Simon Wrote:
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> Yes I'm all for Latin being used - even when I
> have to look it up
>
> But many people don't check things up in these
> cases - and even if they do they seem to go to Dan
> Browns site or the likes of GHMB where people like
> Bauval come along and dismiss Channel 4's
> debunking to have missed the point. When in fact
> they could have done a part 2 of the documentary
> for the parts of Browns book that overlap his
> Talisman and are equally spurious and often
> completely unfounded attacks on the Catholic
> Church. There are so many places around that
> spread the post-modernist type version of new age
> mystic history that even people "checking" with
> something like google get what they are looking
> for.

Hmm.. well.. you can't really control what people do or do not
check up on, no matter what the subject. It's just one of those
things.

You might like to see more disciplined research and scholarship,
even in fiction books, but then what might happen if there were
actually an institution with laws in place to ensure that this
happens? Where would you draw the line? How would you compensate
for the individual preferences and bete noirs of judges or enforcers?
In other words, would you be able to reconcile that kind of restriction
with the inherent human need for free speech and expression?

The Soviets tried controlling speech and expression for a good while;
McCarthy tried it; the Legion of Decency has tried it... the Nazi's have
tried it... and others. But what speaks loudest these days is money.
If it sells, it flies. Thus, I suppose the best system of checks and
balances on extremes of any kind is the personal boycott. Just don't
buy it.

I know there's a bit of a sense of impatience or desperation in the
world right now, and emotions tend to run rather high even on non-life
threatening issues like these. I just say to myself: a book by Dan
Brown is just very good entertainment and even instructive to a degree.
It's not really harming anyone, and it might even be a bit subversive,
which I always love. Whether the shoddy scholarship is a symptom of
something far more dangerous in society, in the way that people do become
susceptible to believing bad information that really can result in serious
harm, speaks more to the way oppression works and to the problems of the
education system, not to the relative merits or deficiencies of any one
book or author.

Also, if you decide to censor someone like Brown, then what do you do when
you get bad information or policy from someone like the pope or the president?
See the problem? The best solution is probably to follow the advice of Frank
Smith and change the world, but before you do that I believe you have to think
like Gandhi and be the change you want to see. That's hard to do, though, but
it makes sense.

Sue