Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Thursday, April 15, 2004

 
I've always rather liked the idea of counter-factuals (i.e. what if alternative versions of history), largely because it seems to me that understanding what didn't happen is often as important as what did happen. So, I was rather struck by this critique of counter-factuals:

"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." ... It is no surprise that progressives rarely involve themselves [with what if history], 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."


Accordingly, counter-factuals are seen as a preserve of the right, creating a narrative based on the actions of great men rather than of economic and technological forces. Of course, there is always a continuum in such things; only the most doctrinaire would deny a role to human agency in the face of wider forces or vice versa. But I must admit I became more favourable to this critique after reading an article by Victor Davis Hanson (who has contributed pieces to some of the counter factual books I have), imagining what if President Carter had responded with military action against Iran in 1979, comparing the actual events to the appeasement of Hitler and opposing them to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the hands of the Reagan doctrine. Firstly, this assumes that these are the correct analogies for present circumstances; it could as easily be argued that Vietnam is a better analogy than Munich, or indeed the Boer War. For what it's worth, I think the Boer war is a good analogy, though I'd suggest that the Thuggee cult is possibly a better one.

Secondly, it should be observed that wider forces were indeed involved in all of these cases. To be specific, the economic and military capacity of Britain and France to defeat Germany at that point. Or the economic failure of the Soviet Union, leading to its inability to compete on military terms as the prime cause for perestroika and glasnost. That should also be set against the consequences of the Reagan doctrine in terms of instability and the risks had Gorbachev responded with force. In the present time, we might observe that the question of states is barely relevant (which makes appeasement a poor analogy), since much of the terrorism in question occurs quite independently of state structures and typically tends to thrive in opposition to them (as the history of the British Empire should testify as much as current events in Iraq). In short, I'm rather sceptical about Mr Hanson's thesis. But I do have a counter-factual of my own: what if the US had not applied the Reagan doctrine to Afghanistan? Julie Burchill had some ideas on that point. Perhaps the left can benefit from counter-factuals after all (even if only as wish-fulfilment).

Update: Scott Martens suggests that far from being conservative, counter-factuals are whiggish, depicting scenarios wherein progress is derailed from its correct course (in other words, a past tense version of dystopian fiction). He further notes that conservatism tends to be determinist in its own fashion also; constrained by a fixed notion of human nature rather than history. I'm a little reluctant to describe the genre in terms that are quite so essentialist (the term covers a multitude of sins and Hunt has a point about wish-fulfilment from conservative writers wondering if the British Empire could have been saved), but it is a good point. Consider Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, a novel where the South wins the civil war and thereby creates a backward and primitive future. In fairness, I should also say that the Davis Hanson essay I alluded to above is in a similar vein; it dealt with the possibility of the Athenian navy being defeated at Salamis.

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posted by Richard 7:39 pm