Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

The other day I was talking to a friend that said that he doesn’t read fiction, because there’s so much history to learn so he’d rather stick with what’s more important. I’ve been rolling this around in my head and have been trying to figure out if history is more inherently valuable than fiction?

Of course, there’s the old adage, “history is written by the victors”. Lots of important things end up getting deemphasized as a result. The Bataan Death March and Firebombing of Dresden were both horrible atrocities, but the former is much more well known than the latter. This, despite the fact that Dresden was arguably much worse than Bataan.

There is also the problem with just the scale of the history. My middle school history teacher, Mr. Luther, had been teaching for over 40 years when I had the privilege to be his student. One day he remarked to me that when he started he didn’t have time to teach his students everything they needed to know, and now 40 more years of history were added to his burden.

The problem that results is that history is simplified to make it more efficient to learn. For example, every American student will say that the American Civil War was fought over slavery. But this is really a gross over-simplification: at issue were different viewpoints of federalism, economics, modernization, and separatism. All these were brought to a boiling point when the issue of slavery was considered. Many facts are overlooked; like the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation came a full year after the Civil War started.

And, of course, the relevant Simpsons reference. Apu is trying to get his US citizenship and the following occurs during his verbal exam:
Proctor: All right, here’s your last question. What was the cause of the Civil War?
Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter–
Proctor: Wait, wait… just say slavery.
Apu: Slavery it is, sir.

Lots of people say that it’s important to learn history so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. But even people who study history but think they can do it right themselves. After all, we all now know to “never get involved in a land war in Asia”, but that really hasn’t stopped anyone lately.

Anyway, if we can learn from the mistakes in history, why can’t we learn the mistakes of others in fictional works and try not to repeat them. I can think of a bunch of fictional works that have amazing relevance, whether its Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Quartet, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, or even Battlestar Galactica.

I suppose the main distinction is that the lessons from fiction can be dismissed by saying, “that would never happen.” Of course, that defense can also be applied to history with some modifications. People will often say, “Well, now we know better.” or “Those people were just crazy.”

Still history, or even fiction disguised as history, tends to be more relevant, because people like us made those decisions and had to deal with the consequences of their actions. And sometimes we’re still dealing with the consequences.

So does history have more intrinsic value than fiction? I’d have to say no. The main differentiation is how we choose to interpret and value it.

This does lead into another interesting discussion: when does fiction become fact and, of course, it’s related cousin, can anything be fact? But this is now getting too metaphysical, so we’ll have to talk about this some other time…