Counterfactuals and the Historical Imagination

March 2004 · Historically Speaking2 1 COUNTERFACTUALS AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION William H. McNeill Historians can playfully ask "what if and historians can be foolish when writing imaginary history, too. But there is a serious intellectual kernel behind the game, for there are events, like tiie failure ofthe siege ofJerusalem in 701 B.C.E., that did make a quite extraordinary difference inwhat followed. And by drawing attention to such occasions and wondering out loud how different the world would be, contingent , surprising, unpredictable aspects of the human past can become obvious to most readers. This seems worthwhile to me, since oversimplified schemes for explaininghuman affairs abound and we are continuallytempted to believe everything was somehow always inevitable. Evans's arguments against counterfactual historyseemrather trivial to me. Too oftenhe sets up strawmen to demolish. Surelyno one supposes that "individuals operate on history withoutanyexternal constraints"; and I don't believe anyone thinks that "onlythe alternatives actually considered by contemporaries maybe taken into account." Which is not to say that counterfactual historians do not sometimes rewrite history in silly and misleadingways , as Evans says they do. But suitably restrained reflection on the consequences ofparticular events opens our eyes to contingency and can sharpen awareness ofthe role ofhuman agency in the historical process we would like to understand and, as historians, persistently try to describe and anatomize, knowing all the while how inadequate our words and concepts are for the job we set ourselves. The factis thathuman beings have always lived within an evolving system ofenormous complexitywhere uncertainty prevails. This is true of the entire universe from the Big Bang until the present; it is true of earth's ecosystem within which we exist; and itis true ofhuman societies of every size and shape, and of interactions across time. The whole constitutes a web of interconnectedness, interdependence, and emerging complexities whose future is as unpredictable as was each transformation ofits truly surprising past. Within thatweb, humans occupy a peculiar place on earth and perhaps even in the universe. For after our ancestors became fully human by learning to speak and then began to act together on the basis of agreed-upon meanings, theyintroduced a newlevel ofdisturbance into the world around them. Our history swiftly became a truly amazing story of how humankind enlarged its ecological niche at the expense of other life forms by divertingmore and more energyflows to suit our own particular wishes. As a result, human consciousness, plans, and concerted actions turned out to have profoundly disturbing consequences for ourselves and for earth's other life forms. We even affect climate and the chemical and physical equilibria ofair, sea, and soil. To be sure, humans seldom or never got exactly what theyhoped for. Unexpected side effects and outright disappointments prevail, only to provoke newactions, new forms ofbehavior and, over time, newways ofgettingwhat we want. Human actions consequently became the most active variable affecting biological evolution; and all this started several hundred thousandyears agowhen our ancestors learned to control fire and began to burn landscapes deliberately. Amongourselves, conscious purposes and plans weave a web ofcompetition and cooperation so complexthatno one fullycomprehends it. This is where historians mosdyconcentrate their attention, and not without reason since large-scale upshots, manifestin the actions ofstates, armies, and other powerful human groups, matter for everyone and everything around them. That is because, beingpowerful, theyare able to intrudeupon, alter, and crush opposition far and near, at home and abroad, and todayliterally around the earth as shown by recent events in Iraq. Yet such power does not assure expected results. Surprises, often unwelcome, continue to arise—not least in Iraq. Nonetheless, we historians are professionally committed to explaining what happens, thus making the human world around us more nearlyunderstandable and perhaps channelingfuture collective behavior along lines more likely to escape disaster andminimize unwelcome surprises . The task is beyond human power today and probably always will be. But not to try our very best to understand what happens around us is an abdication of a perennial human aspiration. Once itwas shamans who interrogated the spirits in hope of finding answers. Later priests and prophets invoked a multiplicity ofgods; then used sacred scriptures to decipher God's will. More recently, scientists and...