Mountain of Evidence

There is another part of the whole DaVinci Code controversy that puzzles me. It is a new approach to documentary evidence. People examining the book often wonder how such theories can be taken so seriously. It is so far out of the main stream. Why is this story getting such play? Brown is sloppy, but he is a novelist, not an historian. There are other professional historians utilizing the same technique, however. On the premise that the victor writes the prevailing history, they weight alternate and contradictory evidence heavier in an attempt to ferret out the fuller truth. These alternate documents have previously been marginalized because they contradict the prevailing history.

The traditional approach to history is much like the prospector in Jack London’s short story “The All Gold Canyon.” The miner assays back and forth up a slope, panning out individual shovels of dirt, locating the pocket by the number of flakes of gold revealed in each pan. Moving up the slope he narrows the pattern and closes in on the pocket, which he then mines out. In historical studies we likewise collect sources, compare, evaluate, locate the center based on the weight of evidence, and marginalize conflicting documents to the periphery. We call the center “truth,” and we publish a book.

The new approach resembles more a tent. Competing views stake out their extreme positions, establishing a space between them where we can pitch a tent of truth. Think about the classic Arminian-Calvinist debate about free will versus predestination. Positions on each side are firm, but truth lies somewhere between, maybe everywhere between. In this model it is possible that no data is actually reported from within the tent. We locate the tent from the hard data at the staking points. This is a black hole model of history. Astrophysicists don’t have any data from black holes, but they infer their existence from surrounding peripheral phenomena.

It is like a high mountain covered in ice and shrouded in mist. We infer the character of the mountain based on reports from the foothill villages, but no one actually lives up there, or has ever returned from an expedition to go there. Like our tent, the mountain covers considerable territory. This method establishes a region of truth, not a point of truth. Let that sink in.

This method does not abolish truth. The tent has an inside and an outside. The mountain stands in the midst of plains and valleys that are not the mountain. But truth in this model is not pointillism; it is not reductionistic truth. It sets out space enough to have a civil conversation where all parties can lay claim to truth without denigrating the other conversants.

The traditional point-of-truth approach has always suffered from the illusion that once properly stated, truth was in fact established and static. The new region-of-truth model likewise suffers from some staking points that are in reality weaker than others, or set in thin air. The burden of the historian remains validation, evaluation and interpretation of the evidence available.