Mythistory, or
Truth, Myth, History, and Historians
WILLIAM H. McNEILL
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Myth and history are close kin inasmuch as both explain how things got to be the
way they are by telling some sort of story. But our common parlance reckons myth
to be false while history is, or aspires to be, true. Accordingly, a historian who
rejects someone else's conclusions calls them mythical, while claiming that his own
views are true. But what seems true to one historian will seem false to another, so
one historian's truth becomes another's myth, even at the moment of utterance.
A century and more ago, when history was first established as an academic
discipline, our predecessors recognized this dilemma and believed they had a
remedy. Scientific source criticism would get the facts straight, whereupon a
conscientious and careful historian needed only to arrange the facts into a readable
narrative to produce genuinely scientific history. And science, of course, like the
stars above, was true and eternal, as Newton and Laplace had demonstrated to the
satisfaction of all reasonable persons everywhere.
Yet, in practice, revisionism continued to prevail within the newly constituted
historical profession, as it had since the time of Herodotus. For a generation or
two, this continued volatility could be attributed to scholarly success in discovering
new facts by diligent work in the archives; but early in this century thoughtful
historians began to realize that the arrangement of facts to make a history involved
subjective judgments and intellectual choices that had linie or nothing to do with
source criticism, scientific or otherwise.
In reacting against an almost mechanical vision of scientific method, it is easy to
underestimate actual achievements. For the ideal of scientific history did allow our
predecessors to put some forms of bias behind them. In particular, academic
historians of the nineteenth century same close to transcending older religious
controversies. Protestant and Catholic histories of post-Reformation Europe
ceased to be separate and distinct traditions of learning—a transformation nicely
illustrated in the Anglo-American world by the career of Lord Acton, a Roman
Catholic who became Regius Professor of History at Cambridge and editor of the
first Cambridge Modern History. This was a great accomplishment. So was the
accumulation of an enormous fund of exact and reliable data through painstaking
From Mythistory and Other Essays by William H. McNeill. Reprinted by arrangement with the University
of Chicago Press. ©1986 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
1
2 William H. McNeill
source criticism that allowed the writing of history in the western world to assume
a new depth, scope, range, and precision as compared to anything possible in
earlier times. No heir of that scholarly tradition should scoff at the faith of our
predecessors, which inspired so much toiling in archives.
Yet the limits of scientific history were far more constricting than its devotees
believed. Facts that could be established beyond all reasonable doubt remained
trivial in the sense that they did not, in and of themselves, give meaning or
intelligibility to the record of the past. A catalogue of undoubted and indubitable
information, even if arranged chronologically, remains a catalogue. To become a
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history, facts have to be put together into a pattern that is understandable and
credible; and when that has been achieved, the resulting portrait of the past may
become useful as well—a font of practical wisdom upon which people may draw
when making decisions and taking action.
Pattern recognition of the sort historians engage in is the chef d'oeuvre of
human intelligence. It is achieved by paying selective attention to the total input
of stimuli that perpetually swarm in upon our consciousness. Only by leaving
things out, that is, relegating them to the status of background noise deserving only
to be disregarded, can what matters most in a given situation become recognizable.
Suitable action follows. Here is the great secret of human power over nature and
over ourselves as well. Pattern recognition is what natural scientists are up to; it
is what historians have always done, whether they knew it or not.
Only some facts matter for any given pattern. Otherwise, useless clutter will
obscure what we are after: perceptible relationships among important facts. That
and that alone constitutes an intelligible pattern, giving meaning to the world,
whether it be the world of physics and chemistry or the world of interacting human
groups through time, which historians take as their special domain. Natural
scientists are ruthless in selecting aspects of available sensory inputs to pay
attention to, disregarding all else. They call their patterns theories and inherit most
of them from predecessors. But, as we now know, even Newton's truths needed
adjustment. Natural science is neither eternal nor universal; it is instead historica]
and evolutionary, because scientists accept a new theory only when the new
embraces a wider range of phenomena or achieves a more elegant explanation of
(selectively observed) facts than its predecessor was able to do.
No comparably firm consensus prevails among historians. Yet we need not
despair. The great and obvious difference between natural scientists and historians
is the greater complexity of the behavior historians seek to understand. The
principal source of historical complexity lies in the fact that human beings react
both to the natural world and to one another chiefly through the mediation of
symbols. This means, among other things, that any theory about human life, if
widely believed, will alter actual behavior, usually by inducing people to act as if
the theory were true. Ideas and ideals thus become self-validating within
remarkably elastic limits. An extraordinary behavioral motility results. Resort to
symbols, in effect, loosened up the connection between external reality and human
responses, freeing us from instinct by setting us adrift on a sea of uncertainty.
Human beings thereby acquired a new capacity to err, but also to change, adapt,
Mythistory 3
and learn new ways of doing things. Innumerable errors, corrected by experience,
eventually made us lords of creation as no other species on earth has ever been
before.
The price of this achievement is the elastic, inexact character of truth, and
especially of truths about human conduct. What a particular group of persons
understands, believes, and acts upon, even if quite absurd to outsiders, may
nonetheless cement social relations and allow the members of the group to act
together and accomplish feats otherwise impossible. Moreover, membership in
such a group and participation in its sufferings and triumphs give meaning and
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value to individual human lives. Any other sort of life is not worth living, for we
are social creatures. As such we need to share truths with one another, and not just
truths about atoms, stars, and molecules but about human relations and the people
around us.
Shared truths that provide a sanction for common effort have obvious survival
value. Without such social cement no group can long preserve itself. Yet to
outsiders, truths of this kind are likely to seem myths, save in those (relatively rare)
cases when the outsider is susceptible to conversion and finds a welcome within the
particular group in question.
The historic record available to us consists of an unending appearance and
dissolution of human groups, each united by its own beliefs, ideals, and traditions.
Sects, religions, tribes, and states, from ancient Sumer and Pharaonic Egypt to
modern times, have based their cohesion upon shared truths—truths that differed
from time to time and place to place with a rich and reckless variety. Today the
human community remains divided among an enormous number of different
groups, each espousing its own version of truth about itself and about those
excluded from its fellowship. Everything suggests that this sort of social and
ideological fragmentation will continue indefinitely.
Where, in such a maelstrom of conflicting opinions, can we hope to locate
historical truth? Where indeed?
Before modern communications thrust familiarity with the variety of human
idea-systems upon our consciousness, this question was not particularly acute.
Individuals nearly always grew up in relatively isolated communities to a more or
less homogeneous world view. Important questions had been settled long ago by
prophets and sages, so there was little reason to challenge or modify traditional
wisdom. Indeed there were strong positive restraints upon any would-be innovator
who threatened to upset the inherited consensus.
To be sure, climates of opinion fluctuated, but changes came surreptitiously,
usually disguised as commentary upon old texts and purporting merely to
explicate the original meanings. Flexibility was considerable, as the modern
practice of the U.S. Supreme Court should convince us; but in this traditional
ordering of intellect, all the same, outsiders who did not share the prevailing
orthodoxy were shunned and disregarded when they could not be converted. Our
predecessors' faith in a scientific method that would make written history
absolutely and universally true was no more than a recent example of such a belief
system. Those who embraced it felt no need to pay attention to ignoramuses who
4 William H. McNeill
had not accepted the truths of "modern science." Like other true believers, they
were therefore spared the task of taking others' viewpoints seriously or wondering
about the limits of their own vision of historical truth.
But we are denied the luxury of such parochialism. We must reckon with
multiplex, competing faiths—secular as well as transcendental, revolutionary as
well as traditional—that resound amongst us. In addition, partially autonomous
professional idea-systems have proliferated in the past century or so. Those most
important to historians are the so-called social sciences—anthropology, sociology,
political science, psychology, and economics—together with the newer disciplines
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of ecology and semeiology. But law, theology, and philosophy also pervade the
field of knowledge with which historians may be expected to deal. On top of all
this, innumerable individual authors, each with his own assortment of ideas and
assumptions, compete for attention. Choice is everywhere; dissent turns into
cacaphonous confusion; my truth dissolves into your myth even before I can put
words on paper.
The liberal faith, of course, holds that in a free marketplace of ideas, Truth will
eventually prevail. I am not ready to abandon that faith, however dismaying our
present confusion may be. The liberal experiment, after all, is only about two
hundred and fifty years old, and on the appropriate world-historical time scale that
is too soon to be sure. Still, confusion is undoubted. Whether the resulting
uncertainty will be bearable for large numbers of people in difficult times ahead
is a question worth asking. Iranian Muslims, Russian communists, and American
sectarians (religious and otherwise) all exhibit symptoms of acute distress in face
of moral uncertainties, generated by exposure to competing truths. Clearly, the
will to believe is as strong today as at any time in the past; and true believers nearly
always wish to create a community of the faithful, so as to be able to live more
comfortably, insulated from troublesome dissent.
The prevailing response to an increasingly cosmopolitan confusion has been
intensified personal attachment, first to national and then to subnational groups,
each with its own distinct ideals and practices. As one would expect, the historica(
profession faithfully reflected and helped to forward these shifts of sentiment.
Thus, the founding fathers of the American Historical Association and their
immediate successors were intent on facilitating the consolidation of a new
American nation by writing national history in a WASPish mold, while also
claiming affiliation with a tradition of Western civilization that ran back through
modern and medieval Europe to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews. This version
of our past was very widely repudiated in the 1960s, but iconoclastic revisionists
feit no need to replace what they attacked with any architectonic vision of their
own. Instead, scholarly energy concentrated on discovering the history of various
segments of the population that had been left out or ill-treated by older historians:
most notably women, blacks, and other ethnic minorities within the United States
and the ex-colonial peoples of the world beyond the national borders.
Such activity conformed to our traditional professional role of helping to define
collective identities in ambiguous situations. Consciousness of a common past, after
all, is a powerful supplement to other ways of defining who "we" are. An oral
Mythistoiy 5
tradition, sometimes almost undifferentiated from the practical wisdom embodied
in language itself, is all people need in a stable social universe where in-group
boundaries are self-evident. But with civilization, ambiguities multipled, and
formal written history became useful in defining "us" versus "them." At first, the
central ambiguity ran between rulers and ruled. Alien conquerors who lived on
taxes collected from their subjects were at best a necessary evil when looked at from
the bottom of civilized society. Yet in some situations, especially when confronting
natural disaster or external attack, a case could be made for commonality, even
between taxpayers and tax consumers. At any rate, histories began as king lists,
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royal genealogies, and boasts of divine favor—obvious ways of consolidating rulers'
morale and asserting their legitimacy their subjects.
Jewish history emphasized God's power over human affairs, narrowing the gap
between rulers and ruled by subjecting everybody to divine Providence. The
Greeks declared all free men equal, subject to no one, but bound by a common
obedience to law. The survival value of both these visions of the human condition
is fairly obvious. A people united by their fear and love of God have an
ever-present help in time of trouble, as Jewish history surely proves. Morale can
survive disaster, time and again; internal disputes and differences diminish
beneath the weight of a shared subjection to God. The Greek ideal of freedom
under law is no less practical in the sense that willing cooperation is likely to elicit
maximal collective effort, whether in war or peace.
Interplay between these two ideals runs throughout the history of Western
civilization, but this is not the place to enter into a detailed historiographical
analysis. Let me merely remark that our professional heritage from the liberal and
nationalist historiography of the nineteenth century drew mainly on the Greek,
Herodotean model, emphasizing the supreme value of political freedom within a
territorially defined state.
World War I constituted a catastrophe for that liberal and nationalist vision of
human affairs, since freedom that permitted such costly and lethal combat no
longer seemed a plausible culmination of all historic experience. Boom, bust, and
World War II did nothing to clarify the issue, and the multiplication of subnational
historiographies since the 1950s merely increased our professional confusion.
What about truth amidst all this weakening of old certainties, florescence of new
themes, and widening of sensibilites? What really and truly matters? What should
we pay attention to? What must we neglect?
All human groups like to be flattered. Historians are therefore under perpetual
temptation to conform to expectation by portraying the people they write about
as they wish to be. A mingling of truth and falsehood, blending history with
ideology, resuits. Historians are likely to select facts to show that we—whoever "we"
may be—conform to our cherished principles: that we are free with Herodotus,
or saved with Augustine, or oppressed with Marx, as the case may be. Grubby
details indicating that the group fell short of its ideals can be skated over or omitted
entirely. The result is mythical: the past as we want it to be, safely simplified into
a contest between good guys and bad guys, "us" and "them." Most national history
and most group history is of this kind, though the intensity of chiaroscuro varies
6 William H. McNeill
greatly, and sometimes an historian turns traitor to the group he studies by setting
out to unmask its pretensions. Groups struggling toward self-consciousness and
groups whose accustomed status seems threatened are likel3. to demand (and get)
vivid, simplified portraits of their admirable virtues and undeserved sufferings.
Groups accustomed to power and surer of their internal cohesion can afford to
accept more subtly modulated portraits of their successes and failures in bringing
practice into conformity with principles.
Historians respond to this sort of market by expressing varying degrees of
commitment to, and detachment from, the causes they chronicle and by infusing
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varying degrees of emotional intensity into their pages through particular choices
of words. Truth, persuasiveness, intelligibility rest far more on this level of the
historians' art than on source criticism. B ut, as I said at the beginning, one person's
truth is another's myth, and the fact that a group of people accepts a given version
of the past does not make that version any truer for outsiders.
Yet we cannot afford to reject collective self-flattery as silly, contemptible error.
Myths are, after all, often self-validating. A nation or any other human group that
knows how to behave in crisis situations because it has inherited a heroic
historiographical tradition that tells how ancestors resisted their enemies success-
fully is more likely to act together effectively than a group lacking such a tradition.
Great Britain's conduct in 1940 shows how world politics can be redirected by such
a heritage. Flattering historiography does more than assist a given group to survive
by affecting the balance of power among warring peoples, for an appropriately
idealized version of the past may also allow a group of human beings to come closer
to living up to its noblest ideals. What is can move toward what ought to be, given
collective commitment to a fiattering self-image. The American civil rights
movement of the fifties and sixties illustrates this phenomenon amongst us.
These collective manifestations are of very great importance. Belief in the virtue
and righteousness of one's cause is a necessary sort of self-delusion for human
beings, singly and collectively. A corrosive version of history that emphasizes all
the recurrent discrepancies between ideal and reality in a given group's behavior
makes it harder for members of the group in question to act cohesively and in good
conscience. That sort of history is very costly indeed. No group can afford it for
long.
On the other hand, myths may mislead disastrously. A portrait of the past that
denigrates others and praises the ideals and practice of a given group naively and
without restraint can distort a people's image of outsiders so that foreign relations
begin to consist of nothing but nasty surprises. Confidence in one's own high
principles and good intentions may simply provoke others to resist duly accredited
missionaries of the true faith, whatever that faith may be. Both the United States
and the Soviet Union have encountered their share of this sort of surprise and
disappointment ever since 1917, when Wilson and Lenin proclaimed their
respective recipes for curing the world's ills., In more extreme cases, mythical,
self-flattering versions of the past may push a people toward suicidal behavior, as
Hitler's last days may remind us.
More generally, it is obvious that mythical, self-flattering versions of rival groups'
Mythistory 7
pasts simply serve to intensify their capacity for conflict. With the recent quantum
jump in the destructive power of weaponry, hardening of group cohesion at the
sovereign state level clearly threatens the survival of humanity; while, within
national borders, the civic order experiences new strains when subnational groups
acquire a historiography replete with oppressors living next door and, perchance,
still enjoying the fruits of past injustices.
The great historians have always responded to these difficulties by expanding
their sympathies beyond narrow in-group boundaries. Herodotus set out to award
a due meed of glory both to Hellenes and to the barbarians; Ranke inquired into
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what really happened to Protestant and Catholic, Latin and German nations alike.
And other pioneers of our profession have likewise expanded the range of their
sympathies and sensibilities beyond previously recognized limits without ever
entirely escaping, or even wishing to escape, from the sort of partisanship involved
in accepting the general assumptions and beliefs of a particular time and place.
Where to fix one's loyalties is the supreme question of human life and is
especially acute in a cosmopolitan age like ours when choices abound. Belonging
to a tightly knit group makes life worth living by giving individuals something
beyond the self to serve and to rely on for personal guidance, companionship, and
aid. But the stronger such honds, the sharper the break with the rest of humanity.
Group solidarity is always maintained, at least partly, by exporting psychic frictions
across the frontiers, projecting animosities onto an outside foe in order to enhance
collective cohesion within the group itself. Indeed, something to fear, hate, and
attack is probably necessary for the full expression of human emotions; and ever
since animal predators ceased to threaten, human beings have feared, hated, and
fought one another.
Historians, by helping to define "us" and "them," play a considerable part in
focusing love and hate, the two principal cements of collective behavior known to
humanity. But myth making for rival groups has become a dangerous game in the
atomic age, and we may well ask whether there is any alternative open to us.
In principle the answer is obvious. Humanity entire possesses a commonality
which historians may hope to understand just as firmly as they can comprehend
what unites any lesser group. Instead of enhancing conflicts, as parochial
historiography inevitably does, an intelligible world history might be expected to
diminish the lethality of group encounters by cultivating a sense of individual
identification with the triumphs and tribulations of humanity as a whole. This,
indeed, strikes me as the moral duty of the historica' profession in our time. We
need to develop an ecumenical history, with plenty of room for human diversity
in all its complexity.
Yet a wise historian will not denigrate intense attachment to small groups. That
is essential to personal happiness. In all civilized societies, a tangle of overlapping
social groupings lays claim to human loyalties. Any one person may therefore be
expected to have multiple commitments and plural public identities, up to and
including membership in the human race and the wider DNA community of life
on planet Earth. What we need to do as historians and as human beings is to
recognize this complexity and balance our loyalties so that no one group will be
8 William H. McNeill
able to command total commitment. Only so can we hope to make the world safer
for all the different human groups that now exist and may come into existence.
The historical profession has, however, shied away from an ecumenical view of
the human adventure. Professional career patterns reward specialization; and in
all the well-trodden fields, where pervasive consensus on important matters has
already been achieved, research and innovation necessarily concentrate upon
minutiae. Residual faith that truth somehow resides in original documents
confirms this direction of our energies. An easy and commonly unexamined
corollary is the assumption that world history is too vague and too general to be
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true, that is, accurate to the sources. Truth, according to this view, is only attainable
on a tiny scale when the diligent historian succeeds in exhausting the relevant
documents before they exhaust the historian. But as my previous remarks have
made clear, this does not strike me as a valid view of historical method. On the
contrary, I call it naive and erroneous.
All truths are general. All truths abstract from the available assortment of data
simply by using words, which in their very nature generalize so as to bring order
to the incessantly fluctuating flow of messages in and messages out that constitutes
human consciousness. Total reproduction of experience is impossible and
undesirable. It would merely perpetuate the confusion we seek to escape.
Historiography that aspires to get closer and closer to the documents—all the
documents and nothing but the documents—is merely moving closer and closer
to incoherence, chaos, and meaninglessness. That is a dead end for sure. No society
will long support a profession that produces arcane trivia and calls it truth.
Fortunately for the profession, historians' practice has been better than their
epistemology. Instead of replicating confusion by paraphrasing the totality of
relevant and available documents, we have used our sources to discern, support,
and reinforce group identities at national, transnational, and subnational levels
and, once in a while, to attack or pick apart a group identity to which a school of
revisionists has taken a scunner.
If we can now realize that our practice already shows how truths may be
discerned at different levels of generality with equal precision simply because
different patterns emerge on different time-space scales, then, perhaps, repug-
nance for world history might diminish and a juster proportion between parochial
and ecumenical historiography might begin to emerge. It is our professional duty
to move toward ecumenicity, however real the risks may seem to timid and
unenterprising minds.
With a more rigorous and reflective epistemology, we might also attain a better
historiographical balance between Truth, truths, and myth. Eternal and universal
Truth about human behavior is an unattainable goal, however delectable as an
ideal. Truths are what historians achieve when they bend their minds as critically
and carefully as they can to the task of making their account of public affairs
credible as well as intelligible to an audience that shares enough of their particular
outlook and assumptions to accept what they say. The result might best be called
mythistory perhaps (though I do not expect the term to catch on in professional
circles), for the same words that constitute truth for some are, and always will be,
Mythzstozy 9
myth for others, who inherit or embrace different assumptions and organizing
concepts about the world.
This does not mean that there is no difference between one mythistory and
another. Some clearly are more adequate to the facts than others. Some embrace
more time and space and make sense of a wider variety of human behavior than
others. And some, undoubtedly, offer a less treacherous basis for collective action
than others. I actually believe that historians' truths, like those of scientists, evolve
across the generations, so that versions of the past acceptable today are superior
in scope, range, and accuracy to versions available in earlier times. But such
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evolution is slow, and observable only on an extended time scale, owing to the
self-validating character of myth. Effective common action can rest on quite
fantastic beliefs. Credo quia absurdum may even become a criterion for group
membership, requiring initiates to surrender their critica] faculties as a sign of full
commitment to the common cause. Many sects have prospered on this principle
and have served their members well for many generations while doing so.
But faiths, absurd or not, also face a long-run test of survival in a world where
not everyone accepts any one set of beliefs and where human beings must interact
with external objects and nonhuman forms of life, as well as with one another. Such
"foreign relations" impose limits on what any group of people can safely believe
and act on, since actions that fail to secure expected and desired results are always
costly and often disastrous. Beliefs that mislead action are likely to be amended;
too stubborn an adherente to a faith that entourages or demands hurtful behavior
is likely to lead to the disintegration and disappearance of any group that refuses
to learn from experience.
Thus one may, as an act of faith, believe that our historiographical myth making
and myth breaking is bound to cumulate across time, propagating mythistories that
fit experience beuer and allow human survival more often, sustaining in-groups
in ways that are less destructive to themselves and to their neighbors than was once
the case or is the case today. If so, ever-evolving mythistories will indeed become
truer and more adequate to public life, emphasizing the really important aspects
of human encounters and omitting irrelevant background noise more efficiently
so that men and women will know how to act more wisely than is possible for us
today.
This is not a groundless hope. Future historians are unlikely to leave out blacks
and women from any future mythistory of the United States, and we are unlikely
to exclude Asians, Africans, and Amerindians from any future mythistory of the
world. One hundred years ago this was not so. The scope and range of
historiography has widened, and that change looks as irreversible to me as the
widening of physics that occurred when Einstein's equations proved capable of
explaining phenomena that Newton's could not.
It is far less clear whether in widening the range of our sensibilities and taking
a broader range of phenomena into account we also see deeper into the reality we
seek to understand. But we may. Anyone who reads historians of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and those of our own time will notice a new awareness of
social process that we have attained. As one who shares that awareness, 1 find it
10 William H. McNeill
impossible not to believe that it represents an advance on older notions that
focused attention exclusively, or almost exclusively, on human intentions and
individual actions, subject only to God or to a no less inscrutable Fortune, while
leaving out the social and material context within which individual actions took
place simply because that context was assumed to be uniform and unchanging.
Stil!, what seems wise and true to me seems irrelevant obfuscation to others. Only
time can settle the issue, presumably by outmoding my ideas and my critics' as well.
Unalterable and eternal Truth remains like the Kingdom of Heaven, an
eschatological hope. Mythistory is what we actually have—a useful instrument for
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piloting human groups in their encounters with one another and with the natura!
environment.
To be a truth-seeking mythographer is therefore a high and serious calling, for
what a group of people knows and believes about the past channels expectations
and affects the decisions on which their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor
all depend. Formal written histories are not the only shapers of a people's notions
about the past; but they are sporadically powerful, since even the most abstract and
academic historiographical ideas do trickle down to the level of the commonplace,
if they fit both what a people want to hear and what a people need to know well
enough to be useful.
As members of society and sharers in the historica' process, historians can only
expect to be heard if they say what the people around them want to hear—in some
degree. They can only be useful if they also teil the people some things they are
reluctant to hear—in some degree. Piloting between this Scylla and Charybdis is
the art of the serious historian, helping the group he or she addresses and
celebrates to survive and prosper in a treacherous and changing world by knowing
more about itself and others.
Academic historians have pursued that art with extraordinary energy and
considerable success during the past century. May our heirs and successors
persevere and do even beuer!
