Da Vinci Code

If you read Umberto Eco's the Foucault Pendulum, you would recall a vanity press publisher the narrator works for, setting up an edition for occult books "The Isis Revealed" arguing that there is a steady stream of conspiracy theories hacks that want to have their books published. Da Vinci Code could easily have been one of those books, but it also includes for a romantic relationship and thriller-like action. And this combination for some reason captured the popular imagination.

If there is one thing that is really unnecessary then it must be writing another review of DVC. How many books have their own page in Wikipedia? I will therefore skip recapitulating the plot and go straight to the point I want to make.

The book can be viewed on three levels: on the first one it is a thriller, on a second one it is an presentation of an unconventional theory about history of Christianity, and on the third one it is statement of certain religious worldview. These three points should not be confused.

As a thriller the book is quite unsatisfying, even though this is probably its strongest part. For one thing, the writing feels unnatural, as something learnt but never really understood. The text of DVC is almost exclusively combined from clichés and idioms. Brown never fails to use three words when one would suffice: "Gripping the top of the fence, he heaved himself up and over, dropping to the ground on the other side. Ignoring the slash of pain from his cilice, he retrieved his gun and began the long trek up the grassy slope." I think that this must be what the creative writing lessons do to you.

For the other, the plot itself stretches my facility of suspension of disbelief beyond limits. That a man should not recognize a voice of a person he was speaking with extensively in past twenty-four hours is hard to imagine, "fake French accent" or not. That a bishop of Catholic Church would enter "twenty-millions-euros-for-holy-grail-no-questions-asked" deal with a person he never heard about, is harder still, desperate or not. But that a thousand years old undercover organization encrypts its biggest secret with riddles an average boy scout with access to Internet would crack in six hours is just beyond me. That kind of encryption would be weak probably in time of Leonardo. And today it is just ridiculous.

But how difficult should these ciphers be? That is hard to tell, because it is really unclear what does that secret organization, Priory of Sion, want. If they never intend to divulge the information they protect, they could just as well destroy it. The revelation of the ultimate motives (or lack of those) of these mysterious behind-the-curtains movers is the greatest anti-climax of the book. It must be admitted that on the most fundamental level Brown is honest with us: all the questions are answered, no mystery is unsolved, even though some of the answers feel too stretched. When you close the book, you know who is who, where the Grail is, what it is, why it is there, who put it there and the heroine turns out to be a countess. But the answer to the most interesting question, namely what is going to happen with the Grail now, is the most disappointing one: Nothing.

And this leads us to the next level, that of the occult theory. Going back to Foucault's Pendulum, the editors of The Isis Revealed, after having been swamped by the submissions of esoterica, discover that new books can be generated by a computer randomly rearranging certain recurrent themes commonly known to all occult theories buffs. Using their terminology, the DVC can be best characterised in this way:

     Templars are related to everything.
     Whose marriage took place in Cane of Galilee?
     Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to France
     Merovingians say they rule by the will of God
     Minnie is engaged to Mickey Mouse
     Templars are related to everything.
(all quotations are from the Czech version of the book, the translation from Italian to English probably differs)

In fairness, Eco explicitly quotes the book that presents the gist of this theory (Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) and Brown mentions it, so this is not entirely coincidental. I did not read this source book (save for the short passage quoted in the Pendulum) but it seems that it contains everything that is supposedly shocking in DVC. What sets the two books apart is that the former is a "serious" and "non-fiction" book while the latter is a thriller. People love well-researched thrillers with lots of trivia on esoteric subjects, and what could be more esoteric than esotericism?

How well-researched DVC really is I don't know, but after I read DVC, I happened to play a very old (as computer games go, it was released 1996) game Broken Sword: The Shadows of the Templars. It was really striking how similar the game is to the book and at the same time how much better it is. It’s got the Templars, their lost treasure (the Sword of Bafomet) and it got riddles, it even got a romantic story. It also refers explicitly to the THBatHG: the search for more clues takes your hero to Syria where he meets an American couple. When speaking with the woman, she says, “My husband… he’s little bit strange sometimes. He read that book, Holy this and Holy that and he believes every word of it. But I think it’s just a lot of hooey…” The only thing the game is missing is Walt Disney cast as an illuminati (I am not joking, Brown seriously suggests that Mr. Disney hid messages of the hidden truths in his early movies, or perhaps that the studio keeps hiding them to this day).

But the puzzles in Broken Sword are so much better, the locations more interesting and the characters more believable. It is also much more fun.

The disturbing question is whether Brown believes his theories and subscribes to the worldview stemming from them. This is the third layer of the book.

The worldview is composed of three interconnected axioms: a) our present Atlantic society suffers from the lack of appraisal of "sacred feminine", because b) the two thousand years reign of Christianity in general and Catholic Church in particular promoted masculine over feminine, in stark contrast to c) paganism preceding Christianity that held feminine in proper esteem and women were then free to fulfil their personality.

It is not difficult to see why such a worldview is so popular today. Feminism is a cornerstone of modern secular orthodoxy and paganism is growing more popular every day.

Let's start from c): there might have been some matriarchal societies in the past, but I have yet to see some solid proof of this. At the time of birth of Christianity, the role of women throughout the known world was inferior and that is a sad fact. To say, as Brown very nearly does, that the Temple prostitutes in ancient Egypt were celebrating their feminine identity in holy union with priests, shows a degree of naivety hardly seen in an adult man. An orgy celebrating the fertility and rebirth of Osiris is all good and well, but I cannot help feeling that men got the better of it.

The women in ancient Greece the women were not allowed to leave home without the consent of their husband, in no democratic society of the day were women allowed to vote. Sure, Rome had their Vestals, Greece had Delphi and Orphic cults, but their role in the actual affairs of the state was limited and women, who were not priestess, had very few rights, certainly less than a man that was not a priest.

Nor were the cults of the time such benign celebration of creative powers of the Nature as our present day druids claim. Human sacrifices and ritual cannibalism were very likely a part of these ancient mysteries as well.

The whole pagan revival is a deeply suspicious affair. It is amazing how clear and definite picture of a society that had left little if any documents or even archaeological evidence, some people have. They hear their music (of which there are no records whatsoever) in present day folklore songs, never considering it strange that there is no trace of the medieval church music (of which we have written records), even though the latter is some thousand years closer to us. They claim the Stonehenge for druids, never mind that it was built couple of thousand years before the first Celt set foot in British Isles.

For b), the conduct of the Church. It is fashionable now, as it was all the time during the last two hundred years, to make the Church a culprit of everything that's wrong with the society. This is certainly shallow if only because it is often contradictory. This is a complex topic you don't want to go into here. Maybe it is just worth repeating that the witch-hunts did not kill five million women over three hundred years. The actual number is between 40 and 80 thousand, a quarter of which were men. By contrast, the French Revolution killed 20 thousand men in single year.

And as for a), the lack of sacred feminine as root cause of wars, suffering and victory of G. W. Bush. I would make just on remark here: up until the beginning of the 20th century there was no cheap and reliable contraception. All sexual intercourse carried a large chance of pregnancy and it was certainly the woman that was left worse off when this happened (and this has nothing to do with the role of the woman in the society, this is a biological fact – pregnancy is more dangerous to woman than to a man). Therefore the taboos on sex before marriage and out of marriage actually protected the women.

Actually the most interesting thing about DVC is its phenomenal success. Honestly, I am at loss to understand it. But if it says anything about our society at all, it is nothing you would like to hear.

Catching up

I finished the little alternative history I began some time ago. Sorry for the delay. Also, there is something I wanted to write about Burn rate I commented on earlier. I feel that I might have been too harsh. The point of the book is not the sale of Wolffe's company but the constant search as to what the Internet actually is. Is it TV? Is it newspaper? Is it telephone? Is there any way how to make money here? The book does not answer the question, but the burning search for the answer is interesting to watch.

The paths to liberation

I was reading The Guardian the other day and came across this comment, with refreshingly unambiguous view of the events in Iraq. It must have been many years since I saw the phrase "puppet regime" in print last time. Actually, today it may be fifteen years, to the day.

Fifteen years ago a train of events was set off that would eventually lead to the collapse of communist regime in Czechland. While on a large scale the demise of communism was surely caused by international events: the American offensive foreign policy, Soviet "perestroika" (in itself brought about by chronic wastefulness of centrally-regulated economy), etc., the actual overthrowing of the regime was accomplished by local forces and local activists.

Ever since these events I was wandering what would happen if Czechoslovakia was liberated by foreign armies. Let's assume that there would be a crisis in Russian leadership in, say, 1979. Brezhnev is dead. The politburo is paralysed by internal struggle for succession and CIA agents from Moscow report that the Red Army would be incapable of prolonged action for six months at least. The hawkish Jimmy Carter (now, that's stretching fiction too far), supported by German and UK leaders (and even farther) orders NATO troops to Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, claiming that they come to liberate these ancient Western countries from the communist yoke.

The draft armies of these countries are equipped with old and unreliable weapons and vehicles. The morale is low, nobody is particularly willing to die for communism, and after the first encounters where ageing T-54s and T-55s are flattened by Leopards and Pattons, even the most enthusiastic are losing heart. The desertions are rife, Prague falls after one week, in Poland the anti-communist popular rising in Warsaw, Gdynia and Gdansk liberate large swaths of the country even before the advancing Western armies, Budapest falls after two weeks, because Austria refused to allow NATO armies passage through its territory.

On the borders of Soviet Union the armies stop and uprisings in Baltic republics are brutally put down by the Red Army. New status quo is established.

Now, there are two paths open to the victorious armies, and these vary by the amount of involvement in the post-war process. One would be to go the way Allies went in 1945: write the new constitution for these countries, replace the local administration with bureaucrats from the US army, and de facto run the country for couple of years until the new administration is ready to take over. A parcel of this would be strict anti-communist laws: public display of hammer and sickle or red five-pointed star would be a punishable offence, Communist party would be banned and any party that would make "communism" or "revolution" part of its program would be banned as well.

The other way is a quick pull-out: new parties are hastily cobbled together, free elections are held at the shortest opportunity possible, and then the armies go home. The Communist party is probably still banned, but it soon regroups under a different name. There is an attempt to rid the administration of the most compromised communists, but it is soon found out that without these "valuable specialists" the state machine would come to a halt.

Now the interesting point is what would be the reaction of people to these two scenarios. The second one is actually almost exactly what happened in '89, only without the tanks rolling over Danube. And today, fifteen years after, this is the best thing about the end of communism: we can kid ourselves that it was our own achievement.

The era from '45 to '89 is something the Czechs are not exactly proud of, but also not unreasonably ashamed of. Surely, there is only a handful of people if any who realize that Czechoslovakia was an ally of a Power that had clearly intended to subjugate the whole world to its inhuman ideology, that Czechoslovakia supplied millions of soldiers to this very purpose, and that only its lucky stars and Western resolve prevented the Cold War turning Hot.

For most Czechs, there was no war at all. The crimes of communism, for them, were not political murders, unfair trials, forced labour, and restricted freedom, but long queues, lack of goods, and laughable statesmen.

My prediction is that this feeling would only deepen in my second scenario. If the end of communism was brought on us from outside, but without forcing the country into renouncing it; if the liberating armies set up the free elections, but left the administration – policemen, judges, state bureaucrats – intact, the people would be even more sentimental about communism. They would blame they problems on the new regime – they do anyway – but the new regime would not be their regime.

In the first case, i.e. more long-term involvement, it may be possible that the situation would be better, and the people actually would identify with the new regime more. This is a paradox, because this regime would actually be more "foreign" than in the previous case. It would depend on the ability of the new establishment to distance itself from communist era and discredit it enough in the eyes of the public.

The parallels with Iraq puppet regime are obvious and I will not dwell on them.

An Obligatory Bush post

Is there a blog on this planet that does not comment on Bush's victory? As stated earlier, it neither surprises nor worries me, though I have reservation about his policies. Actually, my support is emotional rather than rational: Bush is an underdog, in Europe at least. Bush's victory proves that the media are not as strong as they believe themselves to be.

There were elections in this country as well, and the two are worth comparing. Visiting Prague a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by a billboard with enigmatic message: "Prihoda neni nahoda" or, cumbersomely, but accurately, "The event is not random". An insurance company? No, it was the message from Mr. Prihoda (literally "Event") a conservative candidate for a Senate seat.

(The slogan can be traced at least twenty years back: "Nehoda neni nahoda" or "There are no random accidents" was a catchphrase of the then Czech State Insurance Company.)

The floodgates of meaninglessness were opened earlier this year by the PM of our social-democratic government, Mr. Gross. His boyish face with motto "I mean it sincerely" were watching you like the Big Brother from every quarter. Though a great target of parodies and derision, the tone for the campaign was set. There will be no issues. There are no matters. This is a popularity contest.

It was remarked that this pre-election campaign degenerated to the level of a marketing promotion for some FMCG. This is a slight to any self-respecting advertising agency. The ads may mislead, they may lie, but they always try to give you some reason: Buy us, we'll make you happier! Make you younger! Make you look as hip as this happy, shiny people! But what did we get from our politicos? Vote for us because Event is no Accident.

Whatever. The point I was trying to make that the US campaign, for all the bad blood that was spilt, was impressive in its thoroughness. There are important issues for US policy, both domestic and foreign, and all candidates had to take stand on them (some candidates took even more than one stand on many of them; this might have been too much thorough for their own good). Surely there was sloganeering and oversimplifications, but over all I cannot but wish that the level of public discourse here was as 'simple' as in that dumb America.

The suicide of the WestAtomised, by Michel Houellebecq

In a studiously detached prose, this book describes the consumption bonfire consuming the bedrock of Atlantic civilization: the pointless 'replacement' activities of intelligent, educated people deprived of any reasonable purpose, sex devoid of anything but carnal pleasure, life devoid of dignity, as it can be casually terminated by a suicide or an abortion, the loss of moral code, religion, dichotomy of right vs. wrong replaced with pleasant vs. unpleasant.

Of the two half-brother heroes, it would be difficult to say which is more despicable or more pitiful. The failed poet, bobbing along the eddies of life toward that inexorable sinkhole, or the scientist, unable to form any human bond, destroying the life around him, finally Frankenstein-like creating a race of monsters.

Many compare Atomised with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (taking a hint from Houellebecq himself). There are interesting points here: the most obvious one is the difference between the anticipated collectivism of Huxley, and existing individualism described by Houellebecq. Huxley assumed that the breakdown of traditional family and unlimited promiscuity would lead to a sort of collectivism; what would be the point of private property if there is no family, no children one could really call his own? Houellebecq shows that the breakdown of traditional family and unlimited promiscuity lead to increased individualism, if by individualism one means a lonely aloofness.

(The Brave New World however is a book that is chillingly accurate in many other respects: The wheels must turn! A new sport is only allowed when it can be shown that it will require more and more expensive equipment than the existing sports.)

The difference between Atomised and BNW runs deeper. The latter is at its core an optimistic book. It is a warning and you don't warn those whom you consider incapable of changing their ways. The author of Atomised has no such belief. This book is not a warning, it is a statement of fact.

One thing the two books have in common, though, is that they can be both incorrectly described as science fiction. Atomised purports to be written in about 2050. What passes for plot deals with a significant scientific discovery.

The book opens with an interesting point about 'metaphysical changes': both Christianity and modern rational science have risen when the then mainstream school of thinking was at the height of its power – Roman empire or Scholastic church. It follows then that now, when the rational science is untouchable, we are due for another 'metaphysical change' and we turn the first page wondering what this would be and hoping we'll soon find out. When we turn the last but one page we know, and it is an anti-climax. The hero of the book invents a way of stabilizing human DNA so it does not degenerate during cell division, this in turns makes possible a creation of race of immortals – enhanced humans, happy and secure and ready to inherit the Earth as the effete humankind withers away.

(This is Brave New World backward: in BNW a human of our own time comes among the race of happy new men, in Atomised a happy new race of men comes among humans of our own time.)

The ending lends to two readings: one that is literal and one that consider the ending to be just more of assorted irony. With literal reading, it would be easy to dismiss the plot of the book altogether: even if the genetic information does not deteriorate during life, the 'new humans' are still mortal due to accidents or diseases. The cloning does not help, my clone has not my memories and experiences, for all practical purposes it is a different entity. It could be speculated that such society would be more afraid of death than our own, not less. If you can be immortal just by being careful, this does not make for a vibrant society, I would guess.

Besides, it is all just a dirty trick: the two metaphysical changes Houellebecq mentions – Christianity and rational science – did what they did with very little material evidence. That is what is so interesting about them. Why would anybody during the reign of the emperor Trajan think that the Roman empire will not last forever? Why would anybody think that its gods and goddesses are not perfectly adequate for whatever needs man may have? And again, why would anybody in fourteenth or fifteenth century France or Italy think that the Roman Church is not going to last forever? Why would they think that the Church philosophers won't be able to answer all questions eventually?

If the evangelists could turn water into wine wherever they preached the gospel to pagans, if Leonardo could show his masters an atomic bomb, then there would be nothing strange about the victory of their ideas. Yet this is the case for Houellebecq's world; his heroes have a tangible evidence of their preaching and the dilemma facing the mankind is not whether to adopt a new unproven theory but whether to adopt its own demise.

This is not my reading of the book. The book is not about the dilemma mentioned in the preceding paragraph. The book is about the suicide of the West and I think it is obvious that the story of the 'new humans' is intended to show us the depth of our fall. In this respect, the book may be a warning, after all.

Heavy gases

A regular reading of today's Opinion column in The Daily Telegraph provides an interesting insight into the lengths of suppression of one's common sense some opponents of global warming theory are willing to go. The article is here, but DT requires registration, so I can give you the gist of it: assuming one liter of carbon dioxide weights about 1.9 kg, it proves that three persons traveling a distance of 10 miles produce actually less CO₂ than if they walked the same distance.

The point is, of course, that it is one cubic meter (or 1,000 liters) that weights 1.9 kg; the striking thing is that neither the author nor his sources paused to think that at the density they assume it to have it would be twice as heavy as water. The interesting question here is whether it is due to generic scientific ignorance pervading journalistic classes or just the zealotry of disclosing the unspeakable evils of Carbon Trust.

It is moments like this that make me wonder. Why the people whose values and beliefs I generally respect and accept repeatedly turn out to be such biased dolts? Why it is that people whose v&b I generally despise and ignore are usually so much brighter?

The Man that's Left

Over the weekend I finished another book lent to me by my magnanimous friends, David Frum's The Right Man and I think it may be worth couple of comments.

Firstly, let me come clean: I may be the only person in Europe, but I hope Bush wins this November. There are several reasons for it – but the most important one is perhaps his loathing by media and intellectual elites on both sides of Atlantic. If anybody manages to win against them, it will not, unfortunately, change their worldview (it'd be seen just as another victory of the global capital), but it will be great fun watching them anyway.

The other reason – and please let me stress that I don't presume to to influence the US citizens, who are certainly more knowledgeable about the situation than I am – is that Kerry is not a good man for the job, and I explain shortly why.

But back to the book. It is reasonably well written, slightly longer than necessary, but it certainly does not presume to be more than an electoral may fly. The genre of legends or hagiographies suffers the dearth of new entries and the story of St. George fighting the Terror is a welcomed addition. And actually, the eye-witness account of 9/11 in Washington is really moving and worth reading the book alone. The book also gives interesting insight of the presidential administration workings and handful of anecdotes about the recent events.

What's difficult to understand from the book, is what the word 'conservative' means these days. Certainly it is not anything Edmund Burke would approve of, as Frum constantly praises Bush for being, if anything, radical. "This changed four decades of US policy to China," or "This turned the policies of six American presidents on its head," exclaims Frum as if scrapping old policies was virtue in and of itself. Obviously, David Frum, if he was reading this, would point out that the old policies left America vulnerable and allowed 9/11 to happen. This is a very strong point, but it cannot carry everything. These policies also allowed America to win the Cold War and made it into the strongest economy in the world.

Frum also tells us that Bush's favourite predecessor is Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now, this was a man that believed that most changes are for the worse and that the best strategy is to let events take their course. Dull and unattractive, but very conservative, and almost exactly opposite to what Bush is doing.

When starting to write this article, I found David Frum's homepage so that I could post a link here. I took a look at his Diary at National Review that was linked there and within minutes I ran across a piece espousing an idea that forms one of the more disconcerting threads of his book; namely, that the "right not to live in fear" is superior to any other rights, and that all other rights may be curtailed in order to honour it.

In fairness, it must be told that Frum does not use words "right not to live in fear". On the other hand, I doubt he could credibly deny that he believes that curtailing some civil rights and liberties, in order to gain information that may protect lives of thousands of citizens, is morally both acceptable and desirable.

But this an illusion. For one thing, everybody lives in fear to some extent, depending on his experience and worldview. For the other, the administrative measures short of totalitarian police state are pretty useless. The European countries, with their compulsory ID cards, national databanks not circumscribed by any Personal Data Protection Acts, and distinctly police-friendly tradition, were unable to fight effectively RAF, Red Brigades or ETA.

And most importantly, the civil liberties are priceless in themselves. There is an illuminating quote, but as my memory fails me, I don't know by whom, nor the exact wording (and I would be grateful to any reader who would point this to me). But the story goes like this: an Act was presented sometime in the middle of the 19th century to the British Parliament giving some extra powers to the police (or maybe establishing the police). To which one of the MPs replied: "I would rather that six more men are stabbed to death on Charing Cross Road a year, than such an intrusion on our liberties be tolerated!"

This is an honest stance. We cannot have the pie and eat the pie, and we cannot have complete security and complete freedom at the same time. However, I think that freedom is a central American value and all attempts to diminish it must be watched with utmost suspicion.

In this context it is interesting that the lunatic right-wing fringe groups, in themselves very useful for US political life, as they allow politicians like e.g. Ronald Reagan to appear as centrists, that these groups, whose abhorrence of the federal government is only matched by their contempt of it, embrace Bush so unquestioningly, despite his administration increasing the federal powers so dramatically.

This I think is also the biggest problem with Kerry. He is certainly no civil liberties activist and his ideas and speeches suggest he is even greater statist than Bush.

Just as he glorifies Bush's domestic measures, Frum is also enthusiastic about the interventions abroad. Now this is the most contentious issue and one that cannot be adequately covered in couple of lines. Suffice to say that now I sincerely wish Iraq may have a stable regime, respecting the rule of law, and that have a stab at creating it was an interesting gamble. But a gamble nonetheless. Frum has no new arguments that weren't repeated many times already and I am not going to dwell on them. Just as with domestic security, he seems to be fascinated by the very fact that something new is happening, the novelty to him is the mark of quality.

Back to the Right Man. Frum is certain that George W. Bush is the one for the next four years. This is an assertion that, with all due respect, I doubt. But he may be the Man that is Left to voters.