I what must have been a combination of self-hatred and completeism neurosis acting up, I recently picked up Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. I knew what I was getting into, or thought I did, but figured, hey, it's in DC, why not see what crazy stupid plot he can come up with there.
It took 38 pages for me to get angry with Dan Brown. I ignored the clunky writing (Langdon at one point thinks "The other man I don't want to disappoint."), the exposition (and I'm not talking about the information dumps, I mean the exposition about the characters) which made me want to yell about showing not telling, and the odd exactitude about certain details (Langdon rides in a "Falcon 2000EX corporate jet," because most of Brown's readers know what that is).
On page 38, I hit this gem, as Langdon remembers a lecture he gave to his students at HARVARD about Occult Symbols. One student claims that Masons are a strange religion, and Langdon challenges the students to put it to the religion ABC test. "Religions assure salvation; religions believe in a precise theology; and religions convert nonbelievers."
At this point the anthropologist in me wanted to throw the book at the wall across the room, stomp on it and bury it in as deep a hole as I could find.
A: "Religions assure salvation." This is the closest he comes, and it makes sense, I suppose. If you do what the religion says, then good things will happen to you. But not all religions include the ideal of salvation, in the heavenly sense.
B: "Religions believe in a precise theology." In fact many do not, and this one I can actually remember concrete examples for. A tribal group in Borneo decided in order to obtain the right to vote they would claim to be Hindu, one of the government-recognized religions. In order to qualify, they had to codify their religion, and in doing so, they actually ended up becoming less religious and practiced their own religion to a much lesser amount. In this case, developing the precise theology that Langdon claims is required lost the group their religion.
C:"Religions convert nonbelievers." No. NO. NO NO NO. The drive to convert others to their religion is obviously a prominent one, and it is said that wars are fought over land and religion. But in reality, there are two main conversion-oriented religions, Christianity and Islam. Hindus and Sikhs and Jews have conversion, but they are tied very much to one's ethnicity and heritage. You are born a Hindu or you are not. Religions that have branched off of these religions, such as Mormonism, have taken up the imperative to convert, but of the hundreds of religions in the world, really only a few are driven to convert others.
If one wanted a better definition of religion, one could turn to Clifford Geertz. His theory: religion is "(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic" (Geertz 1966).
Fun fact. Geertz's theory is broad. So broad in fact, that it can be applied to things that are not typically thought of as religions, such as baseball team fandom. Knowing this, he actually argued against his own definition, by saying that it was impossible to make such a definition because religion itself is so broad.
Get your ABC's out of here, Dan Brown. Also, learn to write books, not movie outlines.
This is where I am too literal- I would've attacked the fact that students at Harvard were attacking Masonry as being a strange religion, when, as far as I can tell, its not a religion. The absurdity of this is driven by the fact that this was proposed by a student at HARVARD. Now if he were talking at Christopher Newport University? Yes, I could believe it. But Harvard? Really?
ReplyDeleteSweet Jesus, have I missed Clifford Geertz.
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