Mythistory
Mythistory is mythic history. The term originated in 1985 - the title of an address given to the American Historical Association by the historian William McNeill. I saw it as title of a brand-new book in the Auckland Public Library, the meme striking my consciousness with immediate intuitive impact, seeming to capture my entire attention in the first fraction of a second from several metres distance as I approached it, despite in being shelved anonymously with the multitude of others.
I didn't have to read the book to know what he meant, but when I did I was intrigued to find that he didn't assay a definition. Resonance of the meme in the minds of readers sufficed to make his point. In 2011 I was again curious, and looked up the term in Wikipedia to see how consequent definition had proceeded in the public mind since. You can imagine my surprise when the encyclopedia informed me that there was no such page! So my reaction was to assume that I'd have to create it. Other priorities intervened, so a couple of years later I'm finally writing the first draft.
In accord with postmodern doctrine, I should start by deconstructing the term. History is an account of the past, whereas myth is a likely story. Mythistory, then, is a story of the past likely to have currency. That is to say, it is widely shared via the cultural ambience. A history is written to inform folks of what happened, and a myth is recycled to explain the meaning of what happened. Histories began as narratives and evolved into analytical commentaries, whereas myths began as legends and evolved into cosmological world-views.
Relevance to social psychology
A deeper explanation is accessible via examination of the social psychology applying to both literary endeavours. When people share a culture and social matrix, they tend to provide a collective rationale for its existence. In the distant past or tribal contexts that lack writing, a story is generated that is sufficiently simple to be told to children. By this method the meaning of the social group is passed down the generations. The key psychology motivating this behaviour is the need to give people a meaning of life that locates individual identity in a collective context. The myth or history contains social meanings and values that are foundational, and construct the social reality of members of that society.
Just as there is a natural polarity in the psyche between the imaginal and the real, so may readers envision a natural polarity between a fact and a fict. Just as a fact is an item of reality, a fict is an item of unreality. Fiction is imaginary. Faction is real. Well, it would be if the english language was symmetrical in internal logic. But observers of politics, religion, or indeed all social groups that function as competitive arenas for egos at play tend to agree that the forming of factions is normal human behaviour. Language has both an arbitrary and an evolving nature (along with internal logic and usage rules or conventions). McNeill wrote in his preface “a friendly young critic remarked to me that I was in danger of developing a private language that would guarantee misunderstanding within the historical profession.” Since historians are adept at misunderstanding each other via the use of public language, McNeill understandably did not allow this concern to deter him from mythistory. Presumably this was because whereas a myth is imaginal (subjective) to a person, when it obtains many subscribers it seems real (objective) to a group.
Indeed, a googling of the meme these days suffices to reveal that it has colonised the minds of a variety of users who seem to feel no need to define it, proving that despite the subtlety of the concept it resonates meaningfully in the thoughts of folk in younger generations. Language invention can be helpful in elucidating meaning, as my invention of the term fict was designed to suggest (time will tell if this new meme can achieve similar currency).
“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 another'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”. That's the start of McNeill's address and essay entitled “Mythistory, or truth, myth, history, and historians”. To err is human, so any account in which the teller of the story strives to be true may result in error. Truth about the past is unattainable normally, since those alive now weren't there to verify any account of it. History purports some objective reality, and the primary features of any account will normally produce general agreement if it matches what is traditional public knowledge or belief. Myth, in contrast, is widely regarded as fictional and an idealised or contrived reconstruction of what happened long ago. Mythistory seems to achieve currency via recognition of a middle ground between these two conventional categories of storytelling about the past. The power and import of the concept lies in the synthesis it performs, alerting us to its paradigmatic significance in social psychology.
If it suits folk's common interests, a body of opinion will coalesce around a new way of seeing the past. Historical revisionism has become a popular pastime in recent decades. Myth-making likewise fulfills a general human need. The social creations that emanate from this creative endeavour are variously regarded as fantasies or reinterpretations depending on one's sympathy with, or antipathy to, the emerging alternative view of things. As complex memes they venture out into the marketplace of public opinion to win adherents by persuasion or natural resonance, constellating likemindedness. Once people begin to spot the trend, the mythistory of this or that becomes recognised as a suitable topic to discuss. A web search will readily provide you with various examples of this in academic papers and social commentary sites.
Relevance to geopolitics & identity
“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, myth for others, who inherit or embrace different assumptions and organizing concepts about the world. That does not mean that there is no difference between one mythistory and another. Some clearly are more adequate to the facts than others.. some, undoubtedly, offer a less treacherous basis for collective action than others..” [p19]
The relevance to geopolitics and peaceful coexistence of these subtleties isn't obvious, so McNeill tries to explain. “Consciousness of a common past, after all, is a powerful supplement to other ways of defining who we are. An oral 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 multiplied and formal written history became useful in defining `us' versus `them'.” [p11]
“The principal source of historical complexity lies in the fact that human beings react to both 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 behaviour, 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 behavioural motility results.” [p6]
The ruling paradigm, world-view or belief system subscribed to by anyone is contingent upon “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 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 social sanction for common effort have an obvious survival value. Without such social cement no group can long preserve itself.” [p7]
“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 un-ending 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 on shared truths – truths that differed from time to time and place to place.. 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.” [p8]
Just as subjective beliefs tend to be self-serving, collective beliefs tend to be group-serving. They advance common interests. We have evolved into a complex society with many subgroups, each of which has it's internal set of beliefs. This matrix of beliefs usually contains a group history which includes explanation of its reason for existence, and the longer such groups retain their operational autonomy the more likely this rationale is to generate a mythic dimension in its description. Thus arises the mythistory of the group. The natural storytelling motive of people creates a communal crucible for such creative embroidery of the group narrative.
“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 the group's behaviour makes it harder for members of the group in question to act cohesively and it good conscience. That sort of history is very costly. 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.” [p14]
“More generally, it is obvious that mythical, self-flattering versions of rival group's pasts simply serves 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”. [p15]
“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 bonds, 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 achieve 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 behaviour 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 historical profession in our time.” [p16]
Competitive myth-making & identity politics
“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 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, individual authors, each with his own assortment of ideas and assumptions, compete for attention. Choice is everywhere; dissent turns into cacophonous confusion; my truth dissolves into your myth.. The liberal faith, of course, holds that in a free marketplace of ideas, Truth will eventually prevail.” [p9]
“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, results. Historians are likely to select facts to show that we – whoever we may be – conform to our cherished principles.. 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'.” However “one person's truth is another's myth, and the fact that a group of people accept a given version of the past does not make that version any truer for outsiders.” [p13]
“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 loyalities. Any one person may therefore be expected to have multiple commitments and plural public identities, up to and including membership of 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 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.” [p17]
Transcendence via evolutionary holism
Nazi mythistory proved compelling as a recruitment device, and it drove Hitler to spectacular success - regardless that it is now generally considered to have been based on delusional mass psychology. Successful religions have been originated by someone who claimed to have been advised by a deity. McNeill informs us of the role of popular fantasies, collective hallucinations and historical mass delusions in the wider context of social evolution. “Effective common action can rest on quite fantastic beliefs” which may “even become a criterion for group membership, requiring initiates to surrender their critical 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.” [p20]
“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 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 adherence to a faith that encourages or demands hurtful behaviour 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 better and allow human survival more often, sustaining in-groups in ways that are less destructive to themselves and to their neighbours than was once the case.. 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.” [p20]
Hitler used a mythistory of the aryans to give profound meaning to the history of the Germans. He was influenced in his younger years by Karl Haushofer - a friend of #2 in the Nazi hierarchy, Rudolf Hess. After rising to the rank of Major General in the army of the Kaiser, this man became an influential professor of geopolitics, and is thus the likely source of the aryan mythistory. “The role of defining and strengthening in-groups by codifying a flattering version of each group's particular past is, indeed, the principal social function that historians played, and continue to play in the contemporary world as much as in antiquity.. though good historians and those who attained greatness went beyond any given in-group's universe of discourse to consider the environing society as well. Thereby they tended to modulate the naïve egoism and self-righteousness that all in-groups display (`us' vs. `them') by recognizing the shared humanity that runs beyond in-group boundaries and connects each group with other human beings.” [p48]
(Written for Wikipedia, Dennis Frank, 12 May 2013)
I didn't have to read the book to know what he meant, but when I did I was intrigued to find that he didn't assay a definition. Resonance of the meme in the minds of readers sufficed to make his point. In 2011 I was again curious, and looked up the term in Wikipedia to see how consequent definition had proceeded in the public mind since. You can imagine my surprise when the encyclopedia informed me that there was no such page! So my reaction was to assume that I'd have to create it. Other priorities intervened, so a couple of years later I'm finally writing the first draft.
In accord with postmodern doctrine, I should start by deconstructing the term. History is an account of the past, whereas myth is a likely story. Mythistory, then, is a story of the past likely to have currency. That is to say, it is widely shared via the cultural ambience. A history is written to inform folks of what happened, and a myth is recycled to explain the meaning of what happened. Histories began as narratives and evolved into analytical commentaries, whereas myths began as legends and evolved into cosmological world-views.
Relevance to social psychology
A deeper explanation is accessible via examination of the social psychology applying to both literary endeavours. When people share a culture and social matrix, they tend to provide a collective rationale for its existence. In the distant past or tribal contexts that lack writing, a story is generated that is sufficiently simple to be told to children. By this method the meaning of the social group is passed down the generations. The key psychology motivating this behaviour is the need to give people a meaning of life that locates individual identity in a collective context. The myth or history contains social meanings and values that are foundational, and construct the social reality of members of that society.
Just as there is a natural polarity in the psyche between the imaginal and the real, so may readers envision a natural polarity between a fact and a fict. Just as a fact is an item of reality, a fict is an item of unreality. Fiction is imaginary. Faction is real. Well, it would be if the english language was symmetrical in internal logic. But observers of politics, religion, or indeed all social groups that function as competitive arenas for egos at play tend to agree that the forming of factions is normal human behaviour. Language has both an arbitrary and an evolving nature (along with internal logic and usage rules or conventions). McNeill wrote in his preface “a friendly young critic remarked to me that I was in danger of developing a private language that would guarantee misunderstanding within the historical profession.” Since historians are adept at misunderstanding each other via the use of public language, McNeill understandably did not allow this concern to deter him from mythistory. Presumably this was because whereas a myth is imaginal (subjective) to a person, when it obtains many subscribers it seems real (objective) to a group.
Indeed, a googling of the meme these days suffices to reveal that it has colonised the minds of a variety of users who seem to feel no need to define it, proving that despite the subtlety of the concept it resonates meaningfully in the thoughts of folk in younger generations. Language invention can be helpful in elucidating meaning, as my invention of the term fict was designed to suggest (time will tell if this new meme can achieve similar currency).
“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 another'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”. That's the start of McNeill's address and essay entitled “Mythistory, or truth, myth, history, and historians”. To err is human, so any account in which the teller of the story strives to be true may result in error. Truth about the past is unattainable normally, since those alive now weren't there to verify any account of it. History purports some objective reality, and the primary features of any account will normally produce general agreement if it matches what is traditional public knowledge or belief. Myth, in contrast, is widely regarded as fictional and an idealised or contrived reconstruction of what happened long ago. Mythistory seems to achieve currency via recognition of a middle ground between these two conventional categories of storytelling about the past. The power and import of the concept lies in the synthesis it performs, alerting us to its paradigmatic significance in social psychology.
If it suits folk's common interests, a body of opinion will coalesce around a new way of seeing the past. Historical revisionism has become a popular pastime in recent decades. Myth-making likewise fulfills a general human need. The social creations that emanate from this creative endeavour are variously regarded as fantasies or reinterpretations depending on one's sympathy with, or antipathy to, the emerging alternative view of things. As complex memes they venture out into the marketplace of public opinion to win adherents by persuasion or natural resonance, constellating likemindedness. Once people begin to spot the trend, the mythistory of this or that becomes recognised as a suitable topic to discuss. A web search will readily provide you with various examples of this in academic papers and social commentary sites.
Relevance to geopolitics & identity
“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, myth for others, who inherit or embrace different assumptions and organizing concepts about the world. That does not mean that there is no difference between one mythistory and another. Some clearly are more adequate to the facts than others.. some, undoubtedly, offer a less treacherous basis for collective action than others..” [p19]
The relevance to geopolitics and peaceful coexistence of these subtleties isn't obvious, so McNeill tries to explain. “Consciousness of a common past, after all, is a powerful supplement to other ways of defining who we are. An oral 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 multiplied and formal written history became useful in defining `us' versus `them'.” [p11]
“The principal source of historical complexity lies in the fact that human beings react to both 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 behaviour, 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 behavioural motility results.” [p6]
The ruling paradigm, world-view or belief system subscribed to by anyone is contingent upon “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 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 social sanction for common effort have an obvious survival value. Without such social cement no group can long preserve itself.” [p7]
“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 un-ending 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 on shared truths – truths that differed from time to time and place to place.. 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.” [p8]
Just as subjective beliefs tend to be self-serving, collective beliefs tend to be group-serving. They advance common interests. We have evolved into a complex society with many subgroups, each of which has it's internal set of beliefs. This matrix of beliefs usually contains a group history which includes explanation of its reason for existence, and the longer such groups retain their operational autonomy the more likely this rationale is to generate a mythic dimension in its description. Thus arises the mythistory of the group. The natural storytelling motive of people creates a communal crucible for such creative embroidery of the group narrative.
“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 the group's behaviour makes it harder for members of the group in question to act cohesively and it good conscience. That sort of history is very costly. 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.” [p14]
“More generally, it is obvious that mythical, self-flattering versions of rival group's pasts simply serves 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”. [p15]
“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 bonds, 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 achieve 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 behaviour 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 historical profession in our time.” [p16]
Competitive myth-making & identity politics
“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 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, individual authors, each with his own assortment of ideas and assumptions, compete for attention. Choice is everywhere; dissent turns into cacophonous confusion; my truth dissolves into your myth.. The liberal faith, of course, holds that in a free marketplace of ideas, Truth will eventually prevail.” [p9]
“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, results. Historians are likely to select facts to show that we – whoever we may be – conform to our cherished principles.. 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'.” However “one person's truth is another's myth, and the fact that a group of people accept a given version of the past does not make that version any truer for outsiders.” [p13]
“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 loyalities. Any one person may therefore be expected to have multiple commitments and plural public identities, up to and including membership of 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 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.” [p17]
Transcendence via evolutionary holism
Nazi mythistory proved compelling as a recruitment device, and it drove Hitler to spectacular success - regardless that it is now generally considered to have been based on delusional mass psychology. Successful religions have been originated by someone who claimed to have been advised by a deity. McNeill informs us of the role of popular fantasies, collective hallucinations and historical mass delusions in the wider context of social evolution. “Effective common action can rest on quite fantastic beliefs” which may “even become a criterion for group membership, requiring initiates to surrender their critical 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.” [p20]
“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 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 adherence to a faith that encourages or demands hurtful behaviour 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 better and allow human survival more often, sustaining in-groups in ways that are less destructive to themselves and to their neighbours than was once the case.. 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.” [p20]
Hitler used a mythistory of the aryans to give profound meaning to the history of the Germans. He was influenced in his younger years by Karl Haushofer - a friend of #2 in the Nazi hierarchy, Rudolf Hess. After rising to the rank of Major General in the army of the Kaiser, this man became an influential professor of geopolitics, and is thus the likely source of the aryan mythistory. “The role of defining and strengthening in-groups by codifying a flattering version of each group's particular past is, indeed, the principal social function that historians played, and continue to play in the contemporary world as much as in antiquity.. though good historians and those who attained greatness went beyond any given in-group's universe of discourse to consider the environing society as well. Thereby they tended to modulate the naïve egoism and self-righteousness that all in-groups display (`us' vs. `them') by recognizing the shared humanity that runs beyond in-group boundaries and connects each group with other human beings.” [p48]
(Written for Wikipedia, Dennis Frank, 12 May 2013)
appendix: historical development of the concept
Science works best when its truth claims are evidence-based, and historians trying to make their discipline seem scientific have been tempted to take the same approach. Recognising historical `facts' becomes a typical syndrome, and sometimes it has polarised practice against myths. However judging whether an historical account is factual or mythical is often subjective and arbitrary and conducive to a professional dialectic in the culture of historians.
Joseph Mali, a Professor of History at Tel Aviv University, is the author of Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography [University of Chicago Press, 2003]. Here's his publisher's description of this text:
Ever since Herodotus declared in Histories that to preserve the memories of the great achievements of the Greeks and other nations he would count on their own stories, historians have debated whether and how they should deal with myth. Most have sided with Thucydides, who denounced myth as "unscientific" and banished it from historiography.
In Mythistory, Joseph Mali revives this oldest controversy in historiography. Contesting the conventional opposition between myth and history, Mali advocates instead for a historiography that reconciles the two and recognizes the crucial role that myth plays in the construction of personal and communal identities. The task of historiography, he argues, is to illuminate, not eliminate, these fictions by showing how they have passed into and shaped historical reality. Drawing on the works of modern theorists and artists of myth such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Joyce and Eliot, Mali redefines modern historiography and relates it to the older notion and tradition of "mythistory."
Tracing the origins and transformations of this historiographical tradition from the ancient world to the modern, Mali shows how Livy and Machiavelli sought to recover true history from uncertain myth - and how Vico and Michelet then reversed this pattern of inquiry, seeking instead to recover a deeper and truer myth from uncertain history. In the heart of Mythistory, Mali turns his attention to four thinkers who rediscovered myth in and for modern cultural history: Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Walter Benjamin. His elaboration of the different biographical and historiographical routes by which all four sought to account for the persistence and significance of myth in Western civilization opens up new perspectives for an alternative intellectual history of modernity - one that may better explain the proliferation of mythic imageries of redemption in our secular, all too secular, times.
Mali writes that the approach of Herodotus “has in our day become a major claim in the historical profession: that in order to know who the Egyptians and all other `barbarians' really were, the historian must know who they thought they were, where they came from, and where they went. And the best – perhaps the only – way to get this knowledge is to take their historical myths seriously.” [p4]
“For historical myths are now commonly perceived as `foundational narratives', as stories that purport to explain the present in terms of some momentous event that occurred in the past.... historical communities, like religions or nations, consist in the beliefs that their members have about them – more concretely, in the stories they tell about them.” “These stories tend to be about events that occurred in what Mircea Eliade calls illud tempus, the primordial mythical time that precedes historical time... This informal definition of historical myths as `foundational', that is to say as stories that retain their original narrative force and essential meaning from generation to generation, is now widely accepted by classicists and social anthropologists.” [p4/5]
Their influence on members defines communal values and trajectory: “in Malinowski's well-known terms, historical myths function as `social charters' – the narration of ultimate origins and ends of the most fundamental laws and institutions of the community secures their authority against any rational or historical attack on their validity... Historical myths might thus be simply defined as those stories that are not merely told but actually lived.” [p6]
So historians “must work on myths; that is to say they must recognize the role of myth in the constitution of national identities. It seems however that most historians still tend to dismiss myths as false histories and, as such, inauthentic sources of national identity. This is evidently true of Pierre Nora and his collaborators on Realms of Memory, who seem to accept that the `national identity' of modern France is largely made up of canonical memories and myths and yet assume that the critical task of history is to expose, so as to oppose, the fallacies of mythical memory that abound in popular traditions and locations of French history.” [p7]
Similarly, “radical historians of the old Marxist school or the new postcolonialist schools still tend to denounce myths of the nation as ideological fabrications or `inventions' of the ruling authorities.” However in developing the Aryan myth “German nationalists did not invent the historical myth of Arminius, nor did they invent the Germanic tradition that had evolved around him since antiquity. Like their predecessors in the Renaissance, they merely revived and greatly amplified the memorable descriptions of Tacitus [98AD]. The Aryan myth was not so much an invention of a new German identity as an evocation of a very old one, an identity... revealed to them by new interpretations and creations of that myth.” [p7]
“Modern historians of Germany must therefore take the historical myth of Arminius seriously because it makes sense of German history, especially since the Germans themselves have always taken it seriously. Long before the modern nationalists they cherished their Sagen as authentic lessons, or Weisungen, of their history, and precisely because they were myths – truly objective and collective creations of das Volk – rather than official histories of their nation. Throughout their history they have consistently, consciously, and explicitly defined themselves as mythmakers.” In Germania “Tacitus noted that the Germans grounded their ancestral and territorial claims “in their ancient songs [caminibus antiquis]”, which were “their only way of remembering or recording their history”. [p8]
“This `recognition of myth' defines the task of mythistory. Although the term itself is a neologism, it carries certain connotations and functions from older historiographical traditions, which may be traced back to Herodotus, Livy, and their followers in early modern historiography, the most notable of whom are Machiavelli and Vico. The first and (only attempt) to revive the notion and tradition of mythistory in modern historiography was made by Donald R. Kelley in his important essay “Mythistory in the Age of Ranke”. Kelley presents mythistory as a revisionist movement in modern historiography, opposed to the dominant Rankean school on both ideological and methodological grounds. Yet Kelley applies the term, and confines his study, to the romantic historiography of the late 18th & early 19th centuries. According to Kelley, mythistory was until then a common, albeir pejorative, term among historians in the Enlightenment. In his Dictorium Brittanicum (1730), Nathan Bailey defined mythistory as “an history mingled with false fables and tales” However, the romantic reaction to the excessive rationalism of the Enlightenment enabled historical scholars such as Herder, Schleiermacher, Creuzer, Savigny, Grimm, Bachofen, and, above all, Michelet to reassess these `false fables and tales' as historical sources and eventually as historical truths. They did not define their works as mythistory, but they practiced it.” [p8/9]
“Freud's ultimate question to Albert Einstein - “Does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology?” - indicates that the quest for a deeper and different kind of order, more poetical than political, which lies, as it were, beyond the common world of regular appearances and laws, affected not only artists and social theorists but also natural scientists... As Michael Bell writes [1997].. “As science sought to understand myth, it increasingly found itself as myth.” Hence, I define modernism as a cultural movement that consists in the `recognition of myth', and I define modern historiography in those terms as well. Recalling the famous words of Claude Levi-Strauss – that his aim was “to show not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact” - I argue that modern historians ought to be (and ought to make us) more aware of the mythical patterns of thought and action that reside in all historical events and narratives... they must revise the positivistic theories and works of Thucydides and his followers to the more hermeneutic theories and works of Herodotus and his fellow mythistorians (in all but name).” [p18]
“Francis Cornford did so, of course, long ago in his classic Thucydides Mythistoricus [1907], the work that literally reinvented the term mythistory in modern historiography... In his interpretation of Thucydides and Greek historiography, Cornford attempted to expose the various myths that lurk in Thucydides' Peloponnesian Wars. Thucydides, of course, did not know and would not have accepted that he was a `mythistorian'.” [p19]
“Cornford's attempt to regain mythistory for modern historiography failed. The term itself, not merely the historiographical tradition it designates, sank into irrelevance.” The professional dialectic swung prevalent opinion behind “positivistic historical scholarship” as the academic fashion trend: “modern historiography, in order to be really modern, must overcome the postivistic fallacy that still prevailed in the human sciences of the early decades of the 20th century”. [p20]
Mali cites “Marc Bloch, the great originator of modern scientific historiography, whose book Les Rois Thamaturges (1924) is widely regarded as one of the most important studies in historical mythology.” “Bloch's attempt to explain historical mythology by the new historical sciences of his times failed because it was more historical than really mythological, or, to put it in my terms, because it was not mythistorical.” [p21]
“Wittgenstein saw the historical fallacy in the study of mythology when he pointed out that the historical methodology of Frazer in The Golden Bough had misled Frazer to conceive of ancient rituals as primitive or prelogical phases of our fully human mentality... In his later works, Wittgenstein sought to show how all our thoughts and actions occur, and must be understood, as beliefs, customs, traditions, institutions, agreements, and similar habitual performances that we commonly practice in social life. These performances, which make up our “networks of tradition”, are, as Wittgenstein saw, “mythological” in the sense that they are artificial representations, which constitute our “world-picture”... Wittgenstein concluded that “a whole mythology is deposited in our language”. [p22]
“His remarks on the formation of Christianity might be taken as a prime example of his interpretative theory and, moreover, of mythistory as the practice of that theory: “Christianity is not based on historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe!”... Such claims for the primacy of beliefs over reasons, images over ideas, narratives over arguments and explanations, and myths over theories have in recent years become most prevalent in the so-called interpretive theories in the humanities and social sciences: for example, `revisionism' in moral philosophy, `communitarianism' in social philosophy, and historical realism in the philosophy and history of science. Common to them all is the postulation of the “narrative construction of reality”, of the fact that the explanation of human actions must always include... an attempt to recover and interpret the subjective meanings of these actions from the point of view of the agents performing them”. [p23]
“In order to explain historical events, it is thus imperative to grasp those ultimate narratives of the agents performing them, their myths... this modernistic recognition of myth might also enable contemporary historians to overcome the fashionable postmodernistic renunciation of myth along with all other `grand narratives' as a fiction that, like any other aesthetic representation without foundation in historical reality, is liable to be disciplinarian and totalitarian. For, as mythistorians, they would readily admit that the Christian theory of history, with its grand narrative of Creation to Salvation, is a myth... that has grown over many centuries out of the popular impressions and interpretations of historical reality.” [p23/4]
“The first, albeit also the last, serious attempt to revive the very notion and tradition of mythistory in modern historiography along the new hermeneutical guidelines was made by William McNeill... in 1985: Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians... The title indicates... that the principal question for the historian is not “What is Truth?”... but rather, What have groups of people known and believed about their past and found necessary to preserve as essential for their entire social existence, namely their `truths'. The task of the historians is not to explain these truths away be reducing them to some more basic and universal Truth comprised of such crude naturalistic categories such as physical causes, biological impulses, economic needs, or social functions, but rather to adopt more hermeneutical methods, which will enable them to interpret these truths as the symbolic means by which people react to “the natural world and to one another.” … McNeill concludes that since “mythistory is what we actually have”, then “to be a truth-seeking mythographer is therefore a high and serious calling, for what a people knows and believes about the past channels expectations and affects decisions on which their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour all depend”. During the last three decades, more and more historians seem to have figured out, though in their own words and ways, this new kind of historiography.” “And yet, significantly enough, none of the `new historians', not even those who otherwise display many of the characteristics of mythistory, have so far employed, let alone applied, the term in their works. McNeill seems to have been right in predicting that mythistory would probably not catch on in professional circles.” [p25/6]
“It appears that, though many historians might admit that in one way of another all history is inevitably mythological, they do not go so far as to accept the more extreme claim – which postmodernists commonly evoke – that there is no such thing as `historical truth' to be found out there and rescued from beyond the many layers of mythical fabulation.” [p26]
So to “the problem that mythistorians since Burckhardt have had with Ranke's famous dictum: What exactly actually happened? ...they would urge modern historians to consider the narratives and other symbolic interpretations of historical reality which people believe to be as real as the conditions and events in which they actually live. On their premises, modern historiography must deal not only with what actually happened (that is, in common terms, history), nor with what people merely imagine to have actually happened (myth), but rather with the process in which both affect the production and reproduction of historical meaning (mythistory).” [p27]
Mali proceeds to demonstrate the efficacy of this method by applying it to the taking of the Bastille, as an example. “The three main narrative modes by which historians have dealt with this event are the mythical, the historical, and the mythistorical. Jules Michelet's History of the French Revolution (1847) is the obvious example of the mythical option. His whole work is mythological, and quite consciously so, for he conceived the Revolution to be a new and higher revelation – the French fulfillment of the Christian messianic message of redemption – and his own role in it as its evangelist.” [p27]
He quotes Michelet: “It was an act of faith. Nobody proposed; but all believed, and all acted. Along the streets, the quays and boulevards, the crowd shouted to the crowd: `To the Bastille!'... when Thuriot and his comrades conquered the fortress (“the Monster”), they appeared, like Saint George, to have defeated the dragon.”
“Albert Soboul's French Revolution, 1789-1799 (1975) is a massive study of 613 pages; the taking of the Bastille takes up hardly half a page in it. Soboul, who for many years held the prestigious chair of Professor of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, acknowledges that this event became a “symbol of popular insurrection”, what Georges Sorel called “a political myth”. But the modern historian regards the event as a rather negligible episode... he pays no attention, let alone homage, to what the people of Paris – indeed, “the whole world” – imagined and believed it to be, a monster. His positivistic history ignores this and all other mythical images, meanings, and implications of the event. Simon Schama's Citizens (1989) is subtitled A Chronicle of the French Revolution. As Schama points out, it aims to be just that, a simple narrative of the events... What renders his work mythistorical is his concrete observation that, contrary to what Marx thought, when the French revolutionaries “performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases”, they were not just acting but were actually acting up to what they really believed in.” [p28]
These “are not feats of pathetic “self-deception” (as Marx thought) but rather of dramatic self-realization. And so, when Schama deals with the taking of the Bastille, he does not inflate its myths (as Michelet did), nor does he reduce them to realities (as Soboul did), but he considers the “myths and realities” of this monument – principally those of “buried alive” – as equally significant”... Schama, then, does not indulge solely in myth nor strictly in history but rather practices what I have called mythistory. The `crucial test' of mythistory, indeed of any form of modern historiography, is whether it offers a new explanation for what is really modern in contemporary history”. [p29]
“What is required, then, is that modern historians, who have already taken several `turns' in their profession – linguistic, narrative, interpretative – now take the `mythic turn', as Giambattista Vico, the great initiator of these turns in modern human sciences, prescribed long ago: “the first science to be learned should be mythology or the interpretation of fables, for, as we shall see, all the histories of the nations have their beginnings in fables, which were their first histories.” ...Vico's New Science [1725] is the most original and still the most seminal contribution to mythistory and... `the making of a modern historiography', where the term making should be understood in the specific Greek connotations that Vico gave it, as poeien, or poetic creation of historical societies and their historians. His attempt to decipher the mythology of history, to reveal what he called the `poetic logic' by which men have made and written their own history, should be critically important to modern historiography, as were David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus to theology, Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy to classic philology, Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to sociology, Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo to psychology, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations to philosophy, Claude Levi-Strauss's Mythologiques to anthropology, and Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism to literary theory. These are all works that recognized the myths underlying the main truths in their respective fields of knowledge and thereby made their professions truly modern.” [p31]
Mali quotes James Joyce on Vico's method: “The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.” “Joyce's words allude to Vico's basic conception of history as a recurrent process... leading away from but always back to the mythical origin, whether that is Vico's `Great Thunder' (which both Joyce and Eliot evoked) or any other occasion in the archaic history of the nation or civilization that is still memorable in their traditions. According to Vico, this is the road that all nations must traverse, and their historians out to do so too”. Mali's chapter 2, “The Vico Road” covers “the long journey from the distant beginnings of mythistory in Roman antiquity up to modernity.” He uses “the basic pattern of the Vico road: first a corso `from myth to history' and then a ricorso `from history to myth'. The first two sections concentrate on Livy and his most famous commentator Machiavelli, both of whom sought to recover true history from uncertain myth. The third and fourth reverse this direction and show how Vico and his first rediscoverer and admirer, Michelet, sought to recover a deeper and truer myth from uncertain history.” [p31/2]
“I regard Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860]as the pivotal moment in the history of mythistory and thereby of modern historiography. In chapter 3, on Burckhardt, I explain why he deserves to be considered the first – and still the greatest – mythistorian, the real maker of modern historiography.” “Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's book The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919),with its brilliant notion and execution of historiography as an evocation of images (verbeelden), is the finest example of what mythistory could be.” [p32]
According to Mali “the mythology of a people does not determine but is its fate, it destiny as decreed from the very beginning. This conviction inspired the German intellectual tradition in the 19th and early 20th centuries and is evident in the lives and works of the three scholars whom I single out as the masters of mythistory.” [p32] He appraises Aby Warburg, Ernst Kantorowicz and Walter Benjamin in chapters 4,5 & 6 respectively, considering them to have been influenced (with Huizinga) by Burckhardt's method, and the final chapter 7 examines James Joyce's Ulysses “as a story that explores the moral deliberations of the mythistorian”. [p35]
