Stepping Out of Myths and Into the Gray (Spring 1995)

[This short essay was the Preface of my 1995 PhD dissertation. Although some of the essay focuses on the particular content of the dissertation, much stands alone and touches on ideas that I still struggle with.]

During the 1970s and 1980s the literature on the colo­nial Chesapeake stood on the cutting edge of American histo­riography, the premier example in American history of the “new social history.” At the Hall of Records in Annapolis, the St. Mary’s City historians performed miracles in generat­ing quantifiable data from stingy surviving records. At the University of New Hampshire, the Rutmans set extremely high standards for both evidence and argument.

Yet by the 1990s historians would generally conclude that colonial Chesapeake historiography had failed to live up to its earlier promise. In part the rise and fall of Chesapeake historiography reflects simply another full cycle in the discipline’s perennial oscillation between “objectiv­ist” and “relativist” phases. ¹ More fundamen­tally, the his­tor­ians of the colonial Chesapeake proved unable to deliver a much-anticipated synthesis as a result of a fail­ure to address the themes of concern to more tradi­tional intellec­tual and cultural historians. Specifically, while the chal­lenge of the new social history was pushing tradi­tional intellectual historians to move from the study of formal ideas divorced from behavior, Chesapeake scholars themselves avoided tackling the problem of relating expressed ideas to observed behavior. ²

Indeed, one can fairly say that because these social historians never bothered to test rigorously their presump­tions about mind and behavior, their analysis of the first Anglo-Americans remained firmly stuck in the framework fashioned more than eighty years ago by Philip Alexander Bruce and Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, a framework of which all but a handful of historians seem blissfully ignorant. In this debate, each side has charged the other so often with propagating “myths” that we would do well to heed their charges. But the problem hardly reflects a lack of creativi­ty or objectivity among historians. Rather, at a deeper level, the historiographical stagnation reflects a general malaise in the social sciences in general, mired in turn-of-the-century debates over what has been variously called the rise of liberalism, modernization, and the transition to capitalism, and over the relative influences of environ­mental, institutional, and cultural factors.

Historians have ambiguously maintained two general views toward myths. Some have favored an “objectivist” ap­proach, treating myths as false ideas to be debunked in the pursuit of truth and pushing the discipline toward a more scientific history. Others, rejecting scientific preten­sions, have favored a “relativist” approach, treating myths simply as ideas which historians and non-historians alike seek to create and shape to help advance certain social agendas, in the process pushing the discipline toward “history as present politics.” ³

Relativists quite correctly point out that what is one person’s truth is another’s myth and that under intense cross-examination all knowledge can be reduced to myths. But they go beyond this to argue that history has no objective standards to determine “truth.” Since myths shape our “actual categories of perception,” no historian can escape them. Myths provide the framework by which we as humans make “the chaos of experience” we call life intelli­gible to ourselves. At a more pragmatic level, myths and stereotypes serve a useful function, allowing historians to write with authority on subjects beyond their expertise and to fill gaping holes in narratives for which no historian could possibly gather enough empirical evidence. Stereo­types, moreover, provide a useful tool for both historians and readers, freeing the mind from an overwhelming amount of contradictory and complex information. And myths have such a life of their own and become so infused with affective meaning that they persist oblivious to the mass of empirical evidence brought against them in historiographical battles. Thus myth-busting becomes a thankless task unless combined with the positive task of fashioning an alternative myth. ⁴

All well and good, but the discipline of history is also vested with scientific standards toward which, as John Higham notes, “the great community of historians–a communi­ty that remains unswervingly engaged in defending a boundary between histories and fictions”–strives. ⁵Relativism turns the discipline of history into “the game of debunking myths,” the fruitless activity of using myths to denounce other myths as false and vice versa ad nauseum with no hope of actually ameliorating our understanding, and inevitably making us slaves to our own myths. ⁶ A belief in the possi­bility of scientific progress in understanding undoubtedly itself reflects a bias in Western thought. But this belief also reflects a pragmatic approach to solving real problems for people who believe that, regardless of differences among people, disinterested scholars can reach some standards of comparison to judge the merits of alternative solutions with the hope of actually improving rather than aggravating the problems. Even the most nihilistic of scholars recognize some standards, knowing full well that human life would otherwise be impossible. In practice, establishing “objec­tive” standards becomes a political rather than epistemolog­ical problem. ⁷

On a more positive note, myths provide a point of takeoff for the scientific historian, “useful generali­za­tions by which data may be tested.” ⁸  The purpose of “seri­ous history,” argues C. Vann Woodward, is not to destroy or create myths, but to critique myths. ⁹ This presumes the ability to step outside of myths, at least temporarily, so that the historian can analyze them objectively. Such an ability cannot be taken for granted. The roots of many myths lie deep in Western thought, especially the dichotomous conventions forcing thought into terms of black and white instead of that vast foreboding gray which comprises reali­ty. With changing generations, myth readily turns into counter-myth only to return to the earlier myth; but above all the Janus-faced myths persist as historians maintain “the old yearning for a sharp, clear-cut antithesis.” ¹⁰ Sophisticated historians realize that debates in history, as in all the social sciences, do not reduce to black and white but re­volve around how to make sense of the gray–or, as David Hackett Fischer puts it, “how the terms of mediation are to be resolved.” ¹¹ Yet the recognition does not neces­sarily enable them or other historians to escape these ubiquitous myths.

This dissertation attempts to explore possible “terms of mediation.” I do not consider this an easy task, but I do believe it possible. The exploration will take us deeper than might be expected into historiography, classical thought, social science theory, and ideas and behavior in England as well as Virginia. But such a journey is necessary on the one hand to an understanding of the immediate subject matter (the seventeenth-century Chesapeake) and, on the other, to show how the modern debates with their varying assumptions about Virginian, Southern, English, American, and human natures have prevented historians from realizing some important truths about those natures.