By DOUG SHAVER
August 24, 2020
It's not exactly true that history is always written by the winners. Sometimes we get a version from the losers. The Peloponnesian War was between Athens and Sparta, and Athens lost, but our primary sources were written by Thucydides and Xenophon, both Athenians. The Spartans were not illiterate, but except for some poetry, serious literature seems to have been held in low esteem, and so little was produced. If any Spartan wrote any history, none of his work seems to have survived.
We should expect a winner's account of any conflict to be biased, obviously, and a loser's account to be no less biased. A biased history is not worthless just because it's biased, though. If it were, we would have no history. All history is biased, because all history is written by human beings, and there are no unbiased human beings. We're not just talking about bias due to partiality, either. Bias, in my lexicon, is just any source of error. A battle could be witnessed by someone with no interest at all in who won, no partiality for either of the belligerants, and that person's account of the battle would still have mistakes, because no witness to any event can be infallible. We perceive things imperfectly, and we remember them even more imperfectly.
And speaking of mistakes . . . I deplore a trend that seems to be approaching ubiquity: the labeling of any untruth as a lie. I'm even seeing YouTube videos in which the creators are correcting mistakes in previous videos and referring to those mistakes as lies, as in "Today I'm going to fix some lies I told in my last video." I suppose it will be just a matter of time before teachers are telling their students how many lies they are telling on their tests.
Those who are asking "Why is this deplorable?" may think the dictionaries approve of it. Merriam-Webster, for just one example, offers four definitions of lie, the two relevant ones being "an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker or writer to be untrue with intent to deceive" and "an untrue or inaccurate statement that may or may not be believed true by the speaker or writer." But dictionary publishers have not, for several generations now, been in the habit of telling people how they should use words. They are only reporting how people actually use the words. Lots of English speakers do use the word lie as a mere synonym for untruth or falsehood, and so dictionary editors duly note this fact without further comment. But, as many of us were told from a very young age, just because everybody does something doesn't make it right. What everybody does is often unobjectionable, but sometimes it's morally wrong and sometimes it's just stupid.
The issue here is not good English versus bad English. The issue is effective communication, making whatever point you're trying to make with minimal ambiguity. I'm old enough to remember when an accusation of lying was an accusation of moral wrongdoing—of sinning, if you happened to be a Christian. Apparently, that is no longer the case. Of course it's still wrong, but not necessarily a moral wrong. Sometimes it's just a mistake. But then what's the big deal? We all make mistakes, don't we?
Oh, but some kinds of mistakes are worse than other kinds, are they not? Of course, and distinctions of that sort are useful to make. That is why English has many different words for things that are alike in some ways but differrent in other ways. We all say things that are untrue. Most of us, most of the time, say those things unknowingly and without deceitful intent. Some of us, some of the time, say those things knowing them to be untrue and with intention to deceive. Those are different kinds of untruths, and it is extremely useful to have a different label for each. We can call the first kind an error and the second kind a lie. We are begging to be misunderstood or to cause gratuitous offense if we also call the first kind a lie.
But of course, this all only matters if we're actually trying in good faith to communicate with each other, and I don't see much good faith in public discourse these days. Good-faith communication isn't a priority when you're trying to win a war. If your adversary says something that isn't true, it just feels so much better to say "You're lying" than to say "You're making a mistake." And in the current political climate, feelings are all that anyone cares about. After all, as we're often told, truth is the first casualty in war.
And it can continue to be sacrificed long after the war is over, especially in the name that the victors assign to the conflict. America's war for independence from Great Britain was a rebellion, not a revolution, and our first Civil War was also a rebellion, not a civil war. Properly speaking, a revolution is an armed conflict seeking to abolish one government and replace it with another. The French Revolution was a real revolution. When one part of a political entity tries to end the government's authority over it without abolishing that government, that is a rebellion, not a revolution.
So why are they called the American Revolution and the American Civil War? Probably because, until the mid-20th century, being a rebel wasn't something anyone wanted to brag about. The original colonies did affirm, in their Declaration of Independence, "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government . . . ." But that was saying to the British government, "By your conduct, you have forfeited your right to exercise authority over us." In the founders' thinking, rebels were just rejecting authority, period, without any concern about setting up a new authority. And that was exactly what the instigators of Shays' Rebellion were doing.
A civil war happens when two factions within a political entity vie for control of that entity. That is not what happened when the Confederate States of America tried to achieve independence, but it was apparently useful for the winning side to pretend, after the conflict was over, that it was what had happened. There was no pretense during the war, though, which is why the Confederate soldiers were called rebels.
The line between a revolution and a civil war can get fuzzy. During the many English civil wars, one side usually represented the existing government, which would make the other side revolutionaries. But the reason they were fighting in the first place was that the king had to some degree lost control of the government before the war even started. There was thus at least a partial power vacuum, and the fighting was over which which faction was going to fill it.
It doesn't look like there is any kind of power vacuum in the United States these days. All the complaining is about how all that power isn't being used to benefit the right people, and pretty nearly all of the aggrieved factions claim to understand that the only realistic solution is to get the right kinds of people elected to Congress and the presidency. That's how democracy is supposed to work. Our problem is a prevalent perception that something is preventing it from working like it's supposed to work. And the perception is correct to this extent: Elections are supposed to convey the consent of the governed onto the government, but that is not what our elections are doing any more. Most Americans do not consent to how they are being governed. That is why some of them are rioting under the pretext of engaging in peaceful protest.
So, the present government has plenty of power, but the people don't accept its legitimacy. At the same time, though, the various discontented factions don't agree on which of them would have legitimacy if they were in power. For the time being, then, they're fighting each other to settle the legitimacy issue, hoping that victory over their adversaries will put them into the position of power they think they're entitled to. That makes the current conflict more of a civil war more than a revolution.
Next: Can we talk?
(This page last updated on August 24, 2020.)