OHC
deep green blue collar rainbow
- Location
- Little Beirut
- Pronouns
- they/she
Apparently UnHerd is starting a counterfactual series. I am not expecting anything great from them, but their introductory article implicitly brings up an element of AH I've considered a few times. The author claims that counterfactuals are disdained by serious historians because they are "prone to deterministic explanations" and don't account for the role of decisive individual action. Good AH supposedly needs a dose of the Great Man Theory to work.
Personally, I think the author's theories about history are just as "ideologically trammeled" as the historians he dismisses, and a lot less rigorous. The example he gives of "one person" kicking off the current pandemic by "eating a bowl of bat soup or dropping a test tube in a laboratory" (hmm) doesn't make much sense to me: maybe one person brought the virus across the species barrier, but new zoonotic diseases have been appearing frequently as wildlife habitat is destroyed and people come into more contact with rare animals, and global travel increases the velocity with which a disease can spread. If that "one person" had acted differently maybe the pandemic wouldn't have happened this year, but it's very likely something like it would have taken place at some point. It's something that any serious, wide-ranging AH of the early twenty-first century should deal with.
But I think there is a kernel of truth there: if COVID jumped the species barrier next year instead of this year, there would be differences. Obviously, hundreds of thousands of individuals would not have lost their lives to the disease, immeasurably changing the lives of those around them, and there are long-term consequences on the societal scale, too. Just off the top of my head, the Black Lives Matter protests this summer might have been a lot smaller and less intense if there hadn't been a sudden economic downturn and an immense demonstration of our political leadership's callousness towards every citizen.
Sure, there can be "good" AH that embraces the Great Man Theory and disregard historiography - good AH just requires good writing. Plausible AH, on the other hand, the kind that can actually be useful as a thought-provoking counterfactual exercise, requires writers to find a POD on a human scale - one of the moments where an individual actually does have agency over history - and use the butterfly effect to extrapolate from there. We have to be careful not to dismiss structural factors in history before the consequences of the POD have time to actually affect social, political, economic, environmental trends.
I don't know, maybe this is all obvious stuff. Let me know if I'm rambling.
Personally, I think the author's theories about history are just as "ideologically trammeled" as the historians he dismisses, and a lot less rigorous. The example he gives of "one person" kicking off the current pandemic by "eating a bowl of bat soup or dropping a test tube in a laboratory" (hmm) doesn't make much sense to me: maybe one person brought the virus across the species barrier, but new zoonotic diseases have been appearing frequently as wildlife habitat is destroyed and people come into more contact with rare animals, and global travel increases the velocity with which a disease can spread. If that "one person" had acted differently maybe the pandemic wouldn't have happened this year, but it's very likely something like it would have taken place at some point. It's something that any serious, wide-ranging AH of the early twenty-first century should deal with.
But I think there is a kernel of truth there: if COVID jumped the species barrier next year instead of this year, there would be differences. Obviously, hundreds of thousands of individuals would not have lost their lives to the disease, immeasurably changing the lives of those around them, and there are long-term consequences on the societal scale, too. Just off the top of my head, the Black Lives Matter protests this summer might have been a lot smaller and less intense if there hadn't been a sudden economic downturn and an immense demonstration of our political leadership's callousness towards every citizen.
Sure, there can be "good" AH that embraces the Great Man Theory and disregard historiography - good AH just requires good writing. Plausible AH, on the other hand, the kind that can actually be useful as a thought-provoking counterfactual exercise, requires writers to find a POD on a human scale - one of the moments where an individual actually does have agency over history - and use the butterfly effect to extrapolate from there. We have to be careful not to dismiss structural factors in history before the consequences of the POD have time to actually affect social, political, economic, environmental trends.
I don't know, maybe this is all obvious stuff. Let me know if I'm rambling.
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