Why Counter-Histories?
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” - David Graeber.
On this site, I offer counter-factual histories: alternatives to our actual history, ways things could have gone right. (And, occasionally, cautionary tales of how they could have gone much more wrong…)
“Counter-histories”, for short.
But why? Why do this?
There are many reasons. The first, obviously, is that it’s fun. Serious fun. It’s a riot, to imagine the past differently. To picture it in all its dense possibilities.
Why is it serious fun? Because it focuses the mind, to actually think what it would have taken for things to have gone differently. Because one starts to see the pinch-points, the pivot-points. The most plausible ‘places’ where a change could have come. These have quite different kinds of characters. They may be battles, which could have gone either way. Chances of weather. Elections or referenda, which again often could have gone either way, or even any which way. Deaths or survival of influential individuals. Chances of diseases. And various more.
One way in which all this has tended to give counter-factual history a bad rap is that some (though only some) of those factors that I have just named tend to lean towards the ‘great man’ theory of history. Which has come into some disrepute in recent decades, and in some key respects of course rightly so. History traditionally tended to neglect the social, the economic, let alone the ecological determinants of its path. In my counter-histories, I seek to correct that neglect. You’ll find that my ‘what ifs’ often focus on how (say) elections could have gone differently because of what activists/movements/citizens chose to do (differently), not just because of what candidates chose to do. And that I take ecological contingencies very seriously. And so on.
Its association with the ‘great man’ theory of history has tarred counter-factual history with a brush, associating it with Right-leaning historiography. I correct that bias. Some of my counter-histories most definitely lean Left, or g/Green. Partly, in the kind of way mentioned in the previous paragraph. We should also however not pooh-pooh the ‘great man' (great person, better, of course) theory of history entirely. There is a baby here not to be ejected with its bathwater. If Al Gore had been a just-slightly greater man, more of a mensch, then world history (including to some extent that of our climate, which increasingly underpins everything else), for instance, would surely have been inflected. If Socrates had happened to die considerably younger (a scenario considered in the interesting book of counter-factual history What If? II), the history of philosophy would have been inflected, without doubt.
The thing to do is, I believe, to do what I am seeking to do in my counter-histories: to keep the baby, without the bath-water; to take seriously as counter-factual history to date simply has not done the import of ecological contingencies, the agency of movements and collectives: the fun full panoply of historical causation. To overcome the Right-wing tendency (and the concomitant tendency to focus mainly on battles and wars that could have gone differently: which is what the first volume What If? did) of counter-factual history to date.
In this way, I seek to show the seriousness of counter-factual thinking with regard to our history. Do I mean to make it ‘academically respectable’? It is hard to see how counter-factual history could ever become a REF-able genre, a part of History (or indeed some other discipline) proper. There are too many possibilities, too many parameters.
But that does not make the enterprise any less intellectually significant. Yes: I would claim that there are serious intellectual tasks that the right-(not Right!-)minded writing of counter-history can and indeed should perform. (Especially, if one aspires to be something like an organic intellectual.) Let me explain…
If we are to see our agency fully, and imagine the future differently, it helps to be able to see the past as it in fact was: >as just one of a myriad of possible ways in which things could have gone<. This avoids ‘the narrative fallacy’, to which theorists and professional historians have long been overly drawn, overtly or covertly: the fallacy that the way that history unfolded was the only possible way in which it could have unfolded. The most powerful way of rebutting that fallacious belief is to explore ways in which it could have unfolded differently, and make them feel real.
These different unfolding are partly, i.e. in some cases, a result of sheer contingency. And partly a result of human agency.
And it should already be clear that this can have real consequences for how we go forward and make our history henceforth, albeit of course in circumstances not of our own choosing, but forced upon us by the actual narrative sequence of events that happened (but that didn’t in all respect had to have happened). Consider for instance a remarkable phenomenon such as the success, contrary to the expectations of most comms ‘experts’, psychologists, movement-historians and NGOs, of Extinction Rebellion [XR], in breaking through and changing climate consciousness and to some extent changing policy or at least politics, in the UK in April/May 2019. The purpose of Extinction Rebellion was to move the Overton Window: to expand the political agenda, to expand the shared sense of what was even possible. We in XR made the previously impossible possible.
Doing that would not have been possible without enough wonderful people, ‘rebels’, being willing to see how the future could be different from the past. Being willing to try their agency, despite the risk of disappointment, imprisonment, etc. .
The less that history feels like a determined unfolding whose path is entirely dependent on what has gone before, the more feasible it feels to do something extraordinary like what we did in XR.
To say it again: the narrative fallacy is dangerously popular. It encourages complacency/fatalism/anomie. The best way to counter it is by way of counter-histories. When we see how the past could have been different, including just where those best pivot-points and pressure-points are, it gets easy to see how the future could be different. When we realise that it was a chance of biology and of the history of domestication that meant that smallpox travelled from Europe to America rather than vice versa; when we reflect upon the choices made by those who (again and again) co-created agriculture or the city; when we consider how narrowly Hitler or Bush the Younger won (or rather, were dodgily gifted) power; when we focus on what it would have taken for XR to have won more thoroughly, or alternatively how it could have been weakened at birth; then we learn lessons that can help as we strategise what’s next for us, in the deeply difficult civilisational moment we find ourselves in.
It is interesting that even the most brilliant minds to have considered these matters in some depth tend to resist counter-factual history. I am thinking for instance of David Graeber and David Wengrow, in their astonishing, epochal recent work, The dawn of everything. About the one moment in the book where I found myself disagreeing with these authors was when they caveatted their explicit rationale for writing their brilliant book — their desire to make clear the many times in history where people, usually in collectives, sometimes in full-on citizens’ assemblies, have chosen to take one path of social organisation rather than another, with a view to rebuilding our sense of shared social agency, and escaping from a sense of history as a trap — by saying that this didn’t mean that they were in favour of counter-factual histories. 'Heaven forbid’! What reason did they give for thinking counter-factual histories, filled-out what-ifs, a bridge too far? They didn’t really give one. One speculates that perhaps the reason is roughly that that I dealt with above: a danger of becoming voluntaristic in one’s history-writing, and of concentrating upon decisions by individual ‘great men’, as military historians often do. But I have explained above why this is not a good enough reason.
One way of describing what I’m doing in my series of counter-histories on Substack would be: writing what-if scenarios in the very spirit that animates Graeber’s and Wengrow’s masterpiece.
For there is one further reason why counter-factual history can matter, and can help. It can help rebut the teleological fallacy, a kind of kissing cousin to the narrative fallacy. The teleological fallacy holds that history has been about the long process of arriving at where we are now (or sometimes: at where we will soon allegedly be); that that has been its purpose. It is found famously in Hegel and (in a kind of ‘first time as tragedy, second time as farce’ manner) in Fukuyama. It is found in every narrative of ‘progress’ (and this is the crucial way in which my endeavour in these counter-histories, for all that it can be read at times as (say) Leftist, or egalitarian, is not strictly speaking a ‘progressive’ at all). It is found, most famously of all perhaps, in the complacent ‘Whig’ interpretation of history that saw history as the record of how we came to be as wonderfully enlightened as we now allegedly are; how we ‘arrived’.
Graeber and Wengrow convincingly undercut the dangerous determinism that sees states as the inevitable telos of civilisation, of the record of human decisions on how to live together. I will at times seek to show in worked-out little examples, in some of my counter-histories, how it could have been different: how we might not have ended up in a world of states. I would like to think that in that way I might essay one friendly amendment to The Dawn Of Everything: in showing how counter-factual history, daring to imagine the past different in concrete ways, powerfully undermines the teleological fallacy in all its forms - and thus helps buttress our sense of historical agency, now, ourselves. As we look to do our bit in shaping a future whose default setting now tends towards civilisational collapse, but whose shape is always in flux, and always open to improvement. Not towards an alleged final cause or perfect or pre-determined form, but away from horror, and towards a freedom and a flourishing that we are fated freely to seek to form together. Always. Even when it gets very hard to do. In fact: especially when it gets so challenging. As, unless something incredible happens (and it might!), it will, in the age of ecological meltdown that, because of fantasies of progress and because of ideologically-imposed learned helplessness, is now underway.
The future path we are set on is grim. The point is: to change it. The freedom to change the future is nourished by seeing how the past could have been different.
And here we reach a final, crucial reason why it is wrong of historians to poo-poo counter-factual history. History makes no sense — it doesn’t mean anything — unless it is the history of beings how, like ourselves right now, take ourselves to have choices. To vote for x or for y. To break such and such a law, or not. To spend our money on weekend city-breaks abroad or to invest it in collective enterprises with sound ‘theories’ of change. And so forth. History is just a narrow-minded unhuman chronicle like if it doesn’t include within itself the active sense that at the time begin written of, the future was not yet chosen. In this sense, all history is counter-factual history: all history is an account seeking to make sense of how, when history was made, the making of it made sense to those who made it. All history is or should include an entering into the minds of those who took one path rather than another.[1] Even if they were mistaken sometimes about the belief that they could have taken an other path (and that surely happens), one simply fails to understand any historical event if one does not understand the event as something that, at the time, was at least in part chosen. What happened happened because it made sense to someone to act in one way rather than another. Certain orders were given, rather than certain other words. Someone in Florida chose to bother to vote, or not. Someone in the White House chose to be corrupt or not. And so forth. There can be no understanding of human action without understanding that such action is normally understood by those carrying it out. If there were no felt possibility ever of anything else being done, what was at issue wouldn’t be human action at all.
Technological determinism invites us to surrender to robots, AI, genetic engineering, etc. But precaution, ethics, politics and history itself invite us not to give up with out a fight. Not to give up at all, in fact. They invite us to resist those who want us to roll over to a particular, dangerous vision of ‘inevitablism’; a vision that itself has been chosen.
Counter-factual histories can be a wonderful, enjoyable, intelligent antidote to the dangerous simplification that is determinism, whether in its classic Marxist form or its contemporary technotopian form.
Graeber and Wengrow write, in their great book, “What if we were to…look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell [a great long-lived indigenous American experiment with semi-egalitarianism] not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: roads not taken?” I couldn’t agree more. I like to think that my late friend and colleague Graeber, if he had had the chance to read some of my counter-histories, which will do just that, would have smiled and realised that maybe counter-factual history can indeed serve the same purpose as the splendid work that he and Wengrow have undertaken.
This purpose includes within it resistance to social scientism and to grand-narrative theoretical history. Once one comes to understand properly that our history is something we make, and could have made differently, the illusions of historicism fall away, and it is no longer possible to treat historical actors as if they were sock-puppets or rag dolls. Instead, one comes to see them as…people - and one realises that one can never escape the responsibility to act as a (responsible) agent, oneself.
History is not a spectator sport.
A last thought. Change something, and, like the breath from a butterfly’s wings, many many other things will change. In my counter-histories, in order to be able to tell them at all, I have had to take a little poetic unlicense with this. When I consider what changes if the Liberators, rather than the Caesarists, win the day in ancient Rome, for instance, I imagine the possible ramifications down through history: how it would have affected the chances of Mussolini vs Gramsci, for instance. But of course, strictly speaking, if the Liberators win that Mussolini or Gramsci don’t end up existing as such at all. But it would make it impossible to tell my counter-histories at all, at least in any remotely-short compass, if I had to undo in this cascading way almost everything that happened thereafter.
So grant me this pinch of salt: allow me to hold fixed some elements in what follows that in truth would not have been held fixed if the what-if had unfolded differently, as I posit it.
And then just bear in mind what this implies: that actually, my counter-histories typically considerably underplay the effects of different historical contingencies, and of different historical choices.
When we exercise our freedom, and change together what comes next, we are almost always more powerful than we can possibly imagine.
[1] Here I am drawing on the philosophy of history of Collingwood, and the philosophy of ‘social science’ of Peter Winch (on which, see my There is no such thing as a social science, co-authored with Phil Hutchinson and Wes Sharrock). Thanks to Tom Greaves for discussion which reminded me of the idea of (the idea of) history set out supra.