Is Writing Good?

I’m not asking if a piece of writing is good. I’m asking if the act of writing is good for the world.

Let’s address Godwin’s law head-on. [Godwin’s law (or Godwin’s rule of Hitler analogies) is an Internet adage asserting that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”]

Goebbels’ propaganda was propagated through the written word. 

Through his Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Goebbel oversaw a large part of the cultural production of Germany in the ‘20s and ‘30s including film, radio, and television. One of the subsidiaries of Goebbels’ overarching media empire was Eher-Verlag, the major publishing house of the Nazi Party, responsible for the world-famous “Mein Kampf.” Growing up in India, it was always strange to see street book vendors flogging “Mein Kampf.” But now, having grown up, I realize, why it was so safe to hawk. Eher Verlag was banned and dismantled after the war and the Intellectual Property rights for “Mein Kampf” transferred to the Bavarian Govt. It’s easier to rip off the Bavarian Government than Harper Collins. 

Anyway, digression aside, Nazis = bad; we can all agree. 

There’s another example that I want to bring up: Julius Caesar. 

Julius Caesar wrote about his exploits. And, unlike our information-saturated age, in which a single event is captured by multiple angles of cellphone cameras, there weren’t many contemporaneous accounts. So Caesar got to make a lot of claims that cannot be verified or disproven. He referred to himself in third-person, by the way. Like, “Caesar inspected the legions. Caesar ordered for a bridge to be built across the Rhine.”

But now, if you close your eyes and think of Julius Caesar, that mythical figure of authoritarianism, one of the original figures used to develop the “great man” theory of history, that figure was created by the written word as much as unfolding events. 

Good. Bad. Immaterial. 

But indisputably, the written word creates alternate realities. 

There’s something counter-intuitively liberating about this idea. If, like me, you feel sometimes that you are seizing up, perhaps, because you’re wondering if your writing isn’t quite the lance for justice you hoped it would be, then perhaps it’s worth remembering that writing isn’t good. That’s an example of ascribing things to writing that are not inherent in writing. Writing isn’t supposed to be good. It’s just an alternate reality.