5 Myths About Mythbusting

There is a logical fallacy called “Appeal to Authority,” where someone with ascribed expertise in a subject makes an assertion to be accepted as true because the authority said so. It creates a tension. You, not an expert, are put in a position of being compelled to accept the word of an “authority,” while at the same time the authority may be wrong, whether intentionally or otherwise, such that a false assertion is accepted not because it’s true or accurate, but because an expert said so.

On the other hand, people with legitimate expertise are generally far better authorities on a subject than someone who lacks any expertise.

This has morphed into a genre, combining two of the favorite rhetorical weapons of simpletons, the listicle and mythbusting.

I can claim some experience in this effort, not as a debunker of myths but as a clearinghouse for them. When I served as the editor of The Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section several years ago, I assigned and edited dozens of “5 Myths” articles in which experts tackled the most common fallacies surrounding subjects in the news. This regular exercise forced me to wrestle with the form’s basic challenges: How entrenched and widespread must a misconception be to count as an honest-to-badness myth? What is the difference between a conclusive debunking and a conflicting interpretation? And who is qualified to upend a myth or disqualified from doing so?

Now a New York Times opinion columnist, Carlos Lozada falls prey to his prejudice. It’s not that he didn’t ask the right questions when he edited WaPo’s myth listicles, but that he fails to grasp that he is no more worthy of deciding what is and isn’t real than any other non-expert, and thus a purveyor of the logical fallacy.

In the worlds of journalism and history, however, myths are viewed as pernicious creatures that obscure more than they illuminate. They must be hunted and destroyed so that the real story can assume its proper perch. Puncturing these myths is a matter of duty and an assertion of expertise. “Actually” becomes an honored adverb.

Actually, “actually” has become a joke, where its addicts conflate their use of a word with their being correct. Some myths, the like the myth of Icarus with which Lozado opens his op-ed, are allegories, not myths to be busted. And his use of the myth reveals how fundamentally clueless he is about the notion of myth at all.

In the realm of folklore and ancient traditions, myths are tales forever retold for their wisdom and underlying truths. Their impossibility is part of their appeal; few would pause to debunk the physics of Icarus’s wings before warning against flying too close to the sun.

Actually, the myth isn’t about the fact of some guy who really flew too close to the sun at all, but a metaphor for the danger of trying to rise above one’s limitations. The physics of Icarus’ wings isn’t the point, but neither is the physics of flying too close to the sun. Did he really not grasp this?

The purpose of Lozado’s column is to lend credence to a new book “debunking” myths in American history by no less “experts” than Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, both historians at New Jersey’s best known university, Princeton

These questions came up frequently as I read “Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past,” a collection published this month and edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, historians at Princeton. The book, which the editors describe as an “intervention” in long-running public discussions on American politics, economics and culture, is an authoritative and fitting contribution to the myth-busting genre — authoritative for the quality of the contributions and the scope of its enterprise, fitting because it captures in one volume the possibilities and pitfalls of the form.

Lozado is no historian. Neither am I. Nor you. So if Kruse says so, who are we to disagree? But this isn’t about generic American history, but about what are now deemed “right wing” versions of history that Kruse, et al., classify as “myths.” On the one hand, Kruse may well be an expert based upon his education and experience, but aside from the taint of accusations of plagiarism, he’s also become a deeply partisan progressive historian. It’s not just that he has a horse in this race, but he’s dedicated to winning the race at all costs.

Even Lozado can’t shake off Kruse’s flagrant bias.

The collection raises worthy arguments about the use of history in the nation’s political discourse, foremost among them that the term “revisionist history” should not be a slur. “All good historical work is at heart ‘revisionist’ in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect — and yes, to revise — our understanding of the past,” Kruse and Zelizer write. Yet, this revisionist impulse at times makes the myths framework feel somewhat forced, an excuse to cover topics of interest to the authors.

Historians disagree abut the facts and the takeaway from those facts. To call assertions with which you disagree “myths” is a strong statement. Maybe it is a myth, as in something that never happened and is, in actuality, a full-throated lie that has be repeated over and over until  the truth is subsumed by the “myth.” Maybe it’s not a “myth” at all, but an interpretation with which you disagree. Maybe it can be empirically debunked by physical testing. Maybe it can be partially debunked, but demonstrating that the basis upon which an assertion relies is unsound or unwarranted, but without being able demonstrate falsity, just lack of accuracy.

The rhetorical trick of calling something a myth is itself an ad hominem, framing the effort as correcting something inherently untrue. Kruse may well be sufficiently expert to get a gig teaching history in New Jersey, but his expertise can just as easily be used to create myths as to debunk them. Actually.