>Virtual
History. Alternatives and Counterfactuals
>edited
by Niall Ferguson; Basic, 560 pp., $30
>What
If? The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been
edited
by Robert Cowley; Putnam, 395 pp., $27.95
Many
years ago, my father-in-law bumped into an old Korean War buddy in a Hong Kong
street. The friend, now a general, offered to fly him back to North America on
a military plane. Wanting to buy more souvenirs, my father-in-law declined. So
they exchanged addresses and promised to get in touch when they returned home.
That evening, the general’s plane vanished over the Pacific.
Who
doesn’t have a story like this? Who has never wondered about how our lives and
the lives of those we love would have been altered had we made another choice
than the one we did? Footfalls echo in the memory,
> as T. S. Eliot wrote in "Burnt Norton," Down
the passage which we did not take, / Towards the door we never opened.
>
But
though it’s natural to speculate about the paths we personally did not choose,
historians have warned for decades that it is futile and misleading to engage
in such speculation about humanity as a whole. "Cleopatra’s nose: Had it
been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed," Blaise
Pascal mused — and ever since, the idea that something as contingent as one
woman’s beauty might be responsible for the rise and fall of kingdoms has been
damned by the historical profession as the "fallacy of Cleopatra’s
nose."
Historians
have objected to Pascal’s proposition for two opposite reasons: some because
they believe that the shortening of Cleopatra’s nose would have changed too
little to make a difference; others because they believe that it would have
changed too much for the human mind to reckon with.
Those
who disparage the effect of the nose-change think that historical developments
are vast, virtually irresistible tides, channeled within bounds that no
individual can alter. Suppose Cleopatra had been less seductive, and that as a
result Mark Antony rather than Octavian had emerged the dictator of Rome. How
could that make a difference? To succeed, Antony would have had to govern more
or less as Octavian did; had he failed to do so, his regime would have swiftly
collapsed, as the three military dictatorships before Octavian’s collapsed. In
other words, had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the names on the busts in the
Capitoline museum might well have been altered. But the face of the world? Hardly
a jot. According to this deterministic objection, historical counterfactuals
are useless because they fail to take account of how little difference any
single human being can make.
The
other theory, by contrast, complains that Cleopatra’s nose counterfactuals are
useless because they fail to reckon with how much
normal'> difference a single human being can make. Ray Bradbury has a famous
science-fiction story in which a character travels back in time to the age of
the dinosaurs, accidentally steps on a single butterfly, and returns to the
present — only to discover the world entirely changed. It’s ridiculous, goes
this theory, to ask how Mark Antony’s empire would have differed from
Octavian’s. Alter one fact of history and all of history is put up for grabs,
in such a radical way that we here in North America could easily be pondering
in Chinese what-if scenarios about our Han dynasty ancestors.
The
Italian historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce delivered an especially
eloquent expression of this point of view, which is disapprovingly quoted in
Niall Ferguson’s introduction to Virtual History: Alternatives and
Counterfactuals, a recent collection of
essays on the topic. The Cleopatra’s nose problem, Croce complained,
"arbitrarily divides the course of history into necessary facts and
accidental facts." A supposedly accidental fact is then
mentally
eliminated in order to espy how the first would have developed along its own
lines if it had not been disturbed by the second. This is a game which all of
us in moments of distraction or idleness indulge in, when we muse on the way
our life might have turned out if we had not met a certain person, . . .
cheerfully treating ourselves, in these meditations, as though we were the
necessary and stable element, it simply not occurring to us . . . to provide
for the transformation of this self of ours which is, at the moment of
thinking, what it is, with all its experiences and regrets and fancies, just
because we did meet that person.
And
yet despite all these wise admonitions, people continue to engage in just the
sort of speculation Croce and others condemn. They use it as a teaching device,
to jolt people out of the complacent assumption that events had to happen as
they did: The British historian Conrad Russell has a marvelous essay about how,
if the wind had not abruptly shifted in 1688, the Glorious Revolution would
have failed and a Catholic king would have been preserved on the English
throne. At still other times it serves a moral purpose, prodding us to appreciate
the importance of individuals in history: What if the car that struck Winston
Churchill when he looked the wrong way before crossing Fifth Avenue in 1931 had
killed him? Alexis de Tocqueville warned that because men in democratic
societies feel themselves to be small and weak, they are dangerously tempted by
explanations of historical events that stress inevitability. Alternative
history at its best can encourage us to appreciate the daunting contingency of
history — and the supreme importance for good or ill of individual moral
choice.
This
point is effectively made by the best of the essays anthologized in Ferguson’s
book, Mark Almond’s "1989 Without Gorbachev." With bitter irony,
Almond argues that we do indeed owe the end of the Cold War to Mikhail
Gorbachev. "After generations of dullard apparatchiks had safely guided
the Soviet Union to super-power status, it was the bright-eyed Gorbachev who
grabbed the steering wheel and headed straight for the rocks." Repression
could still have worked in the mid-1980s, and would have found no lack of
apologists in the West.
Gorbachev’s
perestroika, by contrast, wrecked the stagnating Soviet economy while his
glasnost discredited his regime. "Gorbachev’s belief that a relaxation in
international tensions was in the Soviet Union’s interest was profoundly
misplaced. Only the ‘two camps’ division of the world provided the kind of
global scenario in which such a strange animal as the Soviet economy could
function." Had Gorbachev only held on a little longer, he would have
discovered that ideological help was on its way.
The
long march through the institutions of post-1960s pacifism and fellow traveling
combined with nuclear panic was just about to reach its goal. It was only the
surprising and total collapse of Communism . . . which brought much of the
Western intelligentsia to admit that the Right had been correct. . . . Had the
Wall stayed up, much of the Western elite would have remained oblivious to
Communism’s failings, moral as much as material, for at least another
generation.
But
alternative history is seldom at its best. More often it turns into
heavy-handed academic drollery — like the 1932 collection If It Had
Happened Otherwise, in which (among other
heavy-handed drolleries) Benjamin Disraeli becomes grand vizier to a
rejuvenated Muslim kingdom in Spain. Or else into ponderously detailed
constructions of imaginary societies — science-fiction without the robots and
deathrays — as in Robert Sobel’s For Want of a Nail,
> a prolonged counter-history of a world in which
American independence was snuffed out at the battle of Saratoga in 1777.
And
of course, sometimes it back-fires altogether. Reading through many
counterfactual histories, one tends to find reinforced one’s Tocquevillian
feelings of inevitability. In Robert Cowley’s What If? The World’s Foremost
Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been,
normal'> another recent anthology of hypothetical history, Alistair Horne
considers how history might have been altered had Napoleon halted his career of
conquest after the Peace of Tilsit in 1807. But to suppose that Napoleon could
have somehow quit the roulette table while he still held all his winnings is to
endow him with a personality entirely different from the one he actually had –
and such an unnapoleonic Napoleon would never have adventured the first
profitable spin. And even if Napoleon could have gotten a grip on his egotism
and refrained from starting further wars himself, his empire was so ruthless,
exploitative, and menacing that sooner or later the Russians, Austrians, and
British would have resumed the war against him.
As
for the old chestnut about Napoleon winning at Waterloo, not even Horne can
bring himself to believe it. "There were vast fresh forces of Russians,
Austrians, and Germans already moving toward France. A second battle, or
perhaps several battles, would probably have followed." And behind these
battles would have been the strangulating power of the Royal Navy and the
superior financial resources of a Britain already embarked upon its industrial
revolution.
It
could be said that alternative history performs as great a service when it
shows that a result was inescapable as when it shows that things might have
turned out otherwise. One of the most sensible essays gathered in these
anthologies is Theodore F. Cook’s in What If?,
normal'> which convincingly argues that the likeliest result of a Japanese
victory at the battle of Midway would have been not an Axis victory, but a
prolongation of the war and the devastation of the Japanese Home Islands by
atomic bombs. Another is Alvin Jackson’s in Virtual History,
> which concludes that Anglo-Irish relations would
have followed the same tragic course in the twentieth century whether or not
the British Liberals had been able to push through the plan for Home Rule for
Ireland. "Ireland under Home Rule might well have proved to be not so much
Britain’s settled, democratic partner as her Yugoslavia."
But
what is no service to anyone is the kind of wish-fantasy that predominates in
both books. Eminent historian that he is, Stephen Sears is kidding himself to
imagine in What If? that a Union victory
at First Bull Run would have knocked the Confederacy out of the war before it
began. In Virtual History, Niall
Ferguson repeats the assertion (made in greater scope in his 1999 book The
Pity of War) that British neutrality in
1914 would have brought us something very like the European Union eight decades
ahead of schedule while preserving England as a great power — a hypothesis
that more closely resembles the daydreams of Civil War re-enactors than the
realities of the early twentieth century.
As
they so often do, in fact, these fantasies reveal more about the fantasizer
than they do about the thing fantasized about. Ross Hassig contends in What
If? that an independent Native American
state could have survived in Mexico had Hernando Cortez been captured and
sacrificed by the Aztecs (as he very nearly was) in the climactic battle for
Tenochtitlan in 1521 — a contention that tells us more about the historical
profession’s born-again enthusiasm for Indian culture than about the real-life
prospects for a stone-tool kingdom whose people lacked immunity to European
diseases. Alternative history is the last redoubt of the historical
traditionalist — the sort of historian who still cares about high politics,
wars, and battles — but dreamy multiculturalists are forcing their way into
even this cloistered subgenre. Makes you shudder to think what the rest of the
profession must be like.
David Frum
November 30th, 2000 at 12:00 am
Comments Off
stay connected