Chaotic Game With History
Virtual History: Alternatives and Counter Factuals
History as vengeance is not new. Nor is history as bunk (thus Henry Ford), nor indeed history as luxury (thus Margaret Thatcher, on being presented to the subjects undergraduates at Oxford). But history as chaos is rather novel. Niall Fergusons enterprise of gathering nine essays of counterfactual history may bear overtones of the vengeful, the pointless and the idly speculative: his central assertion of a chaotic past is, however, to be taken seriously.
What is an event? As G M Trevelyan defined it in 1914, nothing but a set of circumstances, none of which will ever recur. Trevelyan himself liked to play the game of virtual history the last essay of his book Clio, A Muse imagines the consequences of a Napoleonic victory at Waterloo. For Trevelyan, the denial of any positivist science of cause and effect in human affairs was a licence to wax imaginative in the narration of history.
So what happens when experts in the physical sciences deny regular sequences of causation, and infest our universe with chaotic vectors? Then the outlook seems doubly bleak for professional historians. Not only are they reduced to the rhapsodic role of stitching together literary entertainments, but the beautiful patterns of behaviour they create are devoid of moral design. There are no lessons to be learned, no messages on board. Simply nice, yet irredeemably random, concatenations.
Cynical connoisseurs of history on a global scale will appreciate that a fantasy such as Trevelyans sketch of Bonaparte victorious already enjoys a real existence. The monument one is shown at Waterloo today implies no military setback for France. Ask a Frenchman what happened at Trafalgar and his account shares nothing with the British vision of Britannia triumphant. Just as Protestant and Catholic respect separate textbooks in Ulster, so Fergusons alternative histories are actual and ubiquitous.
At its worst, this absence of the definitive record amounts to pernicious revisionism such as David Irvings life-long attempt to persuade us that Hitler never so much as stole a bicycle, let alone organised the murder of six million Jews. At its best, the exploitation of the past conditional is an engaging search for self-knowledge within a generation, conducted Socratically. For we see in the past not only what we want to see, but also what we think we ought to see. Such reflexive historical enquiry is, therefore, a form of intellectual improvement.
The posers addressed by Ferguson and his colleagues are declared to be genuine. Britain could have held more tenaciously to America in the 1760s; Home Rule could have been pressed for the Irish in 1912, and so on. And it is a rule of playing this game that the plausible scenarios envisaged in retrospect were plausible once upon a time hence it is the duty of the full-time historians here to call upon archives and demonstrate a set of former options.
So John Adamson quotes, for example, plenty of 17th-century sources indicating that King Charles I could have taken routes that would have avoided Cromwells revolution. Exploring what did not happen, the virtual historians argue, serves to illuminate the way in which things actually turned out. And one can see how pedagogically this must be useful. Students are thus challenged to be sceptical about anything claiming the status of received wisdom.
Rhetorically, too, scattering counterfactuals ought to be an effective exercise. It encourages debate, and its protagonists can shamelessly indulge their own prejudices.
Ferguson, practiced in the art of writing demagogic columns, naturally allows himself the fantasy of The Kaisers European Union tracing what might have happened had Britain refrained from war in 1914.
But somehow neither this nor any other of these fantasies quite comes off as a piece of persuasion. Just as Trevelyan eschewed any alignment between history and the natural sciences in his day, so historians should leave science to its own devices. Dabbling in chaos theory patently undermines literary effort.
The counterfactual essays here are all hoist by their editors petard that is, his basic denial of deterministic inference. I have not counted the number of times that Ferguson, in his own contributions to this assemblage, uses the tags of course, or to be sure. They are frequent enough. But according to the intentions of virtual history (or chaostory, to use Fergusons unhappy hybrid), they should not be used at all. For nothing happens as a matter of course, or surely. In the state of chaos, it just happens.