What if Adolf Hitler’s paintings had been acclaimed, rather than met with faint praise, and he had gone into art instead of politics? Have you ever wondered whether John F Kennedy would have such a shining reputation if he had survived his assassination and been elected to a second term? Or how the United States might have fared under Japanese occupation? Or what the world would be like if nobody had invented the airplane?
If you enjoy speculating about history in these counterfactual terms, there are many books and movies to satisfy you. The counterfactual is a friend to science-fiction writers and chatting partygoers alike. Yet ‘What if?’ is not a mode of discussion you’ll commonly hear in a university history seminar. At some point in my own graduate-school career, I became well-acculturated to the idea that counterfactualism was (as the British historian E P Thompson wrote in 1978) ‘Geschichtwissenschlopff, unhistorical shit.’
‘“What if?” is a waste of time’ went the headline to the Cambridge historian Richard Evans’ piece in The Guardian last year. Surveying the many instances of public counterfactual discourse in the anniversary commemorations of the First World War, Evans wrote: ‘This kind of fantasising is now all the rage, and threatens to overwhelm our perceptions of what really happened in the past, pushing aside our attempts to explain it in favour of a futile and misguided attempt to decide whether the decisions taken in August 1914 were right or wrong.’ It’s hard enough to do the reading and research required to understand the complexity of actual events, Evans argues. Let’s stay away from alternative universes.
But hold on a minute. In October 2015, when asked if, given the chance, he would kill the infant Hitler, the US presidential candidate Jeb Bush retorted with an enthusiastic: ‘Hell yeah, I would!’ Laughter was a first response: what a ridiculous question! And didn’t Bush sound a lot like his brash ‘Mission Accomplished’ brother George W just then? When The New York Times Magazine had asked its readers to make the same choice, only 42 per cent responded with an equally unequivocal ‘Yes’. And as The Atlantic’s thoughtful piece on the question by Matt Ford illustrated, in order to truly answer this apparently silly hypothetical, you have to define your own beliefs about the nature of progress, the inherent contingency of events, and the influence of individuals – even very charismatic ones – on the flow of historical change. These are big, important questions. If well-done counterfactuals can help us think them through, shouldn’t we allow what-ifs some space at the history table?
One reason professional historians disdain counterfactuals is that they swing so free from the evidence. The work of academic historical writing depends on the marshalling of primary and secondary sources, and the historian is judged on her interpretations of the evidence that’s available. Did she try hard enough to find the kind of evidence that would answer her questions? Does she extrapolate too much meaning from a scanty partial archive? Does she misunderstand the meaning of the evidence, in historical context? Or should she have taken another related group of sources into account? For the professional historian, these sources are not incidental to interpreting history; they are the lifeblood of doing so. In a counterfactual speculation, the usual standards for the use of evidence are upended, and the writer can find herself far afield from the record – a distance that leaves too much room for fancy and interpretation, making a supposedly historical argument sound more and more like fiction.
What is worse, counterfactual speculations spring naturally from deeply conservative assumptions about what makes history tick. Like bestselling popular histories, counterfactuals usually take as their subjects war, biography or an old-school history of technology that emphasises the importance of the inventor. (This is part of why Evans termed counterfactualism ‘a form of intellectual atavism’.) Popular counterfactuals dwell on the outcomes of military conflicts (the Civil War and the Second World War are disproportionately popular), or ponder what would have happened if a leader with the fame of Hitler had (or, in some cases, hadn’t) been assassinated. These kinds of counterfactual speculations assign an overwhelming importance to political and military leaders – a focus that seems regressive to many historians who consider historical events as the result of complicated social and cultural processes, not the choices of a small group of ‘important’ people.
The ‘wars and great men’ approach to history not only appears intellectually bankrupt to many historians, it also excludes all those whose voices from the past historians have laboured to recover in recent decades. Women – as individuals, or as a group – almost never appear, and social, cultural, and environmental history are likewise absent. Evans, for his part, thinks this is because complex cultural topics are not easy to understand through the simplifying lens of the ‘what if’. He uses that resistance as evidence against the validity of the practice itself: ‘You seldom find counterfactuals about topics such as the transition from the classical sensibility to the Romantic at the end of the 18th century, or the emergence of modern industry, or the French revolution, because they’re just too obviously complicated to be susceptible of simplistic “what-if” speculation.’
Despite all these criticisms, a few historians have recently been making persuasive arguments that counterfactualism can be good – for readers, for students, and for writers. Historical speculation, they say, can be a healthy exercise for historians looking to think hard about their own motives and methods. Counterfactuals, if done well, can force a super-meticulous look at the way historians use evidence. And counterfactuals can encourage readers to think about the contingent nature of history – an exercise that can help build empathy and diminish feelings of national, cultural, and racial exceptionalism. Was the US always destined (as its 19th-century ideologues believed) to occupy the middle swath of the North American continent, from sea to shining sea? Or is its national geography the result of a series of decisions and compromises – some of which, if reversed, could have led to a different outcome? The latter view leaves more space for analysis, more chance to examine how power worked during expansion; it’s also the realm of counterfactuals.
One of the fundamental premises of the new pro-counterfactualists is this: just as there are good and bad ways to write standard histories, so too there are good and bad ways to put together a counterfactual. The historian Gavriel Rosenfeld at Fairfield University in Connecticut is working on an edited collection of Jewish alternative histories, and maintains a blog called the Counterfactual History Review, where he aggregates and analyses examples of counterfactualism in public discourse, many of which relate to the Nazi period: Amazon’s recent adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962); the US presidential candidate Ben Carson’s argument that the Holocaust could have been prevented if Jewish people were better armed; and, yes, the ‘Killing Baby Hitler’ kerfuffle. Rosenfeld argues that a counterfactual’s point of departure from the actual timeline has to be plausible; in other words, it’s much more productive, analytically speaking, to speculate about a situation that was likely to come about, than one that is completely improbable. He also cites a ‘minimal rewrite rule’ that asks the speculator to think about only one major point of divergence, and not to assume two or more big changes in an alternative timeline.
The historian Timothy Burke at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania teaches a seminar on the topic, and wrote on his blog about a class project in which he gave groups of students counterfactual scenarios (‘Mary Wollstonecraft does not die after the birth of her daughter but in fact lives into old age’; ‘Native American societies have robust resistance to Old War diseases at the time of contact with Europeans in the 15th century’) and asked them to game out the scenario in stages. The experience shows students how to use both direct and contextual evidence from our own timeline to support counterfactual assertions. A good counterfactual scenario must be generated with attention to what’s actually known – about the setting, the time, or the people involved. The closer the counterfactual can hew to actual historical possibility, the more plausible it can be judged to be. The end result should be a counterfactual that is relatively close to the given historical record, and offers a new way to think about the period under discussion. Looked at this way, the exercise of constructing a counterfactual has real pedagogical value. In order to do it well, students must figure out what factors matter in writing history, argue for the importance of the factors they’ve chosen to discuss, and deploy the most helpful existing evidence. It’s a tall order, and pretty far from idle speculation.
If you enjoy speculating about history in these counterfactual terms, there are many books and movies to satisfy you. The counterfactual is a friend to science-fiction writers and chatting partygoers alike. Yet ‘What if?’ is not a mode of discussion you’ll commonly hear in a university history seminar. At some point in my own graduate-school career, I became well-acculturated to the idea that counterfactualism was (as the British historian E P Thompson wrote in 1978) ‘Geschichtwissenschlopff, unhistorical shit.’
‘“What if?” is a waste of time’ went the headline to the Cambridge historian Richard Evans’ piece in The Guardian last year. Surveying the many instances of public counterfactual discourse in the anniversary commemorations of the First World War, Evans wrote: ‘This kind of fantasising is now all the rage, and threatens to overwhelm our perceptions of what really happened in the past, pushing aside our attempts to explain it in favour of a futile and misguided attempt to decide whether the decisions taken in August 1914 were right or wrong.’ It’s hard enough to do the reading and research required to understand the complexity of actual events, Evans argues. Let’s stay away from alternative universes.But hold on a minute. In October 2015, when asked if, given the chance, he would kill the infant Hitler, the US presidential candidate Jeb Bush retorted with an enthusiastic: ‘Hell yeah, I would!’ Laughter was a first response: what a ridiculous question! And didn’t Bush sound a lot like his brash ‘Mission Accomplished’ brother George W just then? When The New York Times Magazine had asked its readers to make the same choice, only 42 per cent responded with an equally unequivocal ‘Yes’. And as The Atlantic’s thoughtful piece on the question by Matt Ford illustrated, in order to truly answer this apparently silly hypothetical, you have to define your own beliefs about the nature of progress, the inherent contingency of events, and the influence of individuals – even very charismatic ones – on the flow of historical change. These are big, important questions. If well-done counterfactuals can help us think them through, shouldn’t we allow what-ifs some space at the history table?
One reason professional historians disdain counterfactuals is that they swing so free from the evidence. The work of academic historical writing depends on the marshalling of primary and secondary sources, and the historian is judged on her interpretations of the evidence that’s available. Did she try hard enough to find the kind of evidence that would answer her questions? Does she extrapolate too much meaning from a scanty partial archive? Does she misunderstand the meaning of the evidence, in historical context? Or should she have taken another related group of sources into account? For the professional historian, these sources are not incidental to interpreting history; they are the lifeblood of doing so. In a counterfactual speculation, the usual standards for the use of evidence are upended, and the writer can find herself far afield from the record – a distance that leaves too much room for fancy and interpretation, making a supposedly historical argument sound more and more like fiction.
What is worse, counterfactual speculations spring naturally from deeply conservative assumptions about what makes history tick. Like bestselling popular histories, counterfactuals usually take as their subjects war, biography or an old-school history of technology that emphasises the importance of the inventor. (This is part of why Evans termed counterfactualism ‘a form of intellectual atavism’.) Popular counterfactuals dwell on the outcomes of military conflicts (the Civil War and the Second World War are disproportionately popular), or ponder what would have happened if a leader with the fame of Hitler had (or, in some cases, hadn’t) been assassinated. These kinds of counterfactual speculations assign an overwhelming importance to political and military leaders – a focus that seems regressive to many historians who consider historical events as the result of complicated social and cultural processes, not the choices of a small group of ‘important’ people.
The ‘wars and great men’ approach to history not only appears intellectually bankrupt to many historians, it also excludes all those whose voices from the past historians have laboured to recover in recent decades. Women – as individuals, or as a group – almost never appear, and social, cultural, and environmental history are likewise absent. Evans, for his part, thinks this is because complex cultural topics are not easy to understand through the simplifying lens of the ‘what if’. He uses that resistance as evidence against the validity of the practice itself: ‘You seldom find counterfactuals about topics such as the transition from the classical sensibility to the Romantic at the end of the 18th century, or the emergence of modern industry, or the French revolution, because they’re just too obviously complicated to be susceptible of simplistic “what-if” speculation.’
Despite all these criticisms, a few historians have recently been making persuasive arguments that counterfactualism can be good – for readers, for students, and for writers. Historical speculation, they say, can be a healthy exercise for historians looking to think hard about their own motives and methods. Counterfactuals, if done well, can force a super-meticulous look at the way historians use evidence. And counterfactuals can encourage readers to think about the contingent nature of history – an exercise that can help build empathy and diminish feelings of national, cultural, and racial exceptionalism. Was the US always destined (as its 19th-century ideologues believed) to occupy the middle swath of the North American continent, from sea to shining sea? Or is its national geography the result of a series of decisions and compromises – some of which, if reversed, could have led to a different outcome? The latter view leaves more space for analysis, more chance to examine how power worked during expansion; it’s also the realm of counterfactuals.
One of the fundamental premises of the new pro-counterfactualists is this: just as there are good and bad ways to write standard histories, so too there are good and bad ways to put together a counterfactual. The historian Gavriel Rosenfeld at Fairfield University in Connecticut is working on an edited collection of Jewish alternative histories, and maintains a blog called the Counterfactual History Review, where he aggregates and analyses examples of counterfactualism in public discourse, many of which relate to the Nazi period: Amazon’s recent adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962); the US presidential candidate Ben Carson’s argument that the Holocaust could have been prevented if Jewish people were better armed; and, yes, the ‘Killing Baby Hitler’ kerfuffle. Rosenfeld argues that a counterfactual’s point of departure from the actual timeline has to be plausible; in other words, it’s much more productive, analytically speaking, to speculate about a situation that was likely to come about, than one that is completely improbable. He also cites a ‘minimal rewrite rule’ that asks the speculator to think about only one major point of divergence, and not to assume two or more big changes in an alternative timeline.
The historian Timothy Burke at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania teaches a seminar on the topic, and wrote on his blog about a class project in which he gave groups of students counterfactual scenarios (‘Mary Wollstonecraft does not die after the birth of her daughter but in fact lives into old age’; ‘Native American societies have robust resistance to Old War diseases at the time of contact with Europeans in the 15th century’) and asked them to game out the scenario in stages. The experience shows students how to use both direct and contextual evidence from our own timeline to support counterfactual assertions. A good counterfactual scenario must be generated with attention to what’s actually known – about the setting, the time, or the people involved. The closer the counterfactual can hew to actual historical possibility, the more plausible it can be judged to be. The end result should be a counterfactual that is relatively close to the given historical record, and offers a new way to think about the period under discussion. Looked at this way, the exercise of constructing a counterfactual has real pedagogical value. In order to do it well, students must figure out what factors matter in writing history, argue for the importance of the factors they’ve chosen to discuss, and deploy the most helpful existing evidence. It’s a tall order, and pretty far from idle speculation.
by Rebecca Onion, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Crowds cheer Hitler's Austrian election campaign, April 1938. Photo by LIFE/Getty
