Cult of Dan Brown: Mistake in the book

The "losing" side may be more interesting to a historian, but it's precisely because of the challenge posed by the scarcity of cultural evidence. It takes little effort to chronicle the history of the "winning" side, because it's practically everywhere--books, poems, films, songs, monuments, architecture, etc. Finding out who the "losers" really were, though--as opposed to the enemies as described by the "winners" in their stories--is necessarily more difficult, particularly when these events took place long before the historian came along.

Where written records survive to help the historian, they're generally quite scarce and few in number, such that the historian gets only a very limited view of the "losers'" culture. Cultures with oral traditions typically fare far worse--we'll never know much at all about many of the Native American tribes that were eradicated by other tribes before Western historians set foot on the continent. Archaeology can help to an extent, but again, the "winners" leave more clues behind than the "losers" do, so there's necessarily more guesswork involved in studying the "losing" culture on the basis of that more limited evidence.

That the "losers" existed at all is not generally disputed by anyone. The "winners," after all, typically try to paint their victories as heroic struggles against either a villainous tyrant or an honourable rival, so some evidence of the "losing" culture usually survives in the "winner's" version of events. In fact, these biased tales are often the spark that sets modern archaeologists and historians hunting for information about the "losing" side's culture--cultures that we otherwise wouldn't have known existed.

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I'm not even going to touch on the plausibility of a 2000-year-old conspiracy theory like that suggested by DVC. Now that's just plain ridiculous.

The DVC is a patchwork of conspiracy theories, so I'm not sure which one you're going out of your way not to touch on here. One point you might note, however, is that conspiracy theories thrive on the inability to either prove or disprove them, and that speaks to an insufficiency of available evidence. Speculation rules the day when evidence is scarce, and as we've already agreed, it's the "losing" side that suffers this lack most acutely. It should come as no surprise, then, that conspiracy theories flourish regarding what the "winners" did to the "losers." Any accounts by the "winners" are seen as inherently biased, and the evidentiary record of the "losers" is usually spotty at best, leaving people with a handful of tantalizing clues they can stitch together with whatever explanation suits their fancy. Some historians fall into that trap, too, in an effort to make sense of limited evidence, and conspiracy theorists later use those historians' works as references to support their theories.

Ask yourself, though, how much evidence of our own times is likely to survive the next 500 years--and more importantly, whose culture will be represented by that evidence. That's already a big concern with Google's Digital Library plans. How long will printed books survive if they aren't digitized? Who gets to decide which books are "important enough" to get digitized, and which ones are left to fall into obscurity? Will we see English become the universal language of the digital world, dominating to the detriment of other languages when libraries like Google's only accept English texts and English translations of foreign-language texts? Once again, the dominant culture uses its resources to assert itself to ensure its own survival into the annals of future history, intent on "winning" the culture war. We have a hard enough time preserving the languages and cultures of aboriginal peoples today--how many of those will be irretrievably lost after 500 more years of cultural assimilation?

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