“Dude, It’s Just a Book, Dude”: Assorted Da Vinci Crap

Ace of Spades has a good review of the Da Vinci Code here. Not the movie— the book. One thing I hear about both of them quite a bit is that the book wouldn’t have been such a success if not the outcry against it, just as the movie wouldn’t have been such a blockbuster for the attention brought to it by the public outcry to boycott the movie. Well, maybe so, in the case of the book. But as far as the movie, I doubt public criticism had much to do with it. And the idea that “it’s just a FICTIONAL movie or book so people should lighten up” is a pile of crap.

Whether or not YOU think the Da Vinci Code is stupid fluff and shouldn't be taken seriously, hundreds of thousands of people do take it seriously. It's sold more than 40 million copies in hardcover and I can tell you from experience in my classes that it is taken very, very seriously by tons of college students, especially female college students. This movie was a blockbuster waiting to happen, as the Left Behind books might also have been had they received the hype, production values and talent behind the Da Vinci movie. True, the book sucks. It was still very popular– nobody should be surprised that a movie based on it is very popular as well. And anyone who takes even a brief look at the book knows that at the beginning it claims that all the historical facts about Christ, all the historical facts about Da Vinci, all the historical facts put forth in the novel are TRUE, period, no equivocation on Mr. Brown's part.

I'm sure your teachers taught you the difference between science fiction, historical fiction and so on. The belief that a book cannot serve or be intended to serve as an argument for a certain position simply because it is a work of fiction is completely unwarranted on at least two grounds. First, the idea that a work of fiction cannot be intended to move people into holding a certain position makes no sense. There is nothing about the definition of the term "fiction" that would suggest that it is incapable of doing so. Second, throughout history, works of fiction have purposefully and successfully been used to do exactly that.

The dialogues of Plato, Galileo and Hume are fiction. Each contributed to creating the intellectual atmosphere in which we breath today. Ayn Rand's novels are fictional… But I'm sure you've noticed that, like Dan Brown's novels, they are also polemical. So is Michael Crichton's novel on environmentalist fanaticism, The State of Fear. So was Harriett Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Abraham Lincoln with just a bit of exaggeration claimed set off the Civil War. Fiction can be as powerful as, if not more so than, any other medium. This has been recognized since virtually the beginning of written history– Plato advocated censorship of poets in the Republic for exactly this reason.

Maybe some are making too big a deal out of this movie and maybe it'll be blown out of the water by X-Men: Last Stand when it comes out. But the "it's just fiction so chill out" fallacy is pure drivel in any case.

British Philosopher Trashes America; in other News, Dog Bites Man

Fredric Smoler in American Heritage has a thoughtful review of A.C. Grayling's new book, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. Dr. Grayling was born after World War II, in 1949… But I'm not sure even being alive during the Blitz would have made him appreciate its real significance. After all, his sort of presumptuous, ungrateful, just-short-of-pacifism- emasculated caricature of Just War theory has a long pedigree in analytic philosophy. The philosopher G.E. Anscombe similarly protested against Oxford's granting of an honorary degree to President Truman in 1956, who in her eyes was a "mass murderer".  

Before John Rawls wrote his  Theory of Justice analytic philosophers stayed largely aloof from actual, real life policy disputes, generally adopting a vague, leftism when they did so enter. The tone was still often aloof and theoretical– one example that comes to mind is Bertrand Russell's calling for the U.S. to bomb the Soviet Union out of existence with nukes, then later calling for the U.S. to totally eliminate its own nuclear stockpile. Anscombe herself was in many ways a great philosopher who made virtue ethics respectable again within analytic philosophy. But she failed to heed the lessons of the founder of virtue ethics in this case.

Aristotle refused to give moral rules as absolutes for any given situation, because he recognized what Kant did not– that at some point, one might have to lie– for instance, to save an Anne Frank, the whereabouts of whom are being asked about by Nazis. Instead, Aristotle said that one must inculcate instincts based upon the great and small virtues as best as one can and then act upon those instincts. After Rawls published his opus, some of the Olympian Ivory tower attitude of analytic philosophy started to fade as philosophers became "applied philosophers"— people who tried to use philosophy to solve real-life problems and became advisors in the government and even the private sector at times and therefore had to have a more realistic take than Mrs. Anscombe had. However, much of it still obviously remains and A.C. Grayling is proof of that. In fact, his reflexive leftism appears to have been strengthened by experiences such as being a Davos World Economic fellow.

A typical conclusion from Grayling would and does go something like this: "European capitalism is much more efficient than the Anglo-American model, if you look at the larger, fuller picture"– a conclusion he is able to establish only by looking at a much more narrow, smaller picture than exists. In short, he is an academic peacock, driven by what he wishes were so rather than reality. What else is new?