"Let them eat cake" - the 10,000 years of literati tyranny

“History is written by the victors.” We hear the phrase repeated so often that it has become its own truism. The reality, though, is more subtle and the perspective regarding “victor” may need to shift, when discussing socio-cultural outcome following a conquest. History is written, for the most part, by the middle to lower bureaucrats within a governing institution. Technically, it is the bureaucrat who writes history ranging from official proclamation to academic dissertation. The values and perspective of the literati class is preserved in the documented account of human miseries that we call history, and in many situations, the literati class were not among the victorious conquerors.

Confucianism has dominated the minds of China for 5000 years, until supplanted by Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1966; although the vestige of this tenacious thought continues to linger in the subconscious of one billion modern Chinese. Confucius never held any important government post; in fact, his political career consists brief time as Minister of Crime in the Zhou state. Dissatisfied with his liege, he quit his post and wandered the land, preaching his peculiar ethics and political vision. No state hired him as an official or enacted his political reforms, but Confucius managed to convince the literati throughout China to espouse his vision. The victor of the Warring States was Qin governed under legalist principles. Yet, 100 years after the legalist ascendancy, it was Confucian bureaucrats giddily rewriting history through their peculiar lens.

In 455 CE, Generic of the Vandals sacked Rome. Twenty years later, Rome as a political entity faded into memory, her rotting carcass violently shredded among Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Burgundians, and Saxons. Four-hundred years later, a Frankish king is crowned emperor and protector of a “Roman” people, his political edifice referred by his progeny as “Roman Empire,” and the official religion that of Nicean-Chalcedonian Christianity. Henceforth, any nostalgic reminiscence by a political entity for a bygone Roman times has been referred to as “renaissance” (re-birth).

637 CE, the invincible army of Caliph Umar ended the Sassanian state at Qadesiya. Two years later, the western Sassanian capital Ctesiphon burned. Within 15 years, the Arabs swallowed the entirety of Persia in a lightening conquest. In 762 CE, Caliph Al-Mansur, having overthrown his overlord, commissioned a new capital, Baghdad, a stone’s throw away from the ruins of Ctesiphon. In the Abbasid Caliphate, Persians were professors of Arab poetry, interpreters of Arab legal jurisdiction, Islamic theologians, and cultural arbiters of the supposed Arab empire. Within a hundred years of Arab conquest, the Sassanian literati had usurped the Beduin state.

“Qui plume a, guerre a.” (To hold a pen is to be at war.) so writes Voltaire. The conquest of social consciousness is a war waged in ink by the literati. History is “written.” Drawing sounds requires specialized professionals, who need not be particularly imaginative, but whose character necessitates consistent stubbornness. The literati are less restricted than the bards, who must be peculiar about the position of the sounds in aiding their epic tales, and a degree of liberty permits a degree of corruption (both in text and in character).

Salman Rushdie’s famous, or infamous, “Satanic Verses” has an amusing excerpt that illustrates the corruptibility of the literati and the written form:

. . . when he sat at the Prophet's feet, writing down rules rules rules, he began, surreptitiously, to change things.
"Little things at first. If Mahound recited a verse in which God was described as all-hearing, all-knowing, I would write, all-knowing, all-wise. Here's the point: Mahound did not notice the alterations. So there I was, actually writing the Book, or rewriting, anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language. . . . I was scared silly, I can tell you. Also: I was sadder than I have ever been. So I had to go on doing it. Maybe he'd just missed out once, I thought, anybody can make a mistake. So the next time I changed a bigger thing. He said Christian, I wrote down Jew. He'd notice that, surely; how could he not? But when I read him the chapter he nodded and thanked me politely, and I went out of his tent with tears in my eyes . . . So I went on with my devilment, changing verses, until one day I read my lines to him and saw him frown and shake his head as if to clear his mind, and then nod his approval slowly, but with a little doubt. I knew I'd reached the edge, and that the next time I rewrote the Book he'd know everything . . .” (Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses p387-388)

The written form has many advantages: portability, accessibility, consistency, mass production. The modern mind pictures a book or a library, when hearing the term “history.” But drawing sounds are not the only form of record keeping. Man has recalled past events and myths through songs, oral poems, rituals both religious and secular, traditions both religious and secular, paintings, sculptures, and architecture. One could even argue that cuisine is a form of information transmission. Yet, in this sea of information repository, somehow, the written word ascended as the primary and premier method.

Even in this modern era of readily accessible video transmission, the written form remains ascendant and prevalent. The victors of history are the literati who have become integral to social interpretation of any past or present event. The literati are generally counted within the lower ranks of a social class: the slave and the freedmen of an imperial city state, the conquered remnant of a dead empire, and the exiled scholars lurking in the shadows of dynastic ambitions. But they are necessary for the efficient functioning of a centralized state; a bureaucracy requires steady pool from which to recruit conservative-minded candidates. It is the languorous culture of the bureaucrat, and not the fearsome barbarism of the warrior, to which man owes history. Conquerors and geniuses come and go, but the literate will always remain, pen in hand, ready to invent history from their peculiar perspective.

Thank you for your comment. With the wealth of recording methods available to man, it is interesting that we choose the written method for official, legitimate documents. By limiting legitimacy to one form of record keeping, the ultimate censorship belongs to the literati class. The accounts of North European "pagan" mythologies that we read were written by the Christian bureaucrats/monks because the Northern Europeans used bardic songs to record their history and theology. By determining which stories are written, the literati decides which of man's stories are transmitted.

I recall a recent discovery of an ice-age era settlement in Canada, which caused the scientists to re-evaluate the migration history to the Americas. The regional native people had an oral tradition that dated their settlements to this ice-age settlement, but for decades, the authorities dismissed their stories because it was not recorded in written form. I think the next generation of men needs to be taught to appreciate all forms of historical records, not just the written form.