Dan Brown's not alone in his historical naivete

My parents know me well. In their latest care package they included The Da Vinci Hoax by Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel. It's part of the slew of books that have come out recently that set out to debunk The Da Vinci Code. You know my feelings on Dan Brown. So I think Olson and Miesel have done valuable and important work in showing the many ways in which Dan Brown is wrong. I don't share their concern about the anti-Catholic implications of The Da Vinci Code (their book is published by Ignatius Press, a Catholic publisher), so I could quibble with some of the things they choose to emphasize. But on the whole the substance of their debunking is spot-on.

That said, I do think Olson and Miesel get some things wrong.

For starters, they 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. All he's doing is challenging the received wisdom.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Olson and Miesel's own vision of history is awfully outdated; no historian that I know of shares their opinion.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?)

The idea that our interpretations of the past change over time is hardly novel. G.M. Trevelyan, born all the way back in 1876, once wrote:

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.’

The history found in books is not necessarily right, it's just the best guess of the historian. It should be reexamined and challenged. That's the only way our understanding of the past improves. On this question (and probably no others!), Dan Brown is right and Olson and Miesel are wrong.