WRITING HISTORY.

There’s the old saying: “all history is written by the winners”. Which means that written historical accounts of conflicts will not be entirely accurate and will be biased in favour of the people who were on the winning side of the conflict. (And, given that all history is the history of conflict, then this point applies to all written history.)

But surely a bigger source of bias in history writing is the fact that all history is written by people who know how to write. The bias that results from this fact will be greater than the one which results from the fact that history is written by the winners. Because it is possible that history might have been written by the losers. But it is impossible that history was written by people who couldn’t write. By definition.

And the difference between people who knew how to write and those who didn’t isn’t just the fact that the former knew how to write. There would have been lots of other things that inevitably come with being literate. If you were someone who knew how to write you will have belonged to a certain class of people with a particular view of the world. Because, for example, you will have gone to a certain sort of educational institution from which you will have got other values while it was teaching you how to write.

We can never know what ordinary non-literate people thought and felt about the world. Because all that we know comes from writing and non-literate people didn’t know how to express themselves in writing. And even if literate people (kindly) try to write on behalf of those non-literate people the resulting text will have been filtered through the literate person’s mind and so won’t be an entirely accurate account.

Maybe (as suggested in episode 35 of the QI podcast “No Such Thing As A Fish”) the reason why Vikings have such a bad reputation in history is because they often attacked literate monks. The guys who wrote history. Wrong people to mess with!

In fact there is a greater level of bias from this point about writing because it’s not just that history is written by people who know how to write but it’s a particular subset of these people, namely ‘chroniclers’ who kept the records of the times. An ordinary non-chronicler literate person could write a record of what was happening but it would not be accepted by the community of historians.

It is because past writers were biased as explained that we now need modern historians to try to piece together evidence to find out exactly what really happened in the past and what it was like. If the writers of the past had written accurately and comprehensively then we wouldn’t need to have historians rooting around in the past now.

More generally maybe we should be suspicious of the opinion that writing and books are so valuable. Because the only source of this opinion is from people who write. And they have a vested interested in saying that! (Analogous humorous remark by Emo Philips: "I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realised who was telling me this".)

I suppose you could get somebody saying in writing how writing isn’t that great. I think Plato did it once. But his point was more about how writing reduces memory abilities. The way calculators reduce mental arithmetic ability.

How does history get written? If someone writes a book now on, say, the French Revolution, do they start again with the primary sources? Why are there so many books on the French Revolution. There shouldn’t really be any: if you want to know about it, just read the primary sources. And even if there does need to be a book, there shouldn’t be more than one.

[17 April 2016]