In certain precincts it’s an article of faith that the
American invasion of Iraq was a complete and total mistake.
And yet, how does anyone know what Saddam Hussein would have
done and what Iraq would look like if we had not invaded.
Then again, do we know, to a certainty, what Iraq
would look like today if, say John McCain had won the 2008 presidential
election?
Speculations of this order are not, strictly speaking,
historical research. History is what happened. These counterfactual speculations
are about what might have happened.
Some historians have made a career out of conjuring
counterfactuals. Other historians find it all to be an exercise in futility.
At the least, they point out, the number of variables make
it nearly impossible to know what would have happened, for example, if Theodore
Roosevelt had won the 1912 presidential election.
Counterfactual history is based on a philosophical premise. It
assumes that human actions direct or influence the outcome of historical events.
It militates against the notion of historical inevitability.
Recently, some wags have been saying that ISIS will implode
because of its own internal contradictions or because people cannot long stand
to be oppressed by tyrants.
If you, like them, believe in an inevitable outcome you will
advise the president against doing anything to counter the ISIS insurgency in
Syria and Iraq. Why waste resources on a situation that will eventually resolve
itself in our favor?
Then again, even if ISIS will inevitably fail, how many
people will be raped and murdered in the meantime?
Some of its defenders consider counterfactual history an
antidote to the Hegelian and Marxist view of the inevitability of history.
Hegel and Marx believed that human history was an unfolding narrative whose
main events and even conclusions were inevitable.
Theirs was a narrative driven theory of history. They saw history following a script and they believed that the script would determine the
one true outcome.
If, however, you believe that history is like a game, then the outcome
is not predetermined. Different moves by different people change the game and
change thee outcome.
Moreover, the players in the game are endowed, as I and
others have put it, with free will. For my views, see my book: The Last Psychoanalyst.
Reviewing a book on the subject by one Richard Evans, Cass Sunstein summarizes both sides of the argument:
In
Evans’s telling, many of the contemporary counterfactualists seek to respond to
Marxist historians, to suggest that impersonal forces are
overrated, and to demonstrate the
importance of human agency and free will. Indeed, Ferguson saw his collection
as a “necessary
antidote” to
historical determinism, which was his particular target. In Ferguson’s words,
the “reality of history ... is that the end is unknown at the beginning of the
journey: there are no rails leading predictably into the future, no timetables
with
destinations set out in black and white.” Ferguson seemed to suggest that once we reject determinism, and
see that decisions were contingent and might have produced counterfactuals,
we can better illuminate the past.
Of course, once we are talking about possibilities, we cannot
limit ourselves to what might have happened in the past. We are also interested
in what might happen in the future.
If you are formulating policy you do well to consider
the different possible outcomes of different policy proposals. Such work does
require some imagination, but the materials that imagination will be
configuring are facts about the game, the players and the moving parts.
Sunstein notes that such a method applies to some scientific
experiments. Even if experiments are not always very useful or very practical
when making policy, sometimes they are.
He explains:
They
might hypothesize, for example, that if people have to pay a small tax for
plastic bags at convenience stores, they will use fewer plastic bags. To test
hypotheses, social scientists usually like to conduct randomized controlled
trials, allowing them to isolate the effects of the tax. Such trials create
parallel worlds and hence alternative histories—one with the tax and one
without it. Historians cannot conduct randomized controlled trials, because
history is run only once. Yet they nonetheless develop hypotheses, and they
attempt to evaluate them by reference to the evidence.
Of course, these experiments, especially in social science,
often fail to include all the data. If people use fewer plastic shopping bags
they will likely use more burlap or hemp bags. As it happens, reusable shopping
bags breed bacteria that cause ill health and thus drive up the cost of medical
care… etc. You will have saved the earth and nature, but at the cost of more disease. Bacteria are part of nature, too.
This does not discredit the enterprise. It says that in some
circumstances, especially policy making, one needs to be skeptical about the
results of narrowly focused experiments. Most especially, in the social sciences. One should be even more skeptical of
those who want to make government policy based on test results that are
anything but absolutely true.
2 comments:
Interesting. I've reprinted it at the Ifnicity alternate history blog and will comment on it later.
Stuart Schneiderman on Counterfactuals
Social science ignores individual dignity. It extrapolates from a sample to form general conclusions. In its most extreme form is degenerative and realized as doctrines of collective and inherited sin.
Unfortunately, science generally has been corrupted. In an effort to counter traditional faith, there was an opportunistic shift to a universal frame, inductive reasoning, and social, rather than evidentiary, consensus.
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