, interspersed with contemporary (for Bach) Pietist poetry. The service would consist of the singing of these “sermons in music,” as oratorios were called, split by a (spoken) sermon in the middle. Conceptually, this is incredibly simple; in practice, it’s as elaborate as—well, as a Bach oratorio.

This Good Friday afternoon (in accordance with recent tradition here at TAI) I listened to a new recording of the St. John Passion, from Apollo’s Fire, a period-instrument baroque orchestra in Cleveland. It’s excellent (and can be streamed immediately if you have Spotify.) The conductor, Jeanette Sorrell, uses a small ensemble and choir, the same resources as Bach had, to great effect, keeping the vocal action moving while giving each voice or solo instrument a chance to shine. The production values are excellent; even on a single speaker in a small apartment, the voice of The Evangelist (i.e. St. John, the narrator), sung by Nicholas Phan, came through with superb and heartbreaking clarity. A day later, I can still hear a section of the narration that ends with the single word, Golgatha, sung as if ripped from the throat of St. John.

So too did the pulsing, but restrained, basso continuo—the cello and organ accompaniment to each aria that throbs throughout the Passion like a heartbeat, rising and falling, breaking and standing still. The album notes, which justify the trouble of trying to find a physical CD in this case, inform me that Bach once told a student, “the aim and final reason of the basso continuo, as of all music, should be none else but the glory of God and the refreshing of the mind.” In its combination of religious piety (the glory of God) and middle-class education (“the refreshing of the mind” of, probably, a Leipzig merchant’s music-lesson-taking son or daughter), this quote is a perfect encomium of the Baroque-era Enlightenment. Bach was the most notable member of a generation that emerged after a century of horrible religious warfare and upheaval to establish a stable, rational way of life that was nevertheless infused totally with religious spirit. It was also an age of stability and yet of upward social mobility.

Right now, these can seem like distant goals for us, particularly on the national and global scales. Yet among the elite, supposedly so modern, parallels to the world of Bach remain. Later on Good Friday evening evening, the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, the gorgeous, cathedral-like Jesuit edifice on the Upper East Side of New York, was packed to capacity for a moving Mass featuring a sung Gospel (although not by Bach.) The continuity between the supposedly buried, supposedly wicked old ways of the Western past and the modern elite—which does not preach what it practices—continues to be remarkable.

But this is a comment for the middle level of thought that is politics. Good Friday exists on the infinitely more exalted level of universal truth, and Bach comes as close to speaking to that truth as almost anyone who has ever lived. The ability to listen to him—on this or any other good recording—is an incredible aid to reflection to anyone musically-minded. “Vast spaces,” wrote Neuhaus, “are left to be filled in by our imagination.” Yes—and by Bach. Happy Easter weekend, everyone.

US Shale Grows Stronger

This past May, there were just 316 active drilling rigs in the United States, the lowest level we’d seen in nearly seven years. What a difference a year makes. The latest figures show the American rig count is now at 683, the highest level in almost two years. The WSJ reports:

The U.S. oil-rig count is typically viewed as a proxy for activity in the sector. After peaking at 1,609 in October 2014, low oil prices put downward pressure on production and the rig count has receded. However, the oil-rig count has generally been rising since last summer.

Rigs aren’t a perfect metric for measuring the health of the oil industry. When oil prices were high, companies were expansive in their shale ambitions and the rig count ballooned accordingly. Following the crude price collapse, those same firms shut down their least-productive and least-profitable wells, leaving behind the gushers and the real money-makers. While the rig count fell from more than 1,600 down below 400, U.S. oil production dipped just 200,000 barrels per day over that time period.

That said, it’s fair to say that the rig count today, coming off the back of a bearish time in the oil market, is a more accurate measure of how well the U.S. shale industry is doing. The fact, then, that it added 11 rigs in the past week is confirmation of something we’ve been watching carefully in recent months: Shale is booming once again, and the U.S. energy outlook is looking awfully bright.

Erdogan Leading in Referendum—Barely

Turks will be casting their ballots this weekend to decide on vast constitutional changes granting near-dictatorial powers to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The final polls before the April 16 vote point to a victory for Erdogan and the Yes campaign, but one that’s probably much closer than he would like:

Latest #TurkishReferendum polls
Gezici: Yes: % 51.3 No: H.7
Konda: Yes: Q.5 No: H.5
Sonar: Yes: H.8 No: Q.2
ANAR: Yes: R No: H

— Yusuf Sarfati (@y_sarfati) April 14, 2017

Turkish polls are notoriously imperfect measures of how Turks actually vote, and these polls in particular leave something to be desired. The Gezici poll, for instance, involved face-to-face interviews of 1,399 households in just 10 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, leaving out not only huge swathes of people within Turkey but also the three million Turks eligible to vote from abroad. Political repression and lopsided campaigning will also give a built-in advantage to the Yes campaign at the ballot box that might not be reflected in polls.

Nonetheless, the polls do point to deep divisions within Turkey that have been brought to the fore by this referendum. Religious Kurds who have previously backed the AKP’s Islamist and Ottomanist agenda are one key constituency that Erdogan can’t afford to lose, while the wider Kurdish population makes up a large proportion of undecided voters. But some of the Yes campaigners’ messages to the Kurds may turn off nationalist voters. Devlet Bahçeli—the leader of the right-wing nationalist MHP and a key supporter of the Yes campaign—caused a last-minute stir on Thursday night when he seemed to suggest that the AKP might pursue a federalist state system after a Yes vote, something that would be anathema to MHP voters. This prompted immediate and strongly-worded denials from Erdogan and other AKP leaders.

With all the high drama this week over Syrian chemical weapons, MOABs in Afghanistan, and carrier strike groups steaming towards the Sea of Japan, the Turkish referendum has been pushed off center stage. But these divisions within Turkish society will play a critical role, one way or another, in deciding the future of Ataturk’s republic—with important consequences reverberating far beyond its borders.

GOP Nixes Obama Retirement Rule

Another last-minute regulatory initiative by the Obama Administration has made its way into the dustbin. Investment News reports:

President Donald J. Trump on Thursday signed into law a resolution that nullifies Obama-era retirement rules meant to encourage cities and other municipalities to develop auto-IRA programs for private-sector workers.

The resolution, H.J. Res. 67, was passed by the Senate in late March and by the House in mid-February, largely along party lines, with Republicans in favor of overturning the rule.

The regulation, issued by the Department of Labor a month before Mr. Trump took office in January, was meant to ease liability concerns among cities when creating automatic-enrollment, payroll-deduction individual retirement account programs to be offered through the workplace.

The Obama Labor Department rules were aimed at addressing a real crisis—chronic under-saving for retirement. But granting cities the authority to create new publicly administered plans with reduced regulatory oversight creates its own set of problems. State and local pension funds for public employees have been managed utterly incompetently, and there are legitimate worries that newly created plans for private sector workers would be vulnerable to similar mismanagement, leaving workers unprotected.

Now that the GOP has successfully overturned an attempted Democratic fix for the retirement system, it has a special responsibility to address this increasingly pressing problem in a comprehensive way—ideally through bipartisan legislation, rather than regulatory directives. The good news is that there are many good ideas out there, and that a number of legislators seem to be taking them seriously.

Chinese Trade with North Korea Is Increasing

China recently made a big show of rejecting North Korean coal cargoes, raising hope that Beijing is finally using its economic clout to get tough on Pyongyang. New trade numbers released yesterday, however, tell a different story. New York Times:  

The data released on Thursday showed that China’s trade with North Korea grew 37.4 percent in the first quarter of this year from the period in 2016. Chinese exports surged 54.5 percent, and imports increased 18.4 percent, the General Administration of Customs said at a news conference in Beijing. […]

China reported that its imports of North Korean iron were up 270 percent in January and February compared with the period in 2016.

These numbers confirm what we suspected about China’s dramatic coal gesture: the move was a symbolic rebuke to Pyongyang and a savvy goodwill gesture to Trump, but it hardly put a dent in the bilateral trade relationship. Trump has made it clear that he wants the Chinese to tighten the economic screws on North Korea, but so far they have not pulled many of the economic levers at their disposal—and in fact, many Chinese firms are actively enabling the North Koreans’ nuclear program by illegally exporting technology and hardware, while Chinese authorities look the other way.

To be fair, there have been some recent signs that Beijing might take more serious action. According to a recent editorial in the state-run Global Times, Beijing could be willing to restrict oil exports to North Korea if Pyongyang launches another nuclear provocation this month. That would indicate a real willingness to play economic hardball, and a long-term oil embargo would have devastating consequences for the North Korean economy.

Until that happens, though, any claims from Beijing that it is putting the economic squeeze on Pyongyang should be treated with extreme skepticism.

Reading Trump’s Foreign Policy Shifts

Over the past week, President Trump has done a remarkable about-face on foreign policy, from his embrace of NATO to his pessimism on Russia to his rosier outlook on cooperation with China. Reuters:

“We may be at an all-time low in terms of a relationship with Russia,” said Trump, who ordered the firing of U.S. cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield last week to punish Assad for suspected use of poison gas in Syria’s civil war.

While criticizing Russia on Wednesday, Trump said he and Xi had bonded during the Chinese president’s visit to the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where they dined together with their wives and held talks. […]

The evolving Trump foreign policy appears to reflect less of the influence of his campaign team and more the views of Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, all of whom are deeply skeptical of Russia.

One way to read events is that Trump hoped—like Bush and Obama before him—that he could shift Putin toward a more pro-U.S. position. The Bannonite dream of a Christian coalition against Islam may have been a factor, but Trump seemed to hope that he could dramatically simplify America’s complex Middle East dilemmas by peeling Russia away from Assad and Iran.

So far, that policy has predictably failed: Today in Moscow, the Foreign Ministers of Russia, Syria, and Iran presented a united front against the United States, promising to boost cooperation just two days after Rex Tillerson’s trip to Russia. And though Trump may still hope for a more productive and transactional relationship with Russia in the long term, for now the White House has embarked on another effort: to peel China away from North Korea.

This is also difficult, and may even be impossible, but there are reasons to try. Unlike Russia, China has been successfully integrated into the global economy and as a result, its relationship with the United States is less zero-sum than Russia’s. Trade with the United States is a vital component of China’s growth; Trump’s willingness, indeed his eagerness, to make trade a political instrument, offering “good deals” to friendly countries and tougher deals to bad actors, opens up a range of negotiating opportunities with China that simply don’t exist with Moscow.

He is also willing, in a way that his predecessors weren’t, to engage in brinkmanship with North Korea—responding to the DPRK’s volcanic eruptions of hatred and threats with firmness and warnings rather than the usual mumbling. This policy is full of risk, but it is hard to argue that at this point the United States has many alternatives, unless we are willing to live with a North Korean gun at our heads for the rest of time.

The hope seems to be that if the United States can effectively coordinate trade diplomacy with military and security diplomacy aimed at the Korean Peninsula, China will conclude that wholehearted cooperation with the United States on North Korea is its best option.

Russians in Nicaragua

With the world focused on Syria, North Korea, Ukraine, and other pressing hotspots, the Russians have expanded their presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. Last week, the Washington Post revealed that the Russians erected a mysterious satellite-tracking compound in Managua that may double as an electronic intelligence-gathering base. This is just the latest example of the increasing partnership between the Kremlin and banana republic leader Daniel Ortega (yes, the same Ortega who gave Reagan fits and provoked the Iran-Contra affair in the ‘80s).

Three decades after this tiny Central American nation became the prize in a Cold War battle with Washington, Russia is once again planting its flag in Nicaragua. Over the past two years, the Russian government has added muscle to its security partnership here, selling tanks and weapons, sending troops, and building facilities intended to train Central American forces to fight drug trafficking.

The Russian surge appears to be part of the Kremlin’s expansionist foreign policy. In other parts of the world, President Vladimir Putin’s administration has deployed fighter planes to help Syria’s war-battered government and stepped up peace efforts in Afghanistan, in addition to annexing the Crimean Peninsula and supporting separatists in Ukraine […]

As the Beltway world untangles the Trump camp’s links to Moscow, American officials are also puzzling over Russian intentions in its obscure former stomping ground. Current and former U.S. officials suspect that the new Russian facilities could have “dual use” capabilities, particularly for electronic espionage aimed at the United States. Security analysts see the military moves in Central America as a possible rebuttal to the increased U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe, showing that Russia can also strut in the United States’ back yard.

Aside from challenging the two-hundred-year-old Monroe Doctrine, Russian spymasters may see a tactical advantage for being in Nicaragua—namely, the opportunity to intercept American Internet traffic running through an underwater fiber optic cable linking Miami to Latin America and the Caribbean. Indeed, the decision to station “about 250 military personnel” in the country and to give Ortega 50 T-72 tanks for free makes clear that they’re probably not there for the coffee.

Alaska Faces Compounding Oil Woes

Alaska’s oil production has fallen off a cliff, even as America’s overall output has surged on the back of booming shale formations in the continental United States. That’s a problem for the state, but it’s also a problem for what’s left of the oil industry there, because as Bloomberg reports a lower utilization rate of a major pipeline artery could make said pipeline unusable in the near future:

The 800-mile Trans Alaska Pipeline System was built for extreme conditions. But as the state’s oil production declines, the pipeline faces a new challenge: flows so sluggish operators worry the line may become unusable, cutting off access for hundreds of North Slope oil wells. […]

Lower volumes mean crude travels more slowly through the pipeline, losing heat along the way. And at low temperatures, crude behaves badly. Ice crystals form that can damage pumping equipment. Carbon molecules, meanwhile, coalesce into paraffin, a waxy residue that, if not cleared out, can gunk up the line “like a big, frozen tube of ChapStick,” said Betsy Haines, Alyeska’s oil-movements director.

There’s something of a negative feedback loop here, but all hope isn’t lost for the state that calls itself the “Last Frontier.” Last October, a Dallas-based wildcatter claimed to have discovered a massive new oil field off Alaska’s north coast that could end up increasing Alaska’s known oil reserves by 80 percent. Like any oil drilling at that latitude, actually getting that crude out of the ground will be easier said than done, but the discovery suggests that Alaska’s oil chapter isn’t done just yet.

The Mists of Scorsese’s Silence

Silence

 

Directed by Martin Scorsese

 

Screenplay by Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese

 

Paramount Pictures (2016), 161 minutes

The first thing we see in Martin Scorsese’s new film Silence is mist—the mist of 17th century Edo Japan. If it weren’t for the people and objects in and around the mist, an East Asian landscape painting, perhaps one of the magnificent Chinese shan shui style and the Japanese styles it influenced, might come to mind. Shan shui paintings evince a serene peace, and their benign mists rest in the spaces between gently flowing rivers, gracefully flourishing trees, and statuesque natural rock formations. The obscuring mists in shan shui paintings are meant to evoke awe at the hidden mysteries of the universe—a reaction that was cherished in the Taoism that influenced the style. In The Tao of Chinese Landscape Painting, Wucius Wong writes that seeing the mist in these landscape paintings is “like being in meditation, when the entire cosmos looks like a white mist, and one finds oneself in a world of white light.”

But the mist in Silence is not the peaceful mist of meditative East Asian landscape paintings. In the first scene of Silence, the mist obscures the Portuguese Jesuit Ferreira’s view of the Japanese officials torturing his comrades. It rises from boiling hot springs whose water is used to scald the Jesuit martyrs. This marks the first of several memorable episodes in the film where mist hides a mysterious and malevolent Japan from Europeans who wish to understand it.

The next scene takes place years later, when Ferreira (Liam Neeson) is the topic of discussion in his old monastery in Portugal. His two young acolytes have heard no news from him, and worry for his safety and welfare. Confronted with rumors that he has abandoned the Christian faith, they insist on traveling together to Japan to find him.

The shots of Portugal contain no obscuring mists. The only clouds are those hovering over the minds of the young Jesuits, clouds of doubt about the possibility of their mentor’s apostasy, and of confusion about the unknown Japanese land to which they travel. Mental mists persist after they arrive in Japan and begin to experience the physical mists as well. The mists return in several key scenes of the film, at one point hiding a group of samurai bent on torturing Christians, and at another hiding friendly villagers.

Portuguese Jesuits of four centuries ago would certainly not have thought of Chinese shan shui art when experiencing the abundant mists of Japan. More familiar images to them would have been the cloud that the Old Testament described as periodically covering the tabernacle of ancient Israel, or the story in the New Testament of a cloud covering Jesus as he underwent his Transfiguration. In these scriptural accounts, clouds hide glory and knowledge from humans unready to fully comprehend them. These stories indicate that traditional Christianity shares with the Taoism of Asian landscape painters, and indeed with every other major religious tradition, an element of mystery. All of the world’s religions ask that practitioners become resigned and comfortable with incomplete knowledge—as with Moses asking God, “Show me your glory” and being denied the chance to see God’s face, or, as St. Paul described it, being obliged to see “through a glass, darkly.”

The two young priests in Silence (Rodrigues, played by Andrew Garfield and Garupe, played by Adam Driver), came from a Christian tradition that required an acceptance of clouds occasionally hiding knowledge and glory. On the other hand, they also lived during an era of scientific revolution in the run-up to the Enlightenment, and were contemporaries of Galileo and Newton. John Locke, another contemporary, wrote about reason as a “candle” that “shines bright enough for all our purposes.” Like Newton, who wanted to stand on the shoulders of giants to see more, Locke and other 17th century thinkers wanted more than anything else to see the universe clearly, unblocked by clouds of mist or what Shelley much later called “a cloud of error.”

The tension between a desire to know everything, to see through every obscuring mist on the one hand, and the religious injunction to accept a foggy, limited understanding of an often-inscrutable God on the other, is familiar to every believer. Silence is in part the story of the mighty inner struggles that Rodrigues and Garupe must endure to resolve this tension within themselves. At the same time, the film asks many questions of the viewer that it declines to explicitly answer. It thus challenges all viewers—believers and nonbelievers alike—to imbibe an individual experience of the tension between the desire to know and the requirement to accept not knowing.

The major action of the film revolves around the 17th century Japanese government’s politically motivated attempts to extinguish the Christian religion from within its borders. An “Inquisitor” called Inoue Masashige (capably played by Issey Ogata) manages the discovery and interrogation of suspected Christians. Interrogation is followed by either punishment (by various methods of torture and execution) or conversion to Buddhism, attested by the suspected Christian symbolically stepping on an image of Christ or Mary.

Inquisitor Inoue had learned that the Jesuit missionaries had all been weaned on admiring stories about martyrs who sacrificed their bodies and lives for the faith. Torturing and killing the missionaries was thus ineffective, since it only gave them an opportunity to achieve the same glory of their beloved martyrs. The tactic that Inoue therefore adopted was to torture the Japanese peasant Christians in the presence of an untortured priest, and promise to cease the torture upon the priest’s apostasy. That way the priest would accrue no glory for suffering bodily for the faith, and each moment of refusal to apostatize would burden him with complicity for the agonizing pain inflicted on innocent peasant converts. In the words of Inoue to Rodrigues, “the price for your glory is their suffering.”

This particular tactic for persecuting Christians was without precedent in any of the common accounts of Christian martyrdom that would have been familiar to Rodrigues and Garupe. The familiar saintly formula of mortification of the flesh that is rewarded with exaltation of the spirit is muddled; instead, they faced a choice between two spiritual mortifications: either allowing and causing others’ physical torture, or reneging on a sacred vow of fidelity. How could either a spiritual mortification or a betrayal lead to the rewards they sought? As strangers in a strange land, they had neither historical examples nor their missing mentor to guide them through this dilemma.

At several points in the film, the young priests discuss the proper response to Inoue’s tactic. Garupe is rigid in arguing for strict resistance, giving the simple advice, “You must pray for courage.” At one point Rodrigues advises the peasants that in the face of awful danger to their loved ones, “it’s alright to trample.” Although this is his advice to the congregants, as a consecrated priest who had taken serious vows of fidelity he feels that he cannot do it himself. One Japanese official minimizes the act of apostasy, saying: “This is just a formality. . . . We’re not asking you to do it sincerely. Just putting your foot on the thing won’t betray your faith. . . . It’s only a picture.”

A modern viewer may think the dogmatic refusal to make a symbolic gesture before a sadistic bureaucrat is utterly foolish. Surely it is “only a picture,” so from a Benthamite utilitarian point of view, symbolic apostasy is the optimal choice: a simple action, anonymously performed, that immediately ends imprisonment and pain for dozens of loved ones. For a believer, however, this option discounts the infinite expected utility of a heavenly reward. One of the Japanese Christians in the film expresses this simple faith-based utilitarian argument in the desirability of suffering and dying for her beliefs: “our father . . . Padre Juan . . . said if we die we will go to paraiso [from the Portuguese for paradise]. Isn’t it good to die? Paraiso is so much better than here. No one hungry, never sick. No taxes, no hard work.”

Even from a secular perspective, there is an argument for refusing to bend to the Inquisitor’s will and the utilitarian imperative. Consider the justification that one Robert Heinlein “sci-fi” character offers for his enlistment in the army: “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal . . . but a man.” Utility reasoning is a logical criterion for evaluating important decisions, but it is also the same criterion that animals and lifeless computer programs use. For some, embracing less than fully rational modes of thought for the sake of feeling less like an animal and more like a true human being who can exercise free will has strong appeal. This is roughly the argument proposed by Thoreau for his own (arguably) irrational resistance to vengeful state functionaries:

 

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies . . . they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. . . . A very few—as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men—serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part . . . .

 

Thoreau argued for a paradox: that by resisting the state, heroes, patriots, and martyrs most effectively serve it by dragging it toward a better incarnation of itself. The Christians of Silence experienced their own version of this: They most effectively became human by eschewing human utilitarian considerations and trying to become super-human saints.

The film was a box office failure, earning $16 million worldwide against a budget of $40 million. On the other hand, considering the heavy theological issues at its forefront, painful-to-watch torture scenes, and its 161-minute runtime, it’s almost a surprise that anyone went to see it at all. It might also seem like a surprise that anyone invested the money to produce it in the first place. The explanation for this is simple: It’s a Scorsese film. His powerful reputation as a living legend auteur could attract big-name actors and millions of dollars to any project he cared to work on.

If Scorsese could work on any project at all, why did he work on this? In fact, he has wanted to make this movie for decades, since he read the 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo on which the movie was based. He was involved with the film not only as a director, but also as a producer and screenwriter. He described his motivation for making the movie as follows:

“Its subject matter is something that’s sort of consumed me my whole life, really. The themes in this picture kept me going—compassion, love—these things were always very strong with me because of the relationship I had when I was young with the Catholic Church in New York. There was a priest in my neighborhood who was very much a mentor to us and really opened our minds to the opportunities in America. . . . [T]he interest in the message or the tenets of the religion and the application of it in daily life has always been something to me that has been a theme, an idea.”

The ideas of faith in general and Christianity in particular can be found in nearly all of Scorsese’s films by someone who cares to look for them. He has most explicitly explored them in Kundun, his film about the Dalai Lama, and of course The Last Temptation of Christ. But while those two films show religions on their respective native soils and in the personalities of their greatest leaders, Silence tells stories of undistinguished peasants and nobodies in a beautiful but remote corner of the world. So, Silence does not risk generating controversy about misrepresenting famous historical figures, but trades this for the risk of attracting accusations of cultural imperialism and ethnocentrism.

These accusations were voiced in great detail by The Daily Beast’s Jen Yamato. Her review’s subtitle complains that the film “is far more concerned with [the Jesuit priest’s] agony than that of the ‘other.’” She refers to Rodrigues as the film’s “white savior,” describing the film as “an ardent story about cultural imperialism and Western arrogance that doesn’t recognize its own” and that “embraces the white male perspective.” She describes the missionaries as bringing “guns and God” and “their ‘truth’ to a country of naïve converts in need” with an “interloper’s condescension.”

The first thing I would say about Ms. Yamato’s criticisms is that, in a very limited sense, she is right. The film does primarily show the point of view of the European Catholic white male Rodrigues. Japan is shown as a foreign and inscrutable land, and even one that contains many horrors. If Endo’s novel had been adapted by a Japanese filmmaker, it would have been a very different film. In fact, it has been adapted by a Japanese filmmaker (in 1971), and that adaptation was very different from Scorsese’s version.

I could point out some excuses for Scorsese primarily taking a white, male, Catholic perspective in his film. For example, I could describe the ways that Silence takes time to focus on and develop some of the Japanese characters and show their humanity and depth, most notably Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka). But the best excuse for Scorsese taking a white, male, Catholic perspective is simple: that’s the only perspective he has. Born in Queens to Italian parents and raised to manhood as a Catholic, Scorsese does not make movies as a scientist or a demographer focused on cultural balance or an omniscient third party, but rather as Scorsese: a human artist with a unique voice that comes in part from his personal identity.

Scorsese can only make movies as Scorsese with all of his particular background and characteristics; that is not unjust but merely axiomatic. If he tried to make a movie in exactly the same way a Japanese filmmaker would make a movie, with that perspective and cultural upbringing, the result’s cosmopolitanism would not compensate for its inauthenticity. Scorsese himself pointed this out in an interview about Silence, saying:

There’s no doubt that, you know, I’m fairly well versed in Japanese cinema . . . going back to the first Japanese film I saw. It was 1954 or ’55, it was on television, and it was called Ugetsu. . . . I became obsessed, really, with Japanese films. . . . [T]his was a long process too, as to how to approach the picture visually, and what is in my mind? Are there Japanese films in my mind? If that’s the case, then it’s not acc—it’s not authentic. It has to be how I see it, not how I think Japanese cinema would look, or a film shot in Japan about the 17th century would look.

The real problem with these criticisms of cultural chauvinism is that they are distractions from the more important aesthetic features of the film. As important as politics is, it is not greater than art. Each era has its own political obsessions. We have plenty today, and race and historical victim status are among them. But though those obsessions will someday fade and others will replace them, the greatest art of today will endure undimmed by the political fashions of any given moment. Like Picasso said, “there is no past or future in art.” When considering the worth of a film like Silence, aesthetic considerations should trump political ones.

The great Ray Bradbury expressed this idea decades ago:

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conservationist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. . . . If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. . . .

We might add, if anyone is upset about the cultural imbalances in Silence, then remake it, and tell it in your own way, whatever way that might be. Or make another film about something completely different. Of course, Japanese filmmakers are doing just that, and have been for many years.

Last year, Variety ran a story about Shinya Tsukamoto, one such Japanese director. He was not offended by any of Scorsese’s supposed imperialism. In fact, he admired Scorsese so much that when he heard about Silence, he contacted the casting director and ended up in a key role (Mokichi). The Japan Times, for its part, ran a lukewarm review of Silence that faulted it for its length and tediousness but not for its cultural insensitivity. The reception of the film in Japan seemed to be relatively positive, though of course it wasn’t enough of a hit anywhere in the world to enable the film to come close to breaking even.

The last third of the film shows Rodrigues’s final approach to the Inquisitor’s persecutions. The ending contains some surprises, and rewards repeated viewings. During the film, Rodrigues spends anguished hours praying to a God whose silence in response torments him. Eventually, Christ speaks to Rodrigues, breaking his long silence, and claiming that he never had been silent at all. But after Christ speaks, the narration shifts from Rodrigues’s voice to the voice of an uninformed third party. In the last part of the film, viewers are subjected to the silence of Rodrigues. Like Rodrigues had to wonder about the silence of Christ and the contents of Christ’s mind and heart, viewers face the same challenges determining the contents of the heart of Rodrigues. What motivated his ultimate decision—the concerns of a utilitarian or the concerns of a saint? What were its consequences in his mind and conscience? What has become of his faith? The film does not provide certain answers; instead it matches the silence of Christ and Rodgrigues with a soundtrack that is elegiac and spare.

In the final scene, we see the late Rodrigues being cremated, many years after the main action of the film. The fire that engulfs his body recalls a tense argument earlier in the film about what the Japanese martyrs were dying for. “I saw men die for Deus. On fire with their faith,” Rodrigues fervently claimed. The cynical reply was: “Your martyrs may have been on fire. But it was not with the Christian faith. . . . They’re dying for you.” When we see Rodrigues literally on fire, we have only the smallest hint about the faith with which he died, and for what purpose he lived his last years and died, if indeed the answer was for anything other than himself. Viewers are left to come to their own conclusions.

I was a Mormon missionary in Southeast Asia for two years when I was around twenty years old. My experience lacked the hellish intensity of the missionaries’ experience in Silence, but on some small level I could still relate. I was interviewed several times by government and military functionaries who told me of their concerns about the social unrest I might cause in their respective nations. I ran a meeting for isolated Christians in a country that, I later found out, explicitly penalized such forbidden activity with jail time. In a different country, someone called the police on me. The policeman who came lectured me on the undesirability of missionary work in an historically non-Christian nation with reasoning strikingly similar to the reasoning presented to Rodrigues in Silence about why Christianity could never take root in Japan. When traveling between certain countries, I hid contraband Christian scriptures in my luggage lest they be confiscated at the border.

These minor discomforts were nothing like the tortures depicted in Silence, but they mostly came as a shock to a young American like me who, at the time, couldn’t imagine the reasoning behind imposing even minor penalties for religious meetings and proselytizing activities. I tried to understand these policies and regimes that I regarded as nothing more or less than inquisitorial, differing in degree of brutality but not in essential motivation from the inquisitorial regime in Edo Japan, or in any other place where religious minorities have been persecuted.

One conclusion I drew from these experiences and ruminations was that there is a puzzling but constant desire in at least some human hearts to control even the most insignificant minutiae of what other people believe. At one point in Silence, a suspected Christian villager raises an ineffectual protest against the punishments he is threatened with: “But we pay our taxes every year and do our duty to the State. We worship Buddha in the temple.” The Inquisitor’s underling is not fazed by this plea of good behavior. He does not dispute its truth, but replies, “I am well aware that you are all good people. We only want to hear about those who embrace the outlawed faith.” His, or his government’s, interest was in the personal beliefs of the citizens, regardless of outward behavior.

We see occasional glimpses of this same inquisitorial instinct even in the most liberal nations of today’s West. In one famous 2012 case a British borough council removed three children from their foster parents, according to the BBC, “because they belong to the UK Independence Party.” Regardless of their track record as caring foster parents, local bureaucrats thought it appropriate to remove the children for reasons that are hard to understand as anything other than punitive toward those holding beliefs they didn’t like. In 2014, Brendan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of the Mozilla corporation as the result of an “online shaming campaign” of activist individuals and corporations who, though they found nothing to criticize in his behavior, disliked his beliefs about gay marriage. In 2016, the CEO of Grubhub emailed his employees to say that he “absolutely reject[ed] the . . . hateful politics of Donald Trump” and added: “If you do not agree with this statement then please reply to this email with your resignation because you have no place here.” Employees thought that they had contracted to do work in exchange for pay, but their CEO now demanded not just good work but also inner beliefs that conformed to his own. These incidents, though separated in space and time and ideologically diverse in their particulars, clearly manifest the human inquisitorial tendency at work.

But Inquisition is not the only story in Silence. The film also conveys compelling accounts of the unlikely friendship and brotherhood that can flourish even between people from different continents, speaking different languages, who have barely met. It shows redemption and forgiveness and regret and longing and adventure. It is therefore not only former missionaries or Japanese Catholics who can enjoy the film. Its long shots with slow movements evoke Japanese Noh theatre, a genre meant to provide opportunities for private meditation as much as to provide public entertainment. This is the film’s great strength: that like a long Noh sequence, or the mist in a shan shui painting, its dreamy silences provide a blank canvas on which to project our own experiences and quietly meditate on anything or everything or nothing in particular. This is an uncommon opportunity, especially uncommon in Hollywood movies. Whether believer or unbeliever, Inquisitor or victim, imperialist or isolationist, this should be a welcome opportunity for anyone with a soul.