Saturday, May 20, 2006

 

True Lies

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Tim Rutten, media columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has a hilarious take on The Da Vinci Code, both book and movie, that is also wise in the ways of creationists.

Discussing the rather tepid response of the Catholic Church and its effect on the media play ("Dammit, how are we gonna sell this story if we can’t get some pictures of red-faced Cardinals?"), Rutten explains:

The collective Catholic response to the book and film probably were best summed up by a Jesuit theologian who responded to an earnest radio interviewer's long and suggestive question this way: "I don't mean to sound obtuse, but are you asking me whether a novel is true?"

[Without delving into the deep recesses of my shady past, having labored myself under the ministrations of the Jesuits, I can just hear the delicate balance of sarcasm and faux innocence that no doubt dripped from the delivery of that line.]

Noting the regrettable tendency to find himself trapped at parties with people who want to tell him all about how "they made over their yoga studio to include a ‘meditation altar’ with crystals, Buddha and Virgin of Guadalupe icon," Ruttan observes:

[T]he problem with Americans is not that they don't believe anything; it's that so many think they can believe anything -- and that believing one thing doesn't preclude belief in another.

. . . Americans are religious because they've come to treat belief as an adjunct to the consumer society, sort of like the potato chip aisle in the local grocery.

In such an inner landscape, why not entertain the possibility that Jesus scored? After all, it could have happened.

And this kind of blithe ignorance goes beyond the New Agers and those who describe themselves as "spiritual":

. . . Brown's scam is that he insists that his story is based on fact, insisting in the face of all credible evidence that several other book-length frauds are true and that patently unreliable ancient manuscripts are trustworthy and, more important, say things that they don't.

Brown's claims for his book and, by extension, the film adaptation belong to a strong new current in American life -- the culture of assertion, which increasingly pushes logical argument out of our public conversation. According to this schema, things are true because I believe they are true and you have to respect that, because it's what I believe. Thus, the same sensibility most likely to take offense at this film -- that of the religious assertionists -- is the same one that makes things like creationism an issue in our schools and the demands of biblical literalism a force in our politics.

It is this claim to a right to "balance" knowledge, nuance and logic with ignorance fueled by simplistic appeals to emotion -- the phony "tolerance" of "other viewpoints" that the Intelligent Design Movement has no choice but to appeal to, since it has no substance -- that powers the political success of the anti-evolutionists as well as the cultural panache of The Da Vinci Code that they, at the same time, probably abhor.

To quote Robert Heinlein, himself no stranger to cultural phenomena, "Stupidity, if left untreated, is self-correcting."
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Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 11:20 AM
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