Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
For the last 70+ years, we have lived in a world awash in American cultural production. Seen from the outside, from a culture that has little to do with the cultural underpinnings of that production, much of what manages to survive translation and adaptation looks decidedly weird. Culture, after all, consists mainly of un-examined assumptions, and it is only on top of all those assumptions that a writer builds a plot or a composer creates his lyrics. He wants to tell a story about the main character becoming a better person, and so he does. However, the meaning of “becoming a better person” stays unexamined; after all, for him, it is obvious, like all cultural assumptions. It is from our cultural background that this kind of judgment values come, and they seldom are enunciated clearly enough to be rationally examined. Fishes do not examine their wetness.
I read somewhere about an American producer in Central America, who wanted the stories contained in the local version of his project to be drawn from what was already familiar to its intended public. So he asked his local guy to find stories with the same fundamental morals to substitute for the original American ones. The local guy drew a blank when the poor Gringo asked him to provide a local version of “the little engine that could”: there were gazillions of stories teaching children that uppity nails get hammered down, but absolutely no local version of that tale. No culture would retain a story that taught children what any local parent would see as a vice, not a virtue, and that was certainly the case of trying to climb above one’s station in life by one’s own efforts, against the opinion and the wishes of one’s family.
Before the explosion of film, most foreign stories were actually interpreted and domesticated by their translators. The labor of translation was seen etymologically: to translate meant to bring stuff across a cultural divide, jettisoning what does not travel well and repacking what can arrive in one piece. Here in Brazil, for instance, much foreign stuff was adapted for Brazilian kids by Monteiro Lobato, probably the most important children’s author in our history. He idolized American culture to the point of championing the habit of putting one’s feet on the desk, which he argued would bring more blood to one’s brain. Nonetheless, Lobato would systematically alter many aspects of the English and American stories he translated — or rather re-wrote —, so that they could make more sense for Brazilian children. On the other hand, his book about how it would be when the USA finally had a Black President (in the year 2228, no sooner!) was so weird for the American public it only got published in English (for Kindle only) quite recently. Cultural misunderstandings work both ways.
Now, with film, there is no room for a trans-lator, for somebody to carry the basics across the cultural divide, as everything comes as a whole — image, plot, music - with dialogue being the only element that needs translation, or rather replication in another language. Curiously, the main difference between the original script and Brazilian subtitles or dubbing is that the four-letter words do not make it across to the Portuguese text. “M*therf*ker” will be translated as “rascal”, this kind of thing. But the stories come just as they were conceived in another culture, for another culture. Often movie-plot elements come across as bizarre, such as when characters say they will call the cops on their own family for some ludicrous reason. It is quite a common occurrence in American movies and series, but one of the strongest taboos in most other cultures around the globe.
Another cultural thing that is a part of one of the many common plots, but that just does not work in non-Modern cultures is what I call “the magical piece of paper”. It can be a sequence of papers with secrets on them, as in Nicolas Cage’s National Treasure series, or it can be some Da Vinci Code-like “hidden document that can change the world and put the Vatican [a.k.a. the Catholic Church] out of business”. In Dan Brown’s plot, the worth of some arcane piece of paper was so great it is said to be the actual Holy Grail.
But it is not just a plot-building trick: “international” news agencies (that is, American and British ones, as all others are usually ignored outside their home countries) often try to sensationalize discoveries of magical pieces of paper with a few written words here and there, attributing them the power to change the world. One of the weirdest real-life stories in that vein is told in a book whose Amazon blurb reads:
In 2012, Dr. Karen King, a star religion professor at Harvard, announced a breathtaking discovery just steps from the Vatican: she'd found an ancient scrap of papyrus in which Jesus calls Mary Magdalene "my wife." The mysterious manuscript, which King provocatively titled "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife," had the power to topple the Roman Catholic Church. It threatened not just the all-male priesthood, but centuries of sacred teachings on marriage, sex, and women's leadership, much of it premised on the hallowed tradition of a celibate Jesus.
Straight out of Dan Brown, “an ancient scrap of papyrus […] had the power to topple the Roman Catholic Church”! It just makes no sense in any culture that does not idolize the written word. On the contrary, a very common Brazilian expression states that “papel aceita tudo”, “paper accepts anything”. In other words, one cannot trust the written word.
A cousin of mine, who used to be one of the best premium tourist guides in Rio de Janeiro, told me he had a wonderful trick for dealing with annoying American tourists: whenever they insisted too much on doing something that made no sense and could bring them (or him) problems, he’d say there was a law against it. They would immediately shut up and stop demanding the whatnot they had wanted so bad a minute earlier. As his customers were mainly politicians, artists, millionaires, and so on, that is, over-entitled people who would often ask for illegal drugs, prostitutes, or whatever they fancied, it was indeed strange that invoking some weird (and imaginary) local law against, say, wearing Indian headdresses in the tour guide’s car would have any effect. But it did.
Now, what is the common point between calling the cops on one’s own family, believing that some random scrap of papyrus has the power to “topple the Roman Catholic Church”, and abiding by a supposed legal obstacle to whatever thing one wished to do after smoking pot, sniffing coke, and bedding prostitutes?!
It’s what I call the idolatry of the written word.
It is an unexamined belief in the supposed power of the written word to formulate reality, whose immediate origin can be found, I think, in the deep changes effected in Northern European culture by Fr. Martin Luther’s Islamizing doctrine of Sola Scriptura, according to which the whole of God’s Revelation — that was, let us keep it in mind, the bedrock of all social institutions of his time — would be contained in The One Book: the Bible, minus seven of its component parts.
It is not to say there was no magical use of the written word before; quite the opposite, in fact. But magical power, before Fr. Luther’s invention, was not to be found in the word itself.
In Kabballah, which is basically a Neo-Platonic magical system applied to some aspects of Medieval Jewish mysticism, the power is in the individual letters and in the Names of God. Even then, the most important thing is not the literal written meaning, but the numerical values of each letter and the mathematical acrobatics one could do while combining letters.
In European Pagan written invocations, written words had no power by themselves, as they were just what words are supposed to be: a means of communication. People would write messages to the gods, but it was the gods’ power they trusted on. In a way, it’s akin to what people who wedge written prayers between stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem do: a written communication with the Divine.
Likewise, in Middle-Eastern incantation bowls, the words were there to trick the devils into locking themselves in the bowls. A nice trick, by the way: the text was a spiral written from the outside of the bowl in, and devils — who cannot help being curious — would turn and turn to read it, getting further into the bowl with each word, only to find themselves unable to leave later. The words were essentially devil-bait, not powerful per see; if they had not been written in an inwards-oriented spiral they wouldn’t be of any magical use.
Curiously, even if it was not at all his intention, Fr. Luther’s act of nailing written words (his 95 theses, which by the way no Protestant confession nowadays would completely accept, not even the Lutherans) to a church door symbolically opened the way for a supervaluation — idolatrous in many aspects — of the written word against the hard wooden-door-like reality of Sacramental Christianity. This, in turn, led to the Modern belief in the superiority of thought (thus of ideology, positive law, etc.) over reality. Each strike of the friar’s hammer brought us closer to Zuckerberg’s metaverse…
Before the Lutheran Revolution, the written word — and even the written Word, that is, Sacred Scripture — was literally something that only had an academic interest. There were scholars who studied it, as there were scholars who studied other stuff, neither less nor more important. It had nothing to do with the way people lived the Faith, and even less to do with what Christians actually believed. And, obviously, it didn’t have anything to do with morals or human law, and it certainly had no power at all by itself.
Law was custom, and custom was law. The very notion of a “secret” law — or of “hidden commandments” to be found in Scripture — made no sense. Religion, at least in Southerner latitudes, whose Pagan past was too far away in time to be a problem, was communal and consisted of taking part in the mechanisms put in place by the Incarnate God to unite Heavens and Earth. What had been just water became the way one was to be adopted by God the Father, in Baptism; what had been bread and wine became God the Son, really present in His Flesh, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, surrendering Himself on our behalf. Words were important, as all sacramental formulae were more or less fixed, but these were oral words. They could well be written in sacramentaries, but they were utterly powerless until spoken by the right person at the right time. As a matter of fact, it was quite common at the time to have priests who could not read and just memorized the sacramental words. Seminary studies would only become mandatory with the Council of Trent, half a century after the Lutheran Revolution started, and even then they took a long time to become really universal. In the XIXth Century, there still were priests with no academic formation in Iberian countries, allowed to say Mass but forbidden to preach.
That’s how the world was and kept being everywhere in the world, except for the tiny territory of Northern Europe and the lands it conquered, soon to become as powerful economically as they were weak spiritually. Christian lands, especially those that had just won a hard battle against Islam, freeing the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim domination, were preserved from the new idolatry then spreading in the cold North. Even Pagan lands, whose natural religions presented various forms of direct re-connection (re-linkage, re-ligion) between the material and the spiritual, were spared.
In Northern Europe, though, contrary to Fr. Luther’s intentions, Pandora’s box had been opened. What had provided a unanimous sense of right and wrong, what had provided order to society, was no more. In its stead was a cipher: a book one could perfectly well accept as theoretically containing all needed truth, but whose meanings and true contents were heavily contested since it began to be seen in that way. All one could be sure of was that what had been as obvious as universal before was no longer valid. Sects based on strikingly different readings of the same texts sprouted like mushrooms, and, ominously, State power started to be used to protect this or that reading against all others. In any case, the source of those widely-differing readings, that is, The One Book itself, could not have its new-found authority denied without denying altogether the authority of the rulers who adhered to a certain reading of it.
It created a socio-psychological environment in which Truth, which used to be defined as “what has always been believed everywhere”, suddenly started to depend on discovering something “hidden” in the written words of The One Book. It turned the regular order of things (regular, that is, for the whole mass of mankind) upside down: reality no longer informed belief. Quite the opposite, in fact: belief, in the form of a particular reading, a particular deciphering of The One Book, would be forcefully implemented upon reality, overturning traditional mores and beliefs. If a strong-enough prince supported that particular reading, it might survive. If not, the fate of the Münster Anabaptists would probably be replicated. Those within the revolutionary scheme needed to support the idea that The One Book was all that was needed, nevertheless. In spite of the fact that thousands of different interpretations were possible, they had to keep proposing that cipher as the single source of all truth. As something to be trusted above one’s lying senses. Even if it did not work, or especially as it did not work.
The destabilizing effect of replacing universal Truth, known by all, with State-imposition of a particular hermeneutical reading of an idolized text was, obviously, enormous. Even more so when one realizes that by putting The One Book on God’s throne, the God who was known and whom all perceived as acting in the world was actually replaced by divinized Scripture. The arbiter of religious orthodoxy, up to the Lutheran revolution, was the Church. Not “a” Church, as there is no more than one God, and therefore no more than one Church, which is His Mystical Body. And, even more so, not a supposedly “invisible” Church congregating thousands of mutually-exclusive readings of a single Scripture; if He is “the Way, and the Truth, and the Life”, there can be no competing “truths” within His Body.
Now, the Church was not different from the faithful. The hierarchical Church — that is, the Bishops and the (very distant) Pope — did not have much of a role to play, insofar as there was a unanimous understanding of both the Faith and its implications. One of the main ecclesial problems of the time, by the way, was the ubiquity of absentee Bishops, who did not even set foot in their dioceses once in a blue moon.
There had been a need for direct action by the Church before, though. Centuries before, in Southern France, popular disgust for the Cathar heresy grew so strong people were being murdered on the mere suspicion of harboring Cathar inclinations. Thus was born the First Inquisition, which tried to prevent the lynching of supposed heretics without a proper trial. The next one was installed by the Spanish government, against Papal wishes, to deal with false conversions from Judaism and Islamism after the Reconquista.
In regular religious life, then, religion was not an issue of contention, but a fact of life among all others. Just as the seasons followed one another, liturgical time and liturgical feasts timed days and months. Just as one was born, married, had children, and eventually died, sacramental life marked the events of one’s life. There were no separate religious, legal, social, or intimate spheres of life. And that is how things kept being in the countries that remained Catholic, as well as everywhere idolatry of the written word did not get established by secular authorities. In traditional societies, positive law, i.e., all human law that is forced upon the people as written word, is always weaker than custom, and will only be accepted when it follows custom or, at the very least, does not interfere with it.
In Brazil, for instance, we say that some laws “stick”, while most don’t. A law “sticks” when the police will deign to enforce it and people will at least pretend to follow it most of the time. Most positive laws do not stick, by the way; as legislators are well-aware of it, they feel free to promulgate all kinds of absurdity. Some of it is intended as a show of sympathy for some of their electors, some are intended to be used against their adversaries when needed, and so on. Another common expression says “for one’s friends, everything; for one’s enemies, the Law”. It does not mean that one will break the law on behalf of one’s friends, but that even laws that don’t stick can and will be used against political enemies.
For instance, one of present-President Bolsonaro’s sons is being accused of hiring people to — at least theoretically — work in his legislative office, keeping a part of their salaries for himself to help with future campaign funding. Well, I have never heard of a politician who would not do that. It is just the way it is always done, everywhere in the country, by all elected office holders. And it is also “illegal”: clearly, a law that did not stick. Nevertheless, that seemingly-forgotten law came in handy for Bolsonaro’s political enemies, and now his son is being sued for “breaking” it.
Another interesting example: in Rio de Janeiro, for some reason, the police now try to enforce DUI laws, even if they can’t prevent heavily-armed drug-dealer convoys from driving around town terrorizing the innocent and engaging in turf wars. So, every night there are always dozens of police operations called “Blitz da Lei Seca”, “Prohibition Checkpoints”, all around Rio, trying to grab those nasty people who’d down a beer with dinner. The citizenry at large sees it as unacceptable and finds ways to get around that particular problem. For instance, there are WhatsApp and Telegram groups wherein everybody who sees a Prohibition Checkpoint will post its coordinates, freely-downloadable GPS map layers using this data, and so on.
The fact that magical powers are not attributed to the written word of positive law means it can be safely ignored whenever it does not pass the test of custom and reality. It is just not important enough to make it worth, for instance, trying to change it or replace it with a more adequate piece of positive law. It can be annoying, of course, especially in the rare cases when it is indeed used against us, but in general, it can just be safely ignored. Nobody down here, pace Kelsen, would mistake positive law for a moral minimum.
“Paper accepts anything”, after all, and that is why it is still quite common, especially in the countryside, for people to feel offended when asked to sign a written contract. The most common reaction, especially among older men, is to pull one hair out of his mustache and offer it, as proof that he is not some child whose (spoken) word cannot be trusted, but a grown man. A written contract is seen as the abdication of moral responsibility on behalf of an alien State-enforced code of pseudo-law. That is why people who would never break their spoken word feel free to “break” a written contract: signing it already meant it was not a real moral commitment. It was just a favor granted to some childlike person whose word cannot be trusted, and who, for that reason, demanded some kind of innocuous superstitious written amulet.
What goes for Brazil certainly goes for any other more-or-less traditional society, for any society based on something other than the Modern idea, for all societies whose working social mechanisms have been created from the bottom up. This is why it was a ludicrous and doomed-from-the-start project to “build democracy and the rule of law” in the Middle East, for instance. I can easily imagine a regular Iraqi salt-of-the-earth family man pulling off one hair from the Saddam-like mustache he wears for the same reason Americans carry their driving license into bars and nightclubs: to show he is not a child (and therefore his spoken word should be trusted).
In any traditional society, even if it is Muslim, the written word is certainly below social customs and mores. We cannot forget that while Islam also theoretically proposes their One Book as containing all that is necessary, they never really tried to make it so. Islamic sects have always used other elements (as the hadith) together with the very strong imposition by force of arms of a full package of laws, both koranic and extra-koranic. They never went through a centuries-long process of societal dismantlement and upheaval in which the only thing that could not be denied was the letter of the very text whose predictably diverse interpretations fostered chaos. The Koran came together with the hadith, the Caliphs, and whatnot, imposing a totalitarian “peace” that prevented idolatry of the written word such as that which dominated Northern Europe and later, in its secular versions, went out to terrorize the world.
After all, it’s from that first idolatry that ensues the whole of Modernity, including and especially the fundamental assumptions that a certain text can magically create a society — in other others, be its “Constitution”.
An American friend went through a kind of Brazil-mania once, trying to learn the language, listening exclusively to Brazilian music, cooking lots of Brazilian recipes, and so on. Her poor suffering husband wanted to understand what Brazil was about. The way he found to do it couldn’t be wronger if he wanted to: he got himself a translation of the utopian, deliriously-rambling 1988 Constitution promulgated by the extreme left after the end of the military governments, and, of course, could not make head or tail of it. Reading the 1988 Constitution teaches one single thing about Brazil: nobody down here takes positive law, constitutions, and such, seriously.
Another friend worked on a project that demanded the examination of Brazilian political parties’ by-laws and ideological statements and found out they were all virtually the same. What probably happened was that each time a party (and there are plenty of them; the Brazilian system is akin to the French one) was started nobody cared about the wording of documents seen as “mere red tape”. They’d just get something that had already been accepted by State bureaucracy in the establishment of any other party and submit a copy of the same document in their name. Now, that is almost certainly what happened to, say, Afghan NGOs that got American money during the occupation of their country. They would see written documents as amulets required by American red tape, certainly not as statements of reality or faith. Therefore, if a document worked for Abdul’s NGO it would certainly be used again for Hassam’s; all they wanted was to keep their sponsors satisfied, not to confront their document-worshipping superstitions.
Countries with traditional societies can be forced to adopt a very thin veneer of Modern paper-worshipping idolatry. It will always be, though, a superficial layer superimposed onto society, and it will certainly not inform it or, much less, “constitute” it. The people will not substitute it for customary mores and morality, and it will only be able to affect a thin section of society. While there will be (very few) people within the system taking it seriously, the vast majority of the population will not be touched by it unless one is dragged into the bureaucratic or judicial system. Most will avoid it like the plague, for nobody can be sure of what will come from it: another common Brazilian expression says that “cabeça de juiz e bumbum de neném, ninguém sabe o que vem”, “one can never know what will come from a judge’s head or from a baby’s rear end”. One of the reasons why it is so — along with the really crazy stuff Brazilian legislators feel free to promulgate into law — was revealed to me by an important senior judge friend. She told me that in the selection of new judges, effected through a very hard series of exams in which only a tiny but brilliant minority of members of the bar manages to get approved, the senior judges always find a way to approve only very young people, coming straight from law school. Older folk, she told me, will have “too much life experience” and will not be as strict about the letter of the law. The funniest thing in this sad tale is that… it is illegal. Brazilian positive law does forbid discrimination based on age!
But, hey, it’s only a bunch of written words. Paper accepts anything.