A grailing we will go...

[morgan_dhu]

For anyone who found my previous rant about the Da Vinci Code nonsense interesting, my discussion of the literary histoy of the Holy Grail as presented in Richard Barber's book The Holy Grail: History of a Legend is up on my book journal: bibliogramma.

You know, I wouldn't have minded at all if Brown had said "This is a works of fiction. I've taken some historical people and things and reinterpreted them as is my right as a creator of works of the imagination, but this is literature, not history."

But no, he said it's all based on fact, when it simply isn't, and that makes all the difference to me.

Comments

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

I agree, that's exactly what he - and his publicists - are doing. What annoys me almost as much is the way the cottage industry of books and "documentaries" discussing the Da Vinci Code is doing the same thing.

I was watching a "documentary" last night that purported to be examining whether there was any historical proof for the scenario of Brown's novel. What literally enraged me was the way that the person presenting the documentary would interview some total wing-nut whose book said that a particular aspect of Brown's novel was factual based on her feelings about Mary Magdalen or the visions she had when she visited some church or whatever, and would then interview a serious historian or archeologist with several peer-accepted schoraly book to their name in the pertinent field who would say that there was no textual evidence for that aspect of Brown's novel, and then the presenter would sum the segment up by saying rather chirpily "We may never know the truth about this aspect, so let's go on and talk about Y now."

To me, the frightening reverse to this obsession with authenticity is the complete lack of respect for what is actually authentic (I include reality TV, becasue most of them are contrived and at least partly scripted situations, and not at all "real").

And there's the fact that so many people just accept that if someone tells them "this is historically accurate" or - to broaden the field - "this is scientifically accurate" or "this is what is actually happening in another part of the world you can't witness personally" then it must be so.

People (well, a fairly large proportion of them aren't questioning the things they see or hear or read. And maybe unquestioning accptance of historical inaccuracy isn't as important an issue as some other manifestations of this kind of complacency, but it is part of the phenomenon. And it disturbs me greatly.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

'the frightening reverse to this obsession with authenticity is the complete lack of respect for what is actually authentic'

Sounds like the reliance upon 'truthiness' problem in a somewhat different context.

'And maybe unquestioning accptance of historical inaccuracy isn't as important an issue as some other manifestations of this kind of complacency'

Well, yes and no. Some bits of fake history are dynamite - like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for instance.

And though I have no time for Opus Dei, I think they should be held in suspicion for what is really known about them, documented stuff, like their historic links with fascism, not some paranoid fantasy.

How far all of this is a new problem is an interesting question. I remember back in the late seventies watching a really bad documentary on the Shroud of Turin. Two or three 'scientists' were wheeled on to expound some rather unlikely theories as to its provenance. We were never told their areas of expertise; they could have been geologists, or astronomers, or climatologists, or anything. The magic word 'scientist' was supposed to make the viewers genuflect in reverence and assume that they must know what they were talking about. Mind you, none of them claimed to have received any visions.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Conspiracy theories in general are kind of a hobby of mine - studying them, that is, not expounding them. And it seems that when a piece of pseudo-history involves either conspiracy theories, religion, or best of all, both, it really seems to take off.

Part of this, I suppose, is very basic to human nature - we want to understand how things happen, and even more important, it seems, who is responsibleand if we can't find an answer that is obvious, we make one up - or latch onto the answer that someone else has made up that best suits our worldview. And where matters of belief are concerned, it seems to be very difficult for us to step back and apply reason.

So on the one hand, these aren't really new problems. I think that what concerns me most is that in a world of increasing access to information, it really "should" be getting better, not, as I fear, worse. We actually have the tools to gather, at the very least, enough information about all of these things to decide if there is doubt, even if we can't determine what was the truth.

The Shroud of Turin is an excellent example of that - there are a number of different theories about how it came to be, including the church-sanctioned one about it really being the shroud of Jesus, who left some kind of holy watermark behind him. But there is certainly enough evidence to suggest that this is not the the most likely scenario, even though no one can, given the information that is available, really be certain. Of course, if the Church allowed more testing to confirm or disprove many of the questions on both sides or the real-or-fraud controversy, we might get closer to a definitive answer - but it hasn't yet, and so we can't. but we can be sure that their is doubt about how the thing came to be, and none of the hypotheses have incontrovertable evidence behind them, to the best of my knowledge.

What I see around me is an increasingly huge amount of random information on a vast range of subjects, some crucial, some trivial, most somewhere inbetween, being released on a populace that is unprepared to evaluate or even estimate the realtive accuracy of all these pieces of information.

And if information is power, the inability to assess information is a prescription for vulnerability to the power of others.

And now I'm sounding like a conspiracy theorist. ;-)