Dan Brown's not alone in his ignorance of history

First, for some more delightful takedowns of Dan Brown's atrocious prose, see posts by Geoffrey Pullum here, here, and here.

And now onto a Dan Brown topic I have some thoughts on.

My parents, knowing my distaste for Dan Brown in general and The Da Vinci Code, sent me a copy of The Da Vinci Hoax by Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel a few weeks ago. On the whole, I enjoyed the book, and I think it serves an important purpose, demonstrating just how wrong Dan Brown is about his factual claims.* Put simply, Brown is wrong more often than he's right, and Olson and Miesel, rather patiently, lay out Brown's errors and suggests where they likely came from.

That I admire and appreciate The Da Vinci Hoax as a whole, I do think they get a number of things wrong. It's certainly not as bad as The Da Vinci Code, and their errors are more debatable than Brown's.

On the whole, I think Olson and Miesel give Brown far too much credit. They view The Da Vinci Code as a systematic effort on the part of Brown to discredit traditional Christianity (and Catholicism in particular) and replace it with a relativistic belief in the "sacred feminine." But it seems to me that Dan Brown is simply not smart enough to be as insidious as Olson and Miesel suggest he is. The problem with Dan Brown is not that he's anti-Catholic (though he may very well be); the problem with Dan Brown is that he just doesn't know enough to say anything informed or intelligent about religion at all.

Olson and Miesel go off the deep end when they start railing against the relativism and postmodernism of Dan Brown's writing. Again, I simply do not believe that Brown is smart enough to be either a principled relativist or postmodernist. Brown is not concerned with questioning the nature of knowledge or morality. He firmly believes that the Truth is out there. It's just that he's challenging the accepted version of the truth. Put simply, Brown believes in a definitive answer regarding the nature of Jesus and Christianity, a position that relativists and postmodernists would never support.

Olson and Miesel's own vision of history is awfully outdated; no historian that I know of shares their opinion. Criticizing Brown, they write that "He openly questions whether we can even know the truth about the past" (27). Well, yes. Any historian who doesn't question the limitations of historical knowledge isn't being terribly responsible. We can't know *the* truth about the past, and to think otherwise is to display a remarkable lack of knowledge about just how history is produced.

This belief is based, as far as I can tell, on Olson and Miesel's conflation of history as it happened and history as the record of what happened. These are two very different things, and historians have been distinguishing them for a long, long time. Yet they claim that Brown's comment "'How historically accurate is history itself?' is nonsensensical since it rests on the premise that 'accuracy' is in the eyes of the beholder and therefore cannot ever be objectively gauged" (28). In this case, Olson and Miesel are simply wrong. It's perfectly sensible to examine whether history (as it is written) is historically (as it happened) accurate. Indeed, evaluating and improving upon older conceptions of history is exactly what historians do.

(Can I say how bizarre it feels to be defending Dan Brown's position on historical thought?)

Just today I gave a presentation on George M. Trevelyan, about as traditional an historian as you could find in the first half of the 20th century. Before I began my research, I expected to find that Trevelyan had rather quaint views on writing history, believing in Truth, Progress, and all that. What I found, however, was that Trevelyan's historical thought was really quite nuanced and self-critical. In "History and the Reader," for instance, he declared the following:

It is still too early to form a final judgment on the French Revolution, and opinion about it (my opinion certainly) is constantly oscillating. On such great and complex issues there can never be a final ‘verdict of history.’

G.M. Trevelyan, the last Whig historian, fully recognized the speculative nature of history and its ever-changing conclusions. Reading his work, I couldn't help but think, "I don't even know why I bother with thinking about the writing of history. Everyone's already reached the same conclusions as me, a long while ago. Hell, if Trevelyan, the least novel historian you can think of, thought of history in the same way as me, there's really not much chance of me coming up with something new, is there?"

But then I go and read books like The Da Vinci Hoax, which show just how unsophisticated non-historians, even well-educated ones, can be when it comes to what history is. I've written about the gap between historians and laymen when it comes to historical thought (PDF) and mused about possible solutions, but I'm still astonished when I come across ideas like that of Olson and Miesel.

Listen, everyone. I don't mean to sound elitist, but historians know more about the past than non-historians. That's just how it is. If you're going to make proclamations about what history is and how accurate it is, please go out and read historians' takes on these issues. Read Trevelyan, even... he put a lot of effort into writing well (writing each paragraph at least four times before it was ready to be typed, and he's tremendously readable). The history found in books is not necessarily right, it's just the best guess of the writer. History should be reexamined and challenged. That's the only way our understanding of the past improves.

*Lest anyone say, "Oh, come off it. It's just fiction," I'd remind you that Brown starts his books with a page headed "FACT" and makes a great to-do about the years of research that go into each book. If Brown is going to highlight the supposedly factual nature of his work, he's opening himself up to criticisms on just that front.

[UPDATE - 16 Nov 2004: Sandra Miesel e-mailed me to let me now that I'd consistently misspelled her last name. It's been fixed now.]