History: All Story, All the Time

By Wallace Kaufman

Editor’s note: Guest author Wallace Kaufman, a science writer and mediator, earned a B.A. from Duke and an M.Litt from Oxford where he was a Marshall Scholar. He is the author of several books on the environment and housing, including a memoir and a sci-fi novel about the ethical issues of genomics. Recently he has taught poetry for Oregon Coast Community College and a course on environmental covenants at Texas A&M Law School in Fort Worth. He has served as resident adviser on housing and land reform in Kazakhstan, created several rural acreage communities with environmental covenants, and now works from his home base on a deep water slough on the Oregon coast.

 

I asked Wallace to respond to Arizona State University professor James O’Donnell’s “Law of History”: “There are no true stories.”*

All history is myth making. History is the transformation of legions of facts into a coherent story of the intended and unintended results of human behavior that embodies what seems to be important truth about human character and its potentials. The creators of these myths believe they have discovered Truth.

The historians developing any story line believe the story is true and embodies a universal truth because to them it makes sense, explains what happened, even how we got here and who we are.  This is, of course, my story about historians, whether the creators are propagandists, theologians, novelists, or meticulous scholars who call themselves historians.

Herodotus and Thucydides wrote history to teach moral values. Frederick Turner’s analysis of the western frontier shaping American history has all the elements of story—beginning, middle, end and lots of heroic characters. One of the most influential and destructive historians of all time was Karl Marx who constructed a dramatic history of constant class conflict. Slavery gave way to feudalism which gave way to capitalism which would inevitably lead to the final revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie followed by the dictatorship of the proletariat. A story with a happy ending—in the future, of course.

Why is history story? Just as we are bored by those books of the Bible that have endless begats: Salmon begat Boaz, Boaz begat Obed, Obed begat Jesse, Jesse begat David . . .  , we would all be bored by a pottage of raw historical facts. Many of us have taken courses that were little but names and dates to be memorized and meaning nothing or close to it. No story, no interest. But why must we be so entertained?

Incident, said Aristotle, is merely the fact of an action. Choose and arrange the incidents, he said, and there’s a story with a plot. Two thousand two hundred years later novelist E.M. Forster said, the simplest narrative was, “The king died, then the queen died.” A list of chronological facts or incidents. The chronology becomes story with plot and implied causality in, “The king died, then the queen died of grief.” We could say both narratives are a form of history, but the second kind is where we learn about human character and begin to ask what truth this story will reveal.

My long-time friend, novelist and Duke professor Reynolds Price, often said story was a basic human need second only to food and water. All day long we tell ourselves little stories, usually with predictive intention—if I go this way, I’ll get to school faster; I’ll tell him his mother is calling and he’ll go home. We invest by story: if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, the price of my home might go down. We plan marriages and careers and retirement as stories. (And the stories are often revised after something doesn’t happen as we told ourselves it would.) Evolutionary psychologists have more to say about why the human animal needs stories.

The materials of history are the gigantic compilations of all the variables that have caused or been present during change in the lives of humans. The facts of history are the chaotic refuse of human behavior. Comprehending the whole is beyond the capability of either a single writer or reader. To reconstruct history from time’s random rubbish and make the product intelligible to a single reader, the pieces have to fit together as story. Forget Occam’s Razor—the simplest explanations are seldom always the best or most probably true. The understanding of history requires understanding the many disciplines that encompass this morass of fact—psychology, the sciences, the arts, politics, natural history, geography and more.

Suffice it to say that understanding ourselves and our situation and our futures requires stories because evolution made us that way. Historians are not mutants born without the story-making instinct.

The stories we tell moment to moment to ourselves or in books that become classics or in writing history are not reality but models of reality. This is true even in science where variables are far fewer and methods and conclusions can be tested. Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Centre for Bits and Atoms, says, “The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don’t—they make and test models.”

Historians have the same task as scientists: interest an audience by creating credible and perhaps useful models. In history, as in science and literature, truth is a model, and the best models live on to be refined, sometimes for centuries, even millennia—perhaps as powerful myths.

[1] See James O’Donnell’s “Law of History.”