Essays & Stories
Writing History
by Rex Weyler
On April 16, 1968, communications theorist Marshall McLuhan composed a letter from his study in Bronxville, New York, to the new leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, Pierre Trudeau. He wrote from the height of renown, occupying the Albert Schweitzer Chair for Humanities at Fordham University after The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media had redefined the power of media. Trudeau remained four days shy of becoming the Prime Minister of Canada.
McLuhan wrote about the specialization and mechanization of print cultures and the emerging simultaneity and coexistence of electronic culture. He claimed Canada’s status as a “backwater” presented an historical advantage, allowing the flexibility to embrace a rapidly shifting worldview. Conversely, he pointed out, “The men of the press,” and they were typically men in those days, “can work only with people who have fixed points of view.”
Culturally bound errors haunt written history, biases by authors, repeated by later scholars, and taught to wide-eyed students. Shaking loose from status quo points of view – one’s own and those of other observers – remains the challenge to writing good history. “A fish,” says Einstein, “is the last one to discover water.” We must leave the pond to write about it, but to achieve that we must evolve legs and lose the gills.
“Our world,” wrote McLuhan, the media scholar, to the young politician in 1968, “substitutes mosaics for points of view and probes for targets.”
No logic
“No one lies like an eye witness,” Russian folk wisdom tells us. The closer one stands to the swirl of events, the more that witness is influenced by self-serving or group-serving mythologies. As with quantum physics, we disturb the world we’re attempting to witness, it disturbs us, and objectivity merges with subjectivity. We live in a world of spin imposed by political hacks, advertising directors, marketing wizards, personal preferences, and cultural habit. Journalists, who allegedly write the first draft of history, can turn meek in the face of the newsroom paradigm or a publisher’s business plan. Society tends to leave it to artists and criminals to rock the boat and bust the myopic culture.
To write history is to observe fleeting, complex, and often contradictory causes and effects. History offers no grand logic, but rather small, competing logics, which fall apart and go extinct like species. Entropy never sleeps, imperialism makes an empire poor, the rigid crack, happenstance upsets grand plans, and a feisty peasant can unseat a king. History is not nearly as tidy as our college syllabus would have us believe. In politics, we treat conservatives and liberals as mutually exclusive, but we know these points of view compete in each person in each moment, as Gregory Bateson pointed out that nature is simultaneously conservative and creative, and for good reason.
Most historians – those who write school textbooks, for example – have a culture to endorse. Thus in the west, students grow up believing natural philosophy started in Greece, Columbus discovered America, and that slavery was abolished in the 19th century. Lao Tsu and Leif Erikson remain annoying sidebars. Western students don’t learn that invading Europeans butchered some 50-million indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere. In our newspapers, we read about some spoiled heiress’ new perfume fragrance, but we don’t read that 24,000 people starve each day from malnutrition. Historians impose logic on history as often as they actually discover it. Dark Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment. Dickens got much closer to the truth with “the age of wisdom… age of foolishness.”
Cyrus in cyberspace
Humanity’s first information explosion, language itself, allowed ideas to propagate through stories. Oral history edits itself through evolution, as generational renderings polish off short-term prejudices and preserve some diamond core of taboo truth: wicked parents, evil kings, poisoned apples, envy, pride, and power. The oral rendering of history remains more balanced, feminine, ironic, and contradictory, simultaneously tragic and hopeful, conservative and creative. We may not know if Rama actually walked the earth and made common cause with the monkey king, but we cannot doubt the tragedy of pride and the heartbreak of choosing reputation over love. “The history is confused,” wrote poet Antonio Machado, “but the pain is clear.”
Since the dawn of the written record, we notice that clever kings manipulated language for power and spun the story for their own advantage. The first wave of paradigm-busters – Buddha, Pythagoras, Lao Tsu, Jesus – appeared in an oral world, but their ideas propagated in a written world, the second information explosion. They may only seem as a first wave to us because they appear early in the written record. Writing, thus fixing the story in time, changes everything. No entropic fairy steals in at night to cajole away cultural bias. Story edits grow more brutal, as history shows, in purges and pogroms.
Some 2500 years ago, after King Cyrus defeated Babylon and claimed Persian hegemony over the Middle East, he adopted local religions and sent legions of scribes and priests to rewrite the texts, obliterate unfavorable stories, mock gods, and erase goddesses. Eight hundred years later, in the forth century CE, Roman emperor Constantine, in league with Roman church patriarchs, launched a new rewrite, torched the library of Alexandria, and neatly separated the heads of those who defied the orthodox story. The Jewish and Christian Bibles are the histories of Cyrus and Constantine, not the histories of Abraham and the humble teacher from Galilee.
A millennium later, movable type broke the monopoly of scribes, and launched a third information explosion. Again, the official story faced an onslaught, this time in print. Luther nailed his theses on the door of the Pope’s Holy Roman Church, Copernicus slipped subversive notes to trusted colleagues, revolutions thundered, kings fell, and empires withered as the old story broke containment. By the time the new power elite learned how to control the presses, electronic radio and television had scrambled the story again. The computer chip has already crashed the culture only fifty years later, and the FBI has already learned how to post phony web sites pretending to be the voice of the people, King Cyrus in cyberspace.
In our world of spin, those with the power to control the story will always do so for their own benefit. The trial for the writer of history is to escape the spin and touch the heart of the matter. The best writing of history embodies contradiction, catastrophes, fears and desires, the miracle and terror of survival scrambled together and tumbling down through time, each event serving as both effect and cause. And this endless, complex, roll of events is history. Our chapter headings and “ages” are not history.
The window pane
Rosemary Reuther’s Goddesses and the Divine Feminine is a stunning history of western religion precisely because she avoids modern clichés and refrains from replacing the old invented history with a new invented history. Likewise, In Paris 1919, Margaret MacMillan shatters illusions about the U.S. and Britain without imposing new illusions. Rather, she allows contradiction to speak for itself. Michael Herr captures the visceral experience of the Vietnam War in his 1968 Dispatches by exposing chaos. The off-hand diaries of William Shirer and Anne Frank reveal the horror of war better than any account of troop movements. In all these cases, history is allowed to be itself, not to goose-step to the thesis of its author.
Diaries and letters often provide real history, because the writer relaxes out of the cultural paradigm and observes. A recent column by Ann Quindlen in Newsweek magazine included no comment other than excerpts from letters between soldiers in Iraq and their families, laying bare the impact of war, not just on these families, but on all families, through all time. Quindlen’s column showed that good journalism, history’s first draft, is not about writing at all, but about observing.
History can turn on happenstance more often than logic. The birth-control pill changed global culture more than any president or prime minister. So did soap, fire, or the asteroid that snuffed out the dinosaurs 65-million years ago and gave mammals a shot. As Stephen Jay Gould says, evolution may be the survival of the luckiest, not the fittest.
“Good writing,” according to George Orwell, “is like a window pane.” The good historical writer scrubs the window clean from the grunge of society’s fixed ideas.
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From The Pacific Rim Review of Books
December, 2005