A pat on the head

I have been exposed to Dan Brown only through his critics. Criticisms of his works, The DaVinci Code and the movie treatment of his novel Angels and Demons are available in plenty. How these match up to the originals is something I cannot comment on. I found two of them, both appearing in the New York Times extremely interesting. And both say that the author is highly condescending. Of course, they differ in towards whom the condescension is directed.

Ross Douthat writes: “Brown pats believers on the head and bids them go on fingering their rosary beads”. In this the author is accused of condescension towards the traditional believers that they know not rosary beads-fingering will get them nowhere. With this he is scoring brownie points with his “kind of readers”, Americans “abandoning organized religion” and leaning towards “do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away.” This is the group of haves, the writer seems to say. The most important religious trend in 21st century America is the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition. No wonder atheists are having a hard time explaining atheism to this “generalized” laity, a multi-headed hydra in real life.

Dennis Overbye handles the author’s condescension at a higher plane. It is religion that is patting science on the head. All the heads of the hydra have been fused into one “religiousness” and the task becomes easier. A scene near the end of the movie rankles Mr. Overbye as it would any right thinking person. Religion says to science that it is God who is letting science see as far as it does, and, take this, no farther. “Scientists and academics are smart, but religious leaders are wise.” “…having faith is just a little bit better than being smart.”

There are two paragraphs in Mr. Overbye’s piece that deserve to be quoted in toto.

“The lament, voiced often in the movie and even more in the book, is that science, with its endlessly nibbling doubts, has drained the world of wonder and meaning, depriving humans of, among other things, a moral compass.

The church advertises strength through certitude, but starting from the same collection of fables, commandments and aphorisms — love thy neighbor; thou shalt not kill; blessed are the meek for they will inherit the Earth — the religions of the world have reached an alarmingly diverse set of conclusions about what behaviors … are right and wrong.”

The writer says, “In science … the meaning of the quest is derived not from answers but from the processes by which they are found: curiosity, doubt, humility, tolerance.” This is, in a way, a response to the director of the movie Ron Howard’s observation that both religion and science are after big mysteries and hence no conflicts between them. This equates the sincere doubts of science with the fake certainties of religion. Only those who weave dreamland fantasies can come up with such ingenious arguments!

And, now I come to some more patting on the head, of the home-grown variety. This one is from “Cho” Ramaswamy and the hand doing the patting is “Enge Brahmanan”, a Jaya TV serial on which I had blogged elsewhere. Here, the condescension is towards those Brahmins who have been misled by social forces to ignore their Sanskrit tradition and also towards a culture that is not exactly Brahminic. But, in trying to balance the two, there is a lot unsavory mishmash.

“Cho” shows up the present day Brahmins as devoid of an identity. They have lost their moorings, in the Sanskrit scriptures. He pats them on the head and says that though they enjoy Brahmin lineage they have to work hard to deserve it. He devises arguments around passages in scriptures, sourced most haphazardly and with no mention of possible contradictions elsewhere in the compendium, whose naiveté is matched, nay surpassed by that of the listeners. In his implied exhortation of the community lies his condescension.

But given the commercial aspects of a TV serial being telecast in Tamil Nadu, he cannot go overboard on Sanskrit based Brahminism. He has to make the right Tamil noises. So, he brings in the Tamil devotional tradition of the saints of vaishnavite and saivite sects. He quotes the much venerated Sri Kanchi Kamakoti Peetam sage Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati as saying that knowledge from Sanskrit has to be leavened with that from Tamil and vice versa for a full realization of godhead. “Cho” ignores the possible affront to Telugus, Kannadigas and Malayalis! After all they will not be watching this serial, his argument goes, I suppose.

Here is the confusion. If Sanskrit needs Tamil, it should also need Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi and god forbid, perhaps even Latin, Spanish, English! But “Cho”, the smart lawyer that he is, does not let this question arise. He sweeps the confusion under the carpet.

What Dan Brown is trying to do, “selling a theology” of a generalized variety, as per Mr. Douthat, is what “Cho” is doing, selling a particular version of a culture. Mr. Overbye says that Dan Brown is trying to promote the feeling “[W]e are still in awe of that [religious] tradition”, whereas “Cho” extends that to the necessity of bringing back to life the Sanskrit-cum-Brahminic tradition, but without stepping on the toes of those not bought out by Brahminism.

Both achieve their goals by patting on the heads of their audience.

Raghuram Ekambaram