ALTERNATE HISTORY IN THE NEWS: I'm currently writing chapter three of my book, which chapter deals with some alternate history themes, so it was very interesting to me to see that the Guardian has been dealing with the subject recently. Both articles came to my attention from posts (here and here) on the Alternate History list. First, there's an extract from a new book of alternate history essays (Andrew Roberts [ed.], What Might Have Been [Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004]):

What if Thatcher had died at Brighton?

In his contribution to a new book of alternative histories, Simon Heffer imagines how different things might have been had the IRA bombers succeeded in killing the prime minister in Brighton in October 1984

I have considerable reservations about this essay, and my reasons get at the heart of the problem with alternate history as usually practiced. Heffer starts with a plausible premise - that Thatcher might have been killed in the Brighton bombing - and then goes on to speculate on what might have happened afterwards. As he gets farther from the point of departure from our reality, his speculations become more and more unlikely, not because of any carelessness, but rather because in the nature of things the reasonable possible outcomes multiply. There's a scientific basis for skepticism about this kind of speculation: chaos theory, which deals with "classical" (i.e., non-quantum) physical systems, shows that such systems, of which "history" is a particularly complicated example, are "sensitively dependent on initial conditions." This feature is also known as the "butterfly effect": the flapping of the wings of a butterfly on one side of the planet can generate a hurricane on the other side. So if Thatcher had been killed in 1984, the initial conditions of that moment would have received a substantial kick in a direction we could not know, because we couldn't know those initial conditions perfectly (by knowing the position of every atomic particle on earth or in the solar system and how her death rearranged them). That means the initial change would soon lead off in directions we couldn't possibly guess. Put simply: we can be sure that the world of Thatcher dying in the Brighton bombing would be quite different from our world, but we couldn't possibly know in which specific ways it would be different.

Obviously, that doesn't mean I think alternate history is a waste of time, or I wouldn't be writing this chapter. Alternate history can be salvaged and used for some interesting purposes by applying a number of methodological controls. Niall Ferguson in his book Virtual Worlds has suggested that the only alternate historical scenarios that should be explored are those actually suggested as future possibilities by contemporaries of the events (on the grounds that they at least seemed plausible to people who were there at the time). This is a useful limitation, but extrapolating even from plausible alternatives still runs up against the butterfly effect. It's more useful to concentrate on exploring factors that could have led to alternate histories, concentrating on the point of departure itself rather than on futile attempts to extrapolate from that point into an alternate future. (This is largely the approach of Geoffrey Hawthorn in his book Plausible Worlds.) Another viable approach is to construct a plausible stretch of alternate history (without implying that it is an inevitable result of the point of departure) and then compare it to the same stretch of our history to see what we can learn. This last approach is the one I'm using in my book.

Back to the Guardian. Second, there is a review essay by Tristram Hunt on Roberts's book. My comments are interspersed.

Pasting over the past

Far from being a harmless intellectual pursuit, 'what if' history is pushing a dangerous rightwing agenda

Tristram Hunt
Wednesday April 7, 2004
The Guardian

Citing as their inspiration the Gwyneth Paltrow character in the film Sliding Doors, a ragged bunch of rightwing historians have clubbed together to issue a new compendium of "what if" essays. Conrad Black, a man facing a few counter-factuals of his own, asks: what if the Japanese had not attacked Pearl Harbor? David Frum, the former Bush speech-writer, wonders: what if Al Gore had won the 2000 presidential election (I thought he did). And John Adamson indulges the dream of Cambridge dons down the centuries: what if Charles I had won the English civil war?

This paragraph sets an unfortunate tone for the whole article. The phrase "ragged bunch of rightwing historians" stands out. Yes, they're right wing, and I suppose that more than two or three of them might be considered a "bunch," but why "ragged?" What exactly is ragged about them? This borders on the personal, if you ask me. (No, I'm not serious, but the rhetoric begs to be made fun of.)

EH Carr dismissed such whimsical exercises as a red herring worthy not of scholarly pursuit but an idle "parlour game". Characteristically EP Thompson went one stage further, dismissing "counter-factual fiction" as "unhistorical shit". Both pointed to the futility of pondering multiple variables in the past and the logical problem of assuming all other conditions remained constant. But despite their warnings, the thirst for virtual history remains undimmed. And while Carr was right to dismiss them as an amusing pastime, behind the light-hearted maybes lurk more uncomfortable historical and political agendas.

I think I agree with the third sentence, but I wish he had expanded on it. It sounds like it has some promising thoughts that would engage with and criticize alternate history.

The conservatives who contribute to this literature portray themselves as battling against the dominant but floored ideologies of Marxist and Whig history. Such analyses of the past, they say, never allow for the role of accident and serendipity. Instead, the past is presented as a series of milestones in an advance towards communism or liberal democracy. It is the calling of these modern iconoclasts to reintroduce the crooked timber of humanity back into history.

Hmmm . . . I'd have to see exactly what these "conservatives" are saying and who they're interacting with before I could say whether I agree with them. It is certainly a valid point that evolutionary models of history don't work. Karl Popper has written some of the best work on this issue. See his The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies. But I wouldn't say that evolutionary models are dominant in the history I read. One does have to keep an eye out for them, because they do get slipped in by the back door at times.

The unfortunate truth is that, rather than constituting a rebel grouping, "what if" history is eerily close to the mainstream of modern scholarship. The past 20 years has witnessed a brutal collapse in what was once called social history. The rigorous, data-based study of class, inequality, work patterns and gender relations has fallen away in the face of cultural history and post-modern inquiry.

"Brutal"?

This is not my field, but I'll register some skepticism about how objective the study of class, inequality, work patterns, and gender relations has been or is likely to be. It may well draw on a large pool of data and it may examine that date rigorously by the light of its methods, but such studies are also very much driven by ideologies. Nothing wrong with that as long as the ideological orientation is laid out clearly to start with, but let's not kid ourselves that this sort of history is more objective than other kinds.

Research into structures and processes, along with a search for explanation, is overshadowed by histories of understanding and meaning. In many cases this has led to a declining emphasis on the limitations that social context - class status, economic prospects, family networks - can place on the historical role of the individual. Instead, what we are offered in the postmodern world of contingency and irony is a series of biographical discourses in which one narrative is as valid as another. One history is as good as another and with it the blurring of factual, counter-factual and fiction. All history is "what if" history.

I can't really say what's been going on in modern history. In ancient history there has been some really interesting recent work on the contingency of our historical conclusions about ancient texts and their susceptibility to multiple interpretations, not only during the course of their transmission, but even by their original authors and audiences. Derrida and Foucault feed into this approach, but reader-response criticism and intertextuality are more influential. I more or less agree that all history is "what-if history," if by that we mean that a shift in our understanding of the conditions surrounding a text or an artifact can change our understanding of that text or artifact quite a lot. I see this as making our history more objective by showing how much we don't know and forcing us to confront the real (alarmingly wide) range of possible historical readings of such data from antiquity as we have. The best example of this approach I've seen is Maxine Grossman's Reading for History in the Damascus Document, which anyone interested in using ancient texts for historical reconstruction should read.

None of this, of course, precludes research into structures and process or a search for explanations.

No doubt, new right legionaries such as Andrew Roberts and Simon Heffer would be appalled to be in the distinguished company of those postmodern bogeymen, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. And they have partly atoned for their sins with a traditional Tory emphasis on the role of great men in history. For "what if" versions of the past posit the powerful individual at the heart of their histories: it is a story of what generals, presidents and revolutionaries did or did not do. The contribution of bureaucracies, ideas or social class is nothing to the personal fickleness of Josef Stalin or the constitution of Franz Ferdinand.

"Legionaries"?

The problem with the "great man" theory is that history is so sensitive to initial conditions that lots of other things (such as butterflies' wings) can have a great influence on it. Bureaucracies, social classes, and at least some ideas are bigger entities that are harder to push out of the way. But butterflies' wings sometimes give an awfully big push. That said, "'what if' versions of the past" are not in any way required to start with a powerful individual.

But it is surely the interaction between individual choices and historical context which is what governs the events of the past. As Karl Marx put it: "People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past."

This is quite right, but needs some nuancing. The problem with Marx is that he thought historical circumstances could be quantified into laws that predicted the evolutionary course of history to a particular end. Individual choices are constantly being buffeted by choices by other individuals; by larger physical constraints such as locust plagues, the size of invading or defending armies, good and bad harvests, and hard winters; and by butterflies' wings. And if there are laws governing how the mix turns out, we don't know what they are and I have my doubts whether it's possible even in principle for us to know them.

Moreover, as Professor Richard Evans has noted, in this work there is as much a sense of "if only" as "what if". This is history as wishful thinking, providing little insight into the decision-making processes of the past, but pointing up preferable alternatives and lamenting their failure to come to pass. Hence the focus on Charles I's victory and Britain's decision to sit out the world wars. The late Alan Clark enjoyed charting the consequences of Britain making peace with Hitler in 1940 and managing to retain the empire.

I haven't read the book so I can't comment on whether there's wishful thinking in it or not. I don't see any particular wishfulness in the essay by Heffer on Thatcher, and I'm not sure why a right-wing writer would want Thatcher dead in 1984. On the contrary, he seems quite relieved that she survived. But maybe this essay is just an exception to Dr. Hunt's generalization. In any case, I really don't see what the authors' wishes have to do with the validity of their alternate history. If it's well constructed, it could be illuminating, whatever scenario it explores. If not, well, it won't be. And if you go back and reread the first paragraph of this article, you'll see that Dr. Hunt has his own wishes about how history should have gone, so I'm not sure he's in a position to criticize.

But "what if" history poses just as insidious a threat to present politics as it does to a fuller understanding of the past. It is no surprise that progressives rarely involve themselves, since implicit in it is the contention that social structures and economic conditions do not matter. Man is, we are told, a creature free of almost all historical constraints, able to make decisions on his own volition. According to Andrew Roberts, we should understand that "in human affairs anything is possible".

First, I can't fathom how Dr. Hunt could regard the publication of the book, or the idea of alternate history in general, as an insidious threat to present politics. I would hope present politics are more robust than that. Second, it sounds to me if as he's saying that his "progressives" avoid alternate history because they think that social structures and economic conditions impose deterministic constraints. Well, I suppose it's true that they do sometimes, as do various other factors (as above), including butterflies' wings. But although these conditions may limit the range of possible outcomes, they don't determine them and their limitation factor does not preclude the usefulness of alternate history as a tool. The only way they could do that is if social or economic factors determined the outcome through inexorable laws of history that we can know and can apply to predict the future. They don't, and if some people think they do, then it's they who are indulging in wishful thinking.

What this means is there is both little to learn from the potentialities of history, and there is no need to address injustices because of their marginal influence on events. And without wishing to be over-determinist, it is not hard to predict the political intention of such a reactionary and historically redundant approach to the past.

If Roberts & Co. are saying that that there are no constraints on historical outcomes, obviously they're wrong. But if they're saying that constraints that we can see in operation work only on the grossest and most general level and that usually history is unpredictable, they're right. But alternate history is about exploring the potentialities of history, so it can hardly be said that alternate historians see little to learn from them.

I don't understand the statement "there is no need to address injustices because of their marginal influence on events." Injustices need to be addressed in life because they're unjust. Injustices need to be addressed in history because, in fairness to the victims, they should be recorded, and because sometimes we can get ideas from past injustices on how to avoid future ones.

As for the last sentence, I take it he means that the political intention of alternate history is reactionary, rightwing legionary, conservative, nonprogressive, etc. I don't think at all that he has shown this to be the case. Maybe it's true for the particular book in question but it isn't true intrinsically for alternate history. And if it were, so what? It could still be evaluated on its own terms for whatever contribution it makes. It's not as though Dr. Hunt is shy about expressing his political views (and you don't have to be a determinist to figure out what they are). Does that nullify the value of his books on history? Of course not.

I think Dr. Hunt is guilty of excessive generalization in this essay. He criticizes alternate history as though it could be identified perfectly with what he finds in this book. Again, I don't know whether I would agree with his reading of the book, since I haven't seen it myself (I probably should order it), but I can say that much of what he finds fault with is not inherent in alternate history.