Struggles Not In Common

A Carnival of Symbology

A trip to a night market in Taiwan is consistently one of the most memorable experiences for newcomers to the island. The barrage of colorful sights, music competing from different shops, smells of food cooking, of cigarette smoke, of flowing crowds like rivers of humanity, make for an absorbing, fascinating, and sometimes overwhelming introduction to Taiwan and "how things are" here.

Among the stalls you can find nearly everything; from delicate fruit, honey, and shaved ice creations to fried chicken butts on a stick, tacky souvenirs to designer handbags, discount kitchenware to silk ties... the only thing you're not likely to find is a spot quiet enough to make a phone call without shouting.

Among all this even a cursory examination of some of the smaller stalls will reveal a wide array of cigarette lighters, from led light-enhanced chrome zippos to cheap plastic bic-types, covered in random designs drawn from the global soup of symbology, everything from Snoopy to the Nazi flag.

An Arresting Symbol

Wait, the Nazi flag? You might be highly offended at this. It was certainly jarring to see on my first visit to Taiwan. But do you know the history behind the Nazi flag design and its instantly recognizable swastika? It's not a symbol the Nazis made up, but a very, very old one co-opted by Hitler, with his fascination for ancient objects and symbols of power, and exploited in the Nazis' self-serving reconception of history according to their twisted ideals.

The term swastika actually comes from a Sanskrit word, svastika, which denotes a good luck charm or mark, and the symbol itself is thousands of years old, found across the ancient world from Roman mosaics to Japanese clan symbols. It was used for thousands of years as a religious or lucky symbol with various connotations, and became closely identified with Buddhism. Across East Asia, including my city district, it still is:

Does this offend you? Do you wince a little automatically when you see it? What might go through a visiting Jewish person's mind? Should Westerners for whom the symbol is 100% synonymous with hate, racism, and death camps try to get Buddhist people in Asia to stop using it, when that's not what it means to Buddhist people at all?

In Taiwan, the symbol can be seen fairly frequently. It's one of the most compelling reminders that I am not in the West, that I am in a place where even symbology is different, where what "everyone" instantly recognizes as a symbol of historic evil is instead regarded as a positive symbol and displayed in various religious contexts, even used on area maps in the subway stations to denote the locations of Buddhist temples. (Christian churches are marked with crosses).

The emotional impact of the symbol having been co-opted by the Nazis is simply absent here, to the extent that at times the graphic being used is the actual Nazi flag. While some might simply be trying to borrow a recognizable or "rebellious" symbol to put on the lighters or other places, its use in some other situations convinced me that often it's just a case of someone thinking it was a colorful version of the normal Asian religious symbol. The horrible and unbreakable associations of the symbol for Westerners don't exist here, because this is not the West. Though there was frequently contact and a bit of overlap, for the most part Far Eastern history is not Western history, and Western history is not Far Eastern history. Many horrible historical incidents and times of suffering in East Asia are enshrined in the cultural consciousness of people here, events of which most Westerners have never even heard, and vice versa. Our struggles are different, and the legacies of history that affect us today are different. That is part of what it means to be a member of a different culture.

When Symbol Interpretations Collide, Identities Suffer

What we might call "symbol conflict" is just one of the many discontinuities one encounters and must endure when crossing cultures. And now the internet, with its vast resources of instantly accessible information, provides uncountable opportunities for these encounters with no context whatsoever. If you saw a bunch of monks with swastikas on their heads, and didn't know the history of the symbol, you might be incredibly confused. Your imaginative explanation probably could not be devoid of references to Hitler, Nazis, or white supremacy movements, because that's the only context you know for that symbol.

Globalism means that our symbols, our cultural memes and shared understandings of things, more and more often rub up against different interpretations and understandings of the world. Sometimes these are mutually exclusive. Sometimes one interpretation wins, as we've seen in the US with the recently revived debate over the Confederate flag. To a minority, it's a meaningful and important symbol of the heritage of their land and culture, something that ties them to their forebearers and unites them as a group. That race-based slavery was part of that culture in the past is not seen as something positive, but is also not the primary association being made, any more than the primary association of the American flag for Americans is the conquest and slaughter of America's indigenous inhabitants. To the majority, however, the Confederate flag is simply a symbol of racism and slavery, and that interpretation has won out. Even as I write this, the flag is being taken down around the South in many official contexts where it was still being used, as Southerners in positions of authority decide that, rightly or wrongly, perceptions are not going to be changed by more explaining. (Whether demands to eliminate all symbols of Southern history will be taken seriously remains to be seen. There are many who desire, like a new Pharaoh, to have the names of old rivals chiseled away, erased from history itself.)

So the minority is being forced to abandon their symbol, because what it communicated to the majority outside the culture was not the same as what it communicated within their culture. And it may be that the majority is not particularly concerned with what the minority might think about these symbols as regards their identity, because any separate identity along those lines is also considered negative and desired to disappear. There are parallels to this in history. At the beginning of the Meiji era of Japanese history, when its rulers decided that Japan would become a modern nation and sought to imitate many Western ways and customs, many of the old feudal rules concerning the samurai were discarded en masse and new rules banning the distinctive samurai hairstyle and the wearing of swords put in place. Many samurai resisted to the utmost of their abilities, and there were large-scale rebellions; their very identity was bound up in these symbols, and their disappearance marked not only the end of their own role in society but the fading of an entire historical era into the past, never to return. No one likes to be declared a living obsoletion, socially undead. But the changes were inevitable, and the samurai were ended, and died off; victims, in a sense, of globalism in its early stages.

Samurai from the Satsuma clan, who initially fought with the Imperial Army
against a samurai army resisting the Meiji era government, then themselves
rebelled after realizing the new government would end the samurai way of life.
(This is the historical basis of the movie The Last Samurai, as described here)

Tolerance vs. the Will of the Majority

The swastika has not disappeared, however; it is a common sight in this part of the world. To be honest, I haven't gotten used to it yet, perhaps I never will. Perhaps I shouldn't, even outside of my home culture context. But I recognize that what it evokes for me is simply not what it evokes for the vast majority of people who grew up here. That's part of what it means to live as a minority in a culture different than one's home culture; in a nutshell, it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what the entire foreign expat community here thinks. If I began defacing every swastika I saw, I would be put in jail, and rightly so. It doesn't matter how it makes me feel, because my feelings are not those of the people of my host culture. I am not in the context from which those negative associations arose. Our historical struggles have been different; we've overcome different hardships and weathered different storms, and we've developed different symbols or have come to associate the same ones with very different meanings.

Truly accepting diversity means not pretending we are all the same. It means recognizing that some cultures and historical legacies are so different from ours that a powerfully negative symbol of hate in our culture can be a powerful symbol of blessing in theirs. If we understand this, we can accept it. But many people don't actually accept it. They simply abide what they can't change, but then change it at the first opportunity. "On earth as is best in my opinion." They can't accept any viewpoint other than their own, and so when they use the term diversity what they really mean is homogeneity; that there are and should be no differences between people, because lacking the supernatural love of Christ or even a culture of respect, which can stretch across wide barriers of creed or color, they have no means of handling real differences. Sometimes those who shout the loudest about diversity are actually proclaiming their inability to tolerate it. (They typically reveal themselves by trying to silence anyone who truly disagrees with them.)

A Struggle We Do Share

Everyone is not the same. Sometimes our worldviews are radically different and irreconcilable. Living and ministering in Taiwan means both trying to learn and understand the different worldviews of people in my new context, accepting what I can accept, and showing the love of Christ always -and respect where it is due- to those people who hold views I can't accept. After all, I still hold views Christ can't accept, and His love for me doesn't vary on that basis.

So our struggle is not whether we can love someone or not based on whether their ideas and cultural views are reconcilable with ours or not. The story of the Good Samaritan, told in response to someone asking Jesus who could be considered their neighbor (an attempt to narrow the love requirement down to as few people as possible), is about someone whose very identity as a "tainted blood" Jew was repugnant and unacceptable to Jesus' Jewish audience. The struggle is whether or not we can love our neighbors, whoever they might be and whatever they might think about the world. Tolerance can only accept differences, it cannot heal wounds. But the love of Christ expressed through we who know it can take the initiative; it does not need to pretend there are no barriers to leap across them and turn the different, into family.