Well, no, not according to the author…
Via Michael Whitecraft:
“I wanted to write a book that while it entertained at the same time, you close that last page and go ‘Wow, do you know how much I just learned? That’s fascinating.’ That is really what I set out to do.” – Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, from an interview in Chronicle
Notice that Mr Brown doesn’t specify exactly what it is readers should learn after finishing his book. Will they learn to spend their money more wisely, perhaps?
I can’t see how the book gets its true value from being a teaching tool. Isn’t it a compendium of speculation and rumor from across the centuries? I haven’t read it and don’t in fact know what the book purports to say or do. Yet it seems to me that, while a story may teach us valuable things, I don’t necessarily see how the author can reasonably justify his popularity because he has successfully taught something to his readers. It might be more accurate to say that he has successfully sold something to his readers; whether or not it has positive educational value remains to be determined by readers.
Yes, Kool, you’ve hit it. Brown is a far better salesman than teacher. His inclusion of a “fact” page at the start of DVC that boldly proclaims that all depictions of art, architecture, groups, secret rituals, etc, etc are “accurate” tells the reader something up front – that Brown’s done his research. Except every one of those *facts* spread throughout DVC is a lie, none are accurate. He doesn’t even get the sizes of the Leonardo paintings that are so important to his book’s thesis right! (Not to mention that the man’s name was Leonardo, not DaVinci – he was from Vinci, Italy, it wasn’t his last name.) Brown wants his readers to think he’s an expert in the areas of art, architecture, religion, etc so they’re buy into the bogus, ahistorical theories his plot (such as it is) hinges on. Don’t even get me started on the way he goes to great lengths misuses & abuses & twists the Gnostic “gospels” to make his point salable. And folks buy this ‘cos most simply don’t know history, art, architecture, or their own Christian faith well enough to read DVC in a discerning manner. Brown knows that & has traded on it his whole writing career (such as it’s legacy is). I like to say that he’s pulled the wool over the eyes &, in doing so, fleeced them pretty good!
Reportedly, his next book is on the Freemasons. I’m sure it will be divulged that the Vatican is steeped in Shriners in that tome! What, Dan – fresh out of ideas about Jews & Muslims?
The judge’s verdict on the plagiarism case is instructive: delivered in code, it essentially says the author will vanish from history before long and claims that he has written a piece of literature are, at best, spurious.
Sheesh, Robert Anton Wilson, Hal Lindsay and many others made a boatload of book sales shucking these “revealed mysteries” in the seventies. Lest we forget, Israel Regardie foisted himself as the great revealer of Rosicrucian secrets during the fanatical spiritualist revival during the belle epoque, to great personal gain.
There are more instances of this kind of gaming of the gullible public than there is room here to note. Suffice to say, Dan Brown is a member of the long con legacy, but the only people he can fool are those who have no sense of history or literature or the arts in general.
I think this is a very telling quote…kind of sad if you ask me…but expected…
don’t all authors want to somehow influence/enrich their readers lives??
I don’t think Dan Brown has a reverence for truth and what he wants to teach is skeptism (by way of his false gospel).
–RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com
>>but the only people he can fool are those who have no sense of history or literature or the arts in general. <<
In other words… the American public.
i’m with you on that one, jeffrey. especially scary in the contemporary church, at least as far as i’ve seen in evangelical, mainline and even catholic churches.
>>but the only people he can fool are those who have no sense of history or literature or the arts in general. <<
Also explains why the Left Behind books have done so well here.
“In other words… the American public.”
‘Zacly. And the British public, & the Austrailian public, & the Canadian public, & . . . well, you get it. Not to mention the European nations. I’ve read the thing has sold well practically everywhere. But the US does take the cake – 1 million paperback copies of DVC in a little over a week? Sheesh.
Those who believe DVC is well-written also prolly thought The Benchwarmers was high comedic art.
Jeffrey, I generally agree with both JRD and WanitaJayne. However, I think we need to be careful with too closely aligning Christianity with Western Civilization. Western Civ has benefited from Christianity and it is, indeed, the source of many of our freedoms, even if secularists have veered from the general Greco-Judeo-Christian foundations that proscribed such freedoms and rights.
Still, we need to remember that Christianity has much resonance with Eastern ways of living as well, having originated in the East, from a human perspecive at least. Truly, we need to be analytical of all cultures based on the perspective of the Bible. I think that this means that as we struggle against fundamentalistic Islam, we also need to struggle in a counter-cultural fashion against the excesses of our own culture, many of which are flashpoints for Islamic extremists and, indeed, antithetical to Christianity.
And, of course, as we literally struggle in war or observe them, as Christians we need to remember that war is really only a final option, and even when we resort to it we can never really resort to a total good vs. evil mentality, becasuse the people who we are fighting are still created in the image of God.
Interestingly, in the LOTR the only enemies that are destoyed uneqivocally are the Orcs, because, I think, they more or less represent demons. They are irreedemable. All of the human enemies in the LOTR, even though they are fiercely opposed, are given chances to amend their ways either before or after battles, some are given numerous chances.
In the global war on terror, I think it is helpful to remember that as hideous as some of the terrorist atrocities have been (some of which have been less intensely but still horrifically mirrored by our side) that we are still engaged in a struggle against men and not Orcs.
Being Dutch, I am bit astonished by the analysis that JRD gives of the Netherlands. I have children myself, I know many people that have. Moreover, the birth rate is not in general and steady decline, it varies. Is JRD that well acquainted with my country? I getting once more that awful expression, which Americans too often seem to produce, that looking at Amsterdam gives you a correct picture of ‘Holland’ (originally only the west of the Netherlands) and so also of the total Netherlands. Please note that Amsterdam has become a caricature of my country, even though, at its roots, it is a great city. His ‘muslim prophecy’ might arguably seem right for Amsterdam, or Paris, but even there the picture is more diverse. In short: cut the cliche thinking.
Jeffrey;
Thanks for posting this material! I know you’ll take some flak for it, but to me that’s just an indicator that you’re on the right track. I don’t have quite the maturity or broad global experience of either of either Mr. R-D or WanitaJayne, but my life experiences and what I’ve studied so far have me agreeing with their perspectives. As far as I’m concerned, Western Civ is circling the drain faster all the time, and the majority of the population are contented Hobbits who just don’t see the danger.
You know, I’m all for cracking down on and stopping the spread of terrorism, whether it’s being planned and perpetrated by fundamentalist Muslims in the Middle East or White Power groups here in North America. But I have no intention of carrying a spear for “Western Civilization”, whatever that is, and I don’t think too highly of arguments from people like JRD or Mark Steyn or John Gibson telling me I need to produce more white babies to stem the tide of brown people. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I can’t help seeing a latent racism in these sorts of arguments that run counter to any example given by Christ or Paul. As a Christian, why should I expect any sort of privileged status? Paul teaches us to “prefer others to ourselves.” How that translates from the level of the individual or the local community to a national or cultural level, I’m not sure, but, like Neil above, I’m not too hip on the Church associating itself with, much less asserting the privileges of, this “Western Civilization.”
Neil wrote:
All of the human enemies in the LOTR, even though they are fiercely opposed, are given chances to amend their ways either before or after battles, some are given numerous chances.
In the global war on terror, I think it is helpful to remember that as hideous as some of the terrorist atrocities have been (some of which have been less intensely but still horrifically mirrored by our side) that we are still engaged in a struggle against men and not Orcs.
So give me an example where a group of radical Muslims ever backed down, admitted they were wrong, and reconciled themselves to the “greater world.” One basic difference between Christianity and Islam (and this isn’t original with me) is that Islam does not proselytize; their “missionary” has always been a soldier or, now, a terrorist.
Alfred writes:
Being Dutch, I am bit astonished by the analysis that JRD gives of the Netherlands. I have children myself, I know many people that have.
Aside from anecdotal arguments, there are hard statistics about severe population decline in Europe, and it’s a big topic right now. Just the fact that Overpopulation.com is asking “How Will the Human Race Survive Low Birth Rates?”
(http://www.overpopulation.com/archives/years/
2005/000024.html) should alert us to the seriousness of the issue.
The topic of low European birthrates and shifting cultural values is expounded in an excellent January piece in Opinion Journal by Canadian writer Mark Steyn, “It’s the Demography, Stupid” (http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007760):
“The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism.”
In Proper Confidence (one of my favorite books), Lesslie Newbigin points out that not only are Christian metaphysics largely responsible for Western Civilization in terms of scientific rationalism and the development of liberal tolerance, but Christianity can also be blamed for the stagnation of the culture due to the alliance it formed with scientism–that is, for an excess of liberalized thinking. In other words, we’ve gone beyond “committed pluralism” (“it’s okay for us to disagree”) to agnostic pluralism (“there is no way to determine truth”; or, “radical Islam is just as valid as any other viewpoint”), and as a result we’ve stepped into a deadly confusion, one that our enemies in the war on terror do not share and will not pause to consider.
What both Steyn and Newbigin point out is that Western Civilization is being paralyzed by faulty ideas and decadent impulses.
Another of my favorite books is John Gardner’s Grendel, a novel which will likely be of interested to any Tolkien fans. One of the great things about Grendel is that it demonstrates how tribalism is a necessary component of human civilization. As the basic building block of society, it pulled humanity out of the primeval, chaotic muck. And as tribalism evolves into more highly organized forms, from feudalism to liberal democracy, it also continues to carry on in its original form as well (who would argue that political & religious groups, etc., don’t operate largely on basic, tribalistic principals?). The trick is to have a system like liberal democracy where the various “tribes” face off with dialectic, or at least rhetoric, instead of pillage, plunder, and terror. Unfortunately, fundamentalism of the sort we see in Islam today will not permit dialectic. It represents tribalism in a pure, primitive form and recognizes force as the sole method of confronting the “other.”
Adam, I agree with you that radical Muslims are not likely to back down ever. I even agree that this stems from flaws that are inherent to and deeply rooted in Islamic doctrine and thought. In an NPR inteview a few years ago, the writer V. S. Naipaul said that Islam is the only major religion which has not had some sort of reformation or reformations, which have tempered some of its claims to temporal power. And in Islam these claims are exercised in any society in which Muslims reach a critical mass. So, yes, watch out Europe.
My point was more narrow and perhaps too obvious to be stated, that we must treat Muslims as a group as humans created in the image of God. And, yes, this means taking a hard line against those who resort to terror. Even while doing this, though, I think we must listen better to the non-religious reasons some have for resorting to armed conflict and even terror. And I do believe that some of these exist.
Finally, not all advances of Islam have been military advances. Merchants carried Islam to parts of Africa and India (admittedly perhaps concurrent with or just preceeding military advances) where its belief in the equality of all humankind (which inherits from Judaism and Christianity) was appealing to many suffering either the discrimination of caste or other cultural evils.
I agree with others that JRD is correct in pointing to the fragility of Western Civ. However, I just finished reading an article on Milosz’s “The Captive Mind,” which made some important points. M., who survived WWII in Poland and also Marxism, points to the danger of allowing one’s metaphysic to be tied to pragmatism. Truth, for M., must come from beyond what we see and know. It must be bigger than what we see or know. He points to the seduction of confusing what we know…i.e. Western Civ. and it’s values or Marxism or any other idealogy, with truth. If Western Civ. is truth, and we are at war with Islam, then anything that pragmatically serves that “truth” is OK, including bombing a building full of innocent people on the chance that Bin Laden might be there, or locking up people without charge or a trial for an indefinite period of years. It’s OK as long as it pragmatically serves the Truth. In LOTR, this would be the spirit of Boromir who says, why not use the ring? Why not indeed, unless there is a truth beyond the mere, current struggle? A truth revealed in the person of Jesus who says “Love your enemies. Do good to those who persecute and use you.” Relevant recent films: Munich and Sophie Scholl and The New World. While we are fighting, it’s important to remember these things.
Mike wrote:
If Western Civ. is truth, and we are at war with Islam, then anything that pragmatically serves that “truth” is OK, including bombing a building full of innocent people on the chance that Bin Laden might be there, or locking up people without charge or a trial for an indefinite period of years. It’s OK as long as it pragmatically serves the Truth.
Well, exactly. I think that when most thoughtful people talk about “defending Western Civilization,” they are talking about defending a whole collection of societal advances, including the rule of law. However, no war has ever been conducted in which the “bad guys” were 100% at fault and the “good guys” 100% in the right. Organizations like the U.N. were created with such utopian scenarios in mind… and we see how far that goes toward actually solving actual problems.