What's wrong with counter-factual history

 On Bluesky there has been a little discussion of counter-factual history, sparked by a post asking what position you could defend against 20 questioners and which in turn produced answers about which were the most decisive battles in history. That in turn inevitably lurches towards counterfactuals (which is why it’s a War Studies rather than a History question), prompting a comment by Stephen Bush: ‘[…] is why I don’t have much time for counterfactual history. Most of the time the answer to “what if X had won?” is “they couldn’t”. Here is a little riff on why I don’t think that’s right (inspired by but not directed at Mr Bush, whose writings and social media posts I enjoy and also some of the comments made in response), founded ultimately on my belief that history is ‘random, chaotic, ironic, and unpredictable’.

The obvious point is that saying that A rather than B won a war is because the other side couldn’t win is teleological. It implies that there is only possible outcome for a historical process. After the event of course this is true. Napoleon can’t now win the battle of Waterloo; that’s now the only possible outcome. But up until some point of 18 July 1815, it wasn’t. That’s true of all historical processes, and you can’t really understand them without thinking about the other outcomes that were once possible but aren’t now. I have called this keeping faith with the impossible. Things don’t have to be this way. At no point in the past did things have to be a particular way. I think that’s important for a number of reasons, above all because in my view it’s important in giving hope in dark times (like now – and I admit I am finding this hard at the moment). One of my key beliefs about history is that it has – or ought to have – some sort of emancipatory potential. But saying that, in order to get a proper understanding of what happened, you need to think about what people were trying to do, what they thought might happen, what other outcomes might have been possible, is not the same as building an argument that says ‘if X hadn’t happened, Y and Z would have done’. When the latter is expressed differently, as ‘if we assume that this thing that happened didn’t happen, then these other things that didn’t happen somehow would have happened’, the proposition’s absurdity is easier to see. No historian can hang an argument on a counter-factual in that way.[1]

The other problem with analyses which suggest that one side won a war – or came out on top in some other sort of process – because the other side couldn’t, is that the whole exercise is framed teleologically. The factors which are studied to explain that side’s success are identified precisely on the basis that we know (in a way that people at the time, the people actually involved in the historical process didn’t) that it came out on top in the end. Because the Union won the Civil War, it’s easy to look at factors such as industrialisation, population, economy and so on and conclude that the Confederacy’s defeat was inevitable. But, if the Confederacy had won the war (and it’s not outrageous to suggest that it might have done, in a number of different scenarios [2]), historical analysis would focus on quite other issues. We’d be looking not only at why the Union’s massive superiority in numbers, industrialisation had not led to what ought to have been a one-sided conflict, but also at a whole set of other factors and issues that – after the event – would be identified as crucial and structural and deep-seated, in explaining what the South’s inevitable victory. And we’d be asking ‘what if’ the Union had had a greater political will to defeat the south, what if it had made better use of its industry and manpower… The (to me anyway) obvious analogy is the Battle of Adrianople in 378, the ‘decisive battle of the Fall of the Roman Empire’.[3] Really the Romans had no business losing that battle at all (armour, logistics, organisation, training, discipline, and, for all we know, possibly even numbers all being in their favour), so all the analysis focuses on what on earth went wrong? If Valens had retained some sort of control over his army and had – as he should have done – annihilated the Goths, we would be talking about how the outcome of that battle was inevitable and how the Goths stood no chance, and how silly any ‘what if?’ scenario that posited the opposite would be. There is always too much contingency, and too many variables involved in any historical process for the historical outcome to have been the only one possible. Someone will doubtless say, ah yes but for how long would the North have accepted an independent Confederacy? But now we are well and truly into ‘what if’ territory, with no empirical fixed points and, at that point, as I will argue, anything goes. What I would say, for now, is that that brings up the whole issue of historical narrative as literary construct, and its story arcs. As I have said somewhere (possibly on here; possibly in some unpublished musing), what if Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo? Well, who knows? But what if he had lost? His nephew still ended up as Emperor of the French in 1853. What if the allies had won WWII? Forty-five years later the map of eastern Europe had ‘reverted’ to something like its outlines in 1921. Eighty years later there were actual fascists and neo-Nazis sweeping to power across the once-free world. What if the US had won the Cold War? By 2025 …

As I have argued before, every point on a historical narrative is selected as being a significant point in that story after the event. No one at the time knew where they were going, and at every one of those points another outcome, however minimally different, was possible. People were (and are) not programmed to respond to events in a particular way; they were often trying to do things that were very different from the actual outcomes of their actions – as I argued in 2007, the end of the Western Roman Empire was brought about by people were definitely not trying to bring about the end of the Western Roman Empire. And so on. All this undermines every teleological or determinist (Whiggish, Marxist, or whatever) approach to history that see things unfolding on a particular, inevitable path.

And it therefore undermines any counterfactual, or ‘what if?’ approach, at least as anything other than an amusing game – or the basis for alternative history fiction. One of the laughable things about Niall Ferguson’s ‘what if?’ book was that it aimed to undermine determinist Marxist approaches to history by showing that other outcomes were possible. But this approach is, logically, nonsensical. It’s absurd to claim that a teleological or determinist approach to history is wrong by saying that a string of different things would have happened if things at historical conjuncture X had gone another way. What you’re saying is that you can’t predict the outcome of history because, if X had gone differently, I predict (counterfactually) this would have happened instead. If you do this, you are clearly admitting that historical developments can be predicted. This is so elementary that you would really have liked to have thought that a senior academic historian with one (or indeed several) handsomely-remunerated university positions would have had a sufficient command of logic to spot this, but once again we run into my perennial intellectual disappointment with the historical discipline…

Furthermore, once one has let the ‘what if something else happened’ genie out of the bottle you can’t get it back in. Suppose Napoleon had won the battle of Waterloo… suppose he fell off his horse the next day and broke his neck. Suppose he didn’t but that all the remaining Prussian, Russian, Austrian and other armies swamped him and it was like 1814 all over again. Or suppose a (un)lucky canon ball decapitated Alexander I (who has decided to lead his army as in 1814), leaving the throne to the incompetent and horrible, but less virulently anti-French, Grand-Duke Konstantin. Or suppose that, following dramatic early victories by Napoleon, the German states that defected from him in 1813, like Bavaria, declare their neutrality, and/or, as nearly happened in 1814, Frederick-William III and Francis I lost their nerve. Suppose … Once you assume (as you must) that things can always go a different way at any point in a story you’re left with no fixed points and nothing solid to base any argument on.

This is why arguments about what would have happened if something else hadn’t, or about which were the most decisive battles of history are not serious subject-matter for historians.

Notes

[1] Not that this stops people, especially in the ‘strategy and tactics’ wing of war studies from trying. See, e.g., the argument by Paddy Griffith, Gary Sheffield and other ‘Haigiographers’ that if Britain hadn’t gone to war in 1914 a whole string of things ‘would have’ happened. Or see Peter Heather saying that the Roman Empire wouldn’t have fallen if it hadn’t been for the Barbarian Migrations. These are not arguments with any historical (or indeed logical) merit.

[2] Suppose for instance that one of Lee’s serious defeats of the Army of the Potomac had, in spite of Lincoln’s best efforts, led to a collapse of political will to continue the war.

[3] Not the decisive battle of the Fall of the Roman Empire.

What’s history got to do with it? (1)

The ‘Lessons of History’

[This post basically argues three things: that the current world crisis, rise of fascism etc cannot be attributed to insufficient awareness of the history of the mid-twentieth century; that the facts of history do not, in themselves, contain particular lessons; and that historians do not teach history as a set of lessons to be learned.]

'That doesn’t make it any less important to teach the lessons of history. But it does suggest that the usual way of imparting those lessons has stopped working, which means – and I really want to be wrong about this – they will have to be relearned the hard way.'

Thus Rafa Behr in a recent Guardian column about the current crisis facing the world. The general thrust of Behr’s argument was pretty sound, and disturbing, but its comments on history – the ‘lessons’ of history, the ‘burden’ of history, teaching the lessons of history – betray a misunderstanding of history, how it works, how it is taught. This is widespread. Type ‘lessons of history’ into the search function of Bluesky, for example, and you will find a practically endless list of clichés on the same theme: people don’t know their history; they aren’t learning the lessons of the past; they are going to repeat the mistakes of history; those who don’t know their history are condemned to repeat it; and so on. If nothing else, current events have decisively demonstrated the emptiness – the meaninglessness – of the oft-trotted-out platitudes about the value of a historical education.

The crisis we are in has nothing to do with some failure of history-teaching let alone with ignorance of the past, at least as it is conceived in the sort of statements just mentioned. It is a failure of civics, ethics, and morality. Or, if it is a failure of history teaching, it is a failure to appreciate that there is an ethics inherent in the study of history, such as I have argued repeatedly on this blog.[1]

Let’s start with ‘not knowing your past’. The events unfolding in the USA and in Europe can hardly be argued to be the result of ‘not knowing your past’, especially if the past in question, as is most often implied, or indeed stated outright, is that of the 1930s, and especially of 1930s Germany. There is literally no part of world history that is more taught, more a compulsory feature of school curricula, than the rise of the Nazis, the Holocaust, and the Second World War. The UK is obsessed with WWII. Any high street bookstore is likely to have as many volumes on the history of the period 1933-45 as on a large portion (if not all) of the rest of world history combined. From what I have seen, ‘popular history’, as manifested in general bookshops, has a similar focus in France, Italy and Germany, and I suspect this is true of most other European and North American countries. Not that this stops hand-wringing columnists in the right-wing press writing about supposed failures in history education from making a (risible) claim that there somehow isn’t enough WWII history being told (kids these days can’t name the 5 beaches of D-Day! – that sort of thing).

TV history shows the same pattern; someone once said that the typical History Channel programme was ‘Hitler’s Pole-Dancers in Colour’ (‘Hitler’s Aliens in Colour’ might have been more accurate, but still…). So do many other areas in which history is consumed, such as games. Many years ago, some wag commented that a board-wargame entitled Frederick the Great would not have sold so badly if only it had been called Panzergruppe Frederick the Great.

The most obvious ‘lesson from history’, taught so widely, with such a heavy presence in the media and in public engagement is the slaughter of European Jewry by the Nazis. People (including Jewish historians) have referred, controversially perhaps but not unfairly, to a ‘Holocaust industry’. The argument is made for the absolute uniqueness of this event, so that any attempt to place it in a broader context of the history of genocide (even the description of other events as genocides) has been claimed to be somehow verging on Holocaust denial and probably antisemitic.[2]

No. If anything has somehow ‘allowed’ the growth of the European far right, or the fascist coup in the USA, the genocide in Gaza, it is most certainly not a general public ignorance of the history of the middle decades of the twentieth century. This fact on its own blows apart most of the platitudes about ‘why history matters’. Even this level of public exposure to the history of the Nazis and the Holocaust failed to prevent the rebirth of far-right populism – indeed it can be argued to have promoted it; the followers of Nigel Farage are precisely the demographic whose identity is structured around eighty-year-old history about Spitfires, Dambusters, Monty’s 'desert rats', and the rest. All the promotion of the notion of ‘never again’ has not stopped people (including actual professional historians) from turning a blind eye to, or even justifying, the events in Gaza.

So, if knowledge of the past, or the study of history was supposed the prevent the reemergence of Nazis, why hasn’t it? Much of the issue turns on the notion of the ‘lessons of history’, and this requires us to pause briefly to define History. What follows is not controversial. ‘The Past’ is not History. History is critical reflection on the past. The simple narration of historical events is not History, and nor is the description of ‘how things were’. These I call chronicling and antiquarianism respectively. You can’t do history without chronicling and antiquarianism (and some chronicling and antiquarianism is very good, involving top-notch scholarship); you need to establish a factual basis for your analysis. But that does not mean History reduces to chronicling and antiquarianism any more than the fact that theoretical physics can’t be done without pure maths means that theoretical physics simply reduces to pure maths. History goes beyond description.

Even if one could get unmediated access to the ‘facts’ or ‘events’ of history (and we can't - the past always comes already packaged in a story and there are no 'true stories'), however, the problem is that the events of History don’t themselves teach simple lessons. Clearly, many, many people, now think that the lesson of WWII was not that the Nazis were bad. We’ve all seen comments on the line of the following: ‘My grandad didn’t fight on the beaches of Normandy so that woke people could stop people speaking their minds [= being racists or homophobes]’. I saw a relative of a friend post, on the day that the result of Brexit referendum was announced, that Brexit was great because, while young people might not understand, his father had fought the Japanese in the jungle to keep the UK free.  In Trump’s perverse USA, the lessons of WWII have somehow got warped into something quite different from the ones I thought we had learned. Clearly, for many people now – and it would be rash to assume that many of them don’t have a perfectly good knowledge of what happened, of the military history of the period 1939-45 – the ‘lesson of history’ has somehow become the triumph of free speech. The current president of the USA has said, ‘Hitler did some good things’. I remember a time, not all that long ago, when a comment like that would have killed off anyone’s mainstream political career, even on the right wings of the main conservative parties, as soon as the speaker’s mouth had closed but here we are. The problem, though, is that ‘the facts of history’ do not, in and of themselves, rule out that conclusion.

Clearly, there are some ways in which the history of the period has simply been empirically distorted,[3] the most obvious perhaps being the Right’s assertion that the Nazis (or Mussolini) were ‘socialists’. This is so incoherent and illiterate that it needn’t bother us,[4] but, even were everyone taught ‘the actual facts’ of the rise of the Nazis and of WWII, none of this would guarantee that they would oppose Far Right political extremists. This is the problem. I have long argued, including on this blog, that the real danger was not Holocaust-deniers (who are invariably cranks whose arguments are quickly dealt with) but Holocaust-approvers. [This may be the only prediction I have ever made (outside early medieval history and archaeology) that has been broadly correct, but I digress.] What I mean is people whose grasp of the empirical facts might be perfectly sound but who read them to justify (to me) abhorrent opinions. The empiricist historian cannot deal with such people (unlike Holocaust-deniers or right-wing ‘Nazis were socialists’ columnists) by reference to the facts. Were I to say that the facts show that, say, the creation of an out-group within German society was an effective way of unifying a divided people and rallying them behind a strong leader, I don’t think that that would be enormously controversial. I think that was a bad thing, obviously, but someone else might think that this was somehow a positive to be learned from in times of crisis. Someone else might see it as a useful strategy to employ in the present and study Nazi history to find the mistakes Hitler made, in order to avoid making them again. These are all, whether you like it or not, ‘lessons from history’. Not one of them has to rely upon falsifying or misreading the historical record. Clearly I find the slaughter of minorities by the Nazis disgusting; other people see it as ‘collateral damage’, necessary for the creation of a united and strong people. I always thought that the lesson of the Holocaust was that this sort of obscenity should never be allowed to happen again; not that the descendants of the victims of the Holocaust had the right to carry out genocides on the basis of being the victims of the Holocaust(5), which seems to be a very popular ‘lesson’ drawn from the history of the Nazi period. If you’re saying (as I hope you are) ‘yes, Guy, but your lesson is the right one; the other lesson is the wrong lesson to be drawn’, you have, I am afraid, no historical grounds on which to make that statement. There is no empirical basis upon which to decide. You just have either to say ‘well that’s just your opinion, man’, or use some form of academic or institutional power to close the other person down. This is why I have said before that it’s the historicists rather than the so-called ‘deconstructionists’ who are the real relativists.

Anyway, as soon as the argument takes its stance on ethics and morals (as at some point it has to), it has left the field of history (as she is usually taught [6]) and moved into moral philosophy or ethics. [Unless, of course … see the end of this series of thoughts.]

So, the past in itself does not teach single unequivocal ‘lessons’. Does ‘History’, i.e. the discipline of the study of the past taught in schools and universities? I taught history in, in league table terms, top UK university history departments for 30 years. In that time I don’t think that I or my colleagues ever said, ‘right. So here is the lesson you should learn.’ We all try to avoid Sellar and Yeatman-style ‘X was A Bad Thing; Y was A Good Thing’. I guess most of us hoped that the ethical or moral take-aways of the histories we taught would be obvious, though this was always far less clear when you teach remote history. I heard some comments (e.g. about how slavery wasn't so bad), from, as far as I could tell, perfectly decent students, that you’d never, at least in those days, have heard in a class looking at the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. I have argued many times that the horrors of the past don’t become less horrible for having taken place many centuries ago. I wonder whether part of the issue at the moment is that the events of the mid-twentieth century have indeed slipped into the (wrongly) supposedly ethically neutral hyperspace of ‘history’, where we don’t judge.

So, historians don’t teach history as though it were a question of straightforward right and wrong lessons to be taken away. This actually is A Good Thing. If History did teach single lessons, frankly, historians would all soon be out of a job. Once the ‘right lesson’ from X bit of history had been established, there’d be nothing more to do, and whoever had been working on that would have to find a new thing to do.

What Historians teach is how to study evidence critically, how to construct an argument that showed an awareness of the different historiographical viewpoints and of the nature of the evidence and the problems with it. History is an active verb – it’s about studying, reading, thinking, not just about passively learning and knowing. I will come back to talking about how it’s there, not in the ‘knowing’ of facts, that ethics and morality ought to come into history teaching. (Though I have argued this several times before, e.g. here.) University history teachers teach that there is more than one way of reading or interpreting a historical issue. We teach them different views, and how interpretations once standard have become outmoded (for whatever reason to do with research and the history of the discipline) but are perfectly capable of being refined and coming back. We teach students that arguments based upon falsified, distorted, or unreliable evidence can be discarded, but otherwis that history actually is a debate and that, as long as they don’t fall foul of the misuse of evidence rule, all interpretations are fundamentally – historically at least – valid, some better or more subtle than others, maybe, but all valid. Perhaps this does indeed open the door to the “Hitler did all the things he did, but does that mean he was all bad?” approach and all the checks and balances we thought were somehow inherent in the ‘facts’ have, like so many other checks and balances, failed us. Again, at the end of this series of thoughts, I will suggest a solution to this problem.

However, the point I'd like to end this post on is whether one actually needs ‘the lessons of history’ anyway (even if such a thing existed). I have always thought that the implications of statements about needing to know the rise of the Nazis to avoid future Extreme Right, authoritarian governments and genocides, were a faintly absurd. They seem to envisage a situation wherein someone says ‘I was planning to round up all the Jews in my country, put them into labour camps and then gas them if and when they didn’t seem to be useful any more, but then I read Richard Evans’ books on the Nazis and I realised that would have been a terrible idea. Phew!’ To avoid doing that you don’t need history, you need entry-level humanity. If you need to read history books to teach you that you shouldn’t strip people of their human rights, or do a genocide, then, frankly, you’re a sociopath. And if that’s what you think you want to do, then I suspect no amount of history – even at its most moralising – would stop you anyway.

I will have other things to say about the burden of history, relevance, and not repeating the mistakes of the past, but that’s for next time.

 

Notes

1. e.g. Here and here

2. Donatella De Cesare. Se Auschwitz è nulla. Contro il negazionismo, Il melangolo, Genova 2012.

3. Dr Waitman Beorn of Northumbria University seems commendably to devote a considerable amunt of his free time to fighting this nonsense on social media. Chapeau to him, though I suspect it's an unwinnable war.

4. This is where the argument for the uniqueness of the Shoah (as per de Cesare) comes in handy, as it denies the possibility that the toleration of any other genocide against any other people would somehow violate the ‘lesson’ of ‘never again’.

5. My man who was talking about how his Dad fought the Japanese to avert the EU, thought his father had fought in the jungles for six years, implying either that he had started earlier than the rest of the British Empire and Commonwealth, or that he was the one allied soldier who continued his fight in the jungle for years, not knowing the war was over. 

6. I use this phrase a lot (or ‘History as she is wrote’). It’s based upon the title of an unintentionally hilarious English-French phrase book of the (I think) 18^th century called English as She is Spoke. It amuses me. One of my autistic traits is to use phrases like this and assume that somehow everyone knows the reference. Anyway, now you do.