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?