Has Literature Ever Changed the Course of History? | Hacker News Reader

Has Literature Ever Changed the Course of History?

historytoday.com

23 pointslermontov49 comments

> We should not cheat, by calling, say, the King James Bible a work of literature.

It's hard to take the article seriously when it opens like this, because it makes a binary distinction between literature and religion. It's trivially obvious that this isn't the case: for example, the Analects of Confucius, a work that's deeply intertwined with the spiritual practices of ancient China (see Puett's excellent To Become a God.) Not "fictional" enough? How about the even earlier Classic of Poetry, the earliest (known) Chinese text which was frequently cited by emperors and literati in their quest to hearken back to the mores of antiquity.

It is not making a distinction between literature and religion. It is making a distinction between fiction and nonfiction, with works that the authors intended as nonfiction counting as nonfiction regardless of whether or not they were objectively true.

One of my two examples was literally a collection of poetry. Not to mention that fiction/nonfiction is itself not a binary, as evidenced by many other Chinese masterworks. (I'm using early Chinese literature as examples because that's the context I'm most intimately familiar with from my graduate studies.)

I think that the Communist Manifest is an excellent piece of poetry - "All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled" etc - that unfortunately got over a hundred million people killed, and many times that number fubar'd ...

But many clung - still cling - to that futile dream.

How strict is the definition of “literature”? Does it include religious texts? Political texts? Scientific texts? Philosophical texts? Is science fiction literature? All of these have changed history.

Things like Shakespeare and canterbury tales and those in other languages have modified language and blurred stories and politics. So I assume these count?

From the article's opening paragraph: "Books have changed the course of history, but has literature? We should not cheat, by calling, say, the King James Bible a work of literature. Let us discount everything but fiction, drama and poetry."

Remember when some German guy nailed a rant to a church door?

Perfect example.

There was a lot of pre-reformation work that went on before it culminated in the 95 theses, but yeah, that was one of those watershed moments.

More or less about the time the printing press came up, and books - and advertising - started getting cheap?

What a coincidence.

It was certainly a document, but was it literature? I don't think there was any attempt at art. It was just an airing of grievances.

The Arthur Clarke short story "I remember Babylon". Kicked off the geostationary space industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Remember_Babylon

(Not his only work that had some influence on history: "The Nine Billion Names Of God" IIRC was one of the first times anyone suggested that computers might be able to process text as well as numbers. "Superiority" (how technical superiority need not win) was required reading in a certain MIT course for a while. And of course "2001 a space odyssey" will have influenced a lot of people in less-easy-to-define ways.)

Since a change in the course of history has, as a rule, multiple causes, it is very unlikely a priori that a work of literature ever was the one sufficient condition for a change in the course of history.

But as a contributing factor – why not, that is likely and IMHO attested. One example: A performance of the grand opera “La muette de Portici” is credibly said to “have sparked riots leading to the Belgian Revolution” as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_muette_de_Portici puts it.

> very unlikely a priori that a work of literature ever was the one > sufficient condition for a change in the course of history.

That was also the message I took from the article. But this stood out;

"In a 96-page anonymously published pamphlet, The Conduct of The Allies, Swift attacked... Swift turned the tide of debate and hastened the end of the war."

And of course the US Constitution springs to mind.

Maybe not individual books or authors, but the necessary conditions for literature, including the means of dissemination, freedom of speech and, if necessary, anonymity, afford the possibility for changing history.

One of the most famous works of literature in American history that had a huge impact was Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

>It is reported that upon being introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, Abraham Lincoln fondly commented she was "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/harriet-beecher-stowe-litt...

We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams; — World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties We build up the world's great cities, And out of a fabulous story We fashion an empire's glory: One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song's measure Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying, In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself in our mirth; And o'erthrew them with prophesying To the old of the new world's worth; For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth.

How would we know? I suspect that Machiavelli had more influence on world politics than anyone can admit or imagine…

It is verily better to be feared than loved.

Pity book.

Sun Tzu too ?

The Catcher in the Rye has been linked to the murder of several people, including John Lennon and John F. Kennedy.

Accoridng to historian David McCullough, the play Cato was a favorite of George Washington and well known to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Two famous American quotes likely originate in a slightly different form from the play itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato,_a_Tragedy#Influence_on_A...

Cato was the Roman aristocrat that George Washington most heavily admired and styled himself after - and indeed Cato's purported character aligns closely with characteristics that we now consider "presidential" (stoicism; prudence; moral integrity; etc.). Of course, it's through literature that we know all this...

The film The Caine Mutiny helped inspire the 25th amendment to the US Constitution. That's based on a book, so even if you want to narrow it to literature, it still works.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/09/1...

Of course, nothing happens just because someone saw a movie about it. The 25th amendment was also prompted by the assassination of JFK, and the new awesome responsibilities of the US president in nuclear brinkmanship.

But I think literature and especially film are a kind of artificial experience, a memory of something that never happened. And we can start to take steps to realize or avoid those events.

These effects can be subtle, but not that hard to trace. For instance, the police greatly benefit from their nearly universal portrayal as heroes on film and TV. I think you can draw a direct line from that to the massive police budgets you see in North America.

Fables are fictional works designed with an intention of changing social behavior.

And you also have fictional books with political/social agendas like 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, Atlas Shrugged, etc. that are often quoted during real-world debates. So literature has at least permeated the consciousness enough to be considered a reliable argument for some thinkers.

> can literature have any impact outside the confines of culture?

> Literature, originally "writing formed with letters," from litera/littera "alphabetic letter" also "an epistle, writing, document; literature, great books; science, learning"[1]

This old general sense of the word literature is still in use when we refer to scientific papers as "the literature".

In my opinion Literature-proper (like Joyce, Tolstoy, Austen, Mann and on and on) has more noble aspirations than mucking about with the "nightmare of history" (quote is Joyce's, or more specifically Dedalus's). Literature is the source code of culture, history is its child.

Perhaps history and literature can be seen as 2 independent lenses to understand our world, but I see the relation of literature to history more as that of math to physics.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/literature

I think it's very likely Snow Crash has changed the course of Meta.

That’s just because no one speaks sumerian any more.

"Percy Shelley, a famous poet from the Romantic Era, was the first to advocate for peaceful protests and he inspired Gandhi to adopt non-violent resistance. Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance influenced Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama. They had all followed Shelley’s philosophy and it helped create a new world.

When Gandhi read Shelley’s poem, “The Masque of Anarchy” he was instantly captivated by its message for freedom through peace. It is known that Gandhi would often quote various passages from the poem to vast audiences during the campaign for India’s independence."

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/how-a-romantic-poet-...

"The Ugly American" has been claimed to have been an enormous wake up call to how the US does foreign policy. It allegedly motivated much of Kennedy's approach and was responsible for the formation of the Peace Corps. Before he was elected, he bought a copy for every sitting senator.

There is a famous quote from Kenneth Clarke [1] that Charles Dickens did more for the poor people than Marx and Engels.

Emile Zola was also very influential with his books.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made millions aware of the Gulags.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Clark

I hear a lot about "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, but I've never read it.

It led to the Pure Food and Drug Act, IIRC.

The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry... Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

J'accuse led to anti-Semites creating the Tour de France, and one current French Presidential candidate is still battling to smear the reputation of Dreyfus.

Due to the butterfly effect pretty much anything that includes large number of objects interacting with humans changed the course of history.

The Bible.

In same sense The Quran. Found really cool over the meal type of documentary style video introduction :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2cEIDZwG5M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baHT2nR5Wr4

Even secularly, I need to agree. The Bible was swallowed by Roman Empire and tied to Roman greatness for the next half century, maybe millenium. The Qur'an made its own greatness, from heretofore a marginal people, who by their own admissions feared the Persians like falcons fear eagles ('O, lo, the Persians, whose destiny is millennia of greatness. Even when they fell, they reclaimed their imperiality' - paraphrased from pre-Islamic Arab poems) and Rome. (Though I don't find many Arabic poems of Rome, unlike Germanic epic poems about the Roman dragon, even if they hide it sometimes. Siegfried was likely mythical version of Arminius)

I vaguely remember reading some Islamic stuff and Rome was what you would think is USA in terms of power and you live in Afghanistan. Just impossibly out of reach.

Plato’s dialogues are clearly literature and they deeply impacted 3 major religions and western civilization.

Xenophon’s Cyropaedia was used by Alexander the Great as a sort of field guide.

Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis was a key inspiration for Hooke and Newton.

The question they really ask is "Has fiction ever changed the course of history?"

Nothing has changed the course of history. We're in the midst of eternity. It's all an illusion.

The universe is declarative. We just happen to be stuck with state machine interpreters in our skulls that can only parse one moment at a time.

Fiat lux! I dig it.

I think you are asking about the ideas conveyed by the literature... but it used to be common for Politicians to fund their public-service career through books. Thats what Winston Churchill did. Not sure how important 'Mein Kampf' sales were to initially funding the Nazis.

My pet theory is that modern western civ is a sub-product of advertising, as started by printed pamphlets.

Google and Facebook just took it to this century.

Has a piece of code ever changed the course of history?

Not one single thing changes the course of history on it's own. A bunch of factors need to come together to make that happen. Has literature (and arts in general I would add) been one of those factors? Totally so.

Considering the effect that Karl Marx, to name just one example, has had on the history of the modern world, I'd call this question moot and pointless with the obviousness of the answer.

hg wells and the atomic bomb should count i think

EMC2

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