True Stories
Page 24
For a while in the 1960s and 1970s a fashion waxed among statistical economists for ‘cliometry’. It was a beautiful and arrogant term meaning ‘history measuring’, after Clio, history’s muse. What do you measure history against? It is a permanent problem in all studies of unrepeatable phenomena (in geology and epidemiology as much as in the history of humans) that you must make inferences without being able to set up controlled experiments. Shifts in the Earth’s crust, outbreaks of plague and industrial revolutions cannot be run through to order in the laboratory. There are no control groups, no test cases, only the single pattern of raw data provided by events as they fell out. It’s like being asked to come up with an account of a whole game when you can only shake the dice once. The cliometrists tried to get around the problem by referring the real world to hypothetical worlds – ‘counterfactuals’ – where there had been other outcomes. One study, for example, tested the effect that railroads had had on the nineteenth-century American economy by modelling a railway-less version of it and then comparing the two, in the hope of being able to tell apart those developments that were, and those that were not, the economic consequences of railway building. Objections to cliometry came from those who pointed out that the fundamental difficulty still applied. A statistical model of a different history is a grossly abbreviated, simplified thing. To keep it coherent you had to choke back its implications; you had to set arbitrary limits on how far economic behaviour might branch away; you might be able to cope with the consequences of there being no railways, but you had to leave out the consequences of the consequences. Statisticians already made a beeline for any case where economic behaviour was different enough from the norm, and simple enough, for it to approach the conditions of a controlled experiment. Therefore in cliometry you arrived at a model which gave you no more purchase on the totality of the true historical record than you could get from a look at some real deviant group (say, the buggy-driving Amish), and which would be considerably less rich and reliable besides. Cliometry did not die. It lost its glamour and its name, and became a method among others, to be brought into play in those circumstances when real history has accidentally produced the chance for comparison. A humbled form of cliometry happens when medical historians model the effects of the Japanese taking to a meat diet sooner, by investigating the homogeneous group of Japanese emigrants to Hawaii, who munched beef decades before the first McDonald’s opened on mainland Honshu.
Around the same time, however (you see that imaginary histories themselves have a history), the idea of other, differently ordered worlds came to seem philosophically fruitful. In 1973 the logician David Lewis published Counterfactuals, a short provoking book which claimed a semantically watertight (and very technical) argument for, as he put it, ‘realism about possible worlds’. His central chapter gleefully hinted that people kept coming up to him at Oxford parties and asking what he thought he was playing at. In the face of ‘incredulous stares’, or more rarely questions about what he meant by possible worlds, he wrote:
I cannot give the kind of reply my questioner probably expects: that is, a proposal to reduce possible worlds to something else.
I can only ask him to admit that he knows what sort of thing our actual world is, and then explain that other worlds are more things of that sort, differing not in kind but only in what goes on at them . . . It is said that realism about possible worlds is false because only our own world, and its contents, actually exist. But of course unactualized possible worlds and their unactualized inhabitants do not actually exist. To actually exist is to exist and to be located here at our actual world – at this world that we inhabit . . . It does not follow that realism about possible worlds is false. Realism about unactualized possibles is exactly the thesis that there are more things than actually exist.24
This was not only a bravura demonstration of philosophical wit, though it is that, and curious-sounding as ever to non-philosophers who expect that discussion will strike out from roughly agreed terms into the material of evidence and opinions. It was a deliberately extreme statement of a belief about possibilities which a much wider range of philosophers and social scientists only feel compelled to reject when the possibilities are solidified into complete possible worlds. Those interested in how historical explanations work – how something we recognise as a satisfactory description of cause emerges – have been especially willing to admit hypothetical outcomes into the argument (so long as they stay hypothetical). It has been argued, for example, that a whole class of explanations turns on an ‘implied counterfactual’. I employed one earlier in this essay. I asked what conditions would have had to be fulfilled for Babbage to build the Difference Engine, in the hypothetical case that he succeeded; pointed out that those conditions were not in fact fulfilled; and gave that as my reason why the Engine was not built. But in a general sense, everyone concerned with explaining and describing history has a practical stake in the ‘thesis that there are more things than actually exist’. There has always had to be some conceptual scope found for potential, though no such thing as a potential can conceivably be identified in the finite world of objects and people, or else we allow no room for change and becoming. There have always had to be ways found for giving an account of a situation’s potential for change, and in the social sciences attention to might-bes and might-have-beens has sometimes seemed like a promising source of tools. It need not be ‘dispiriting’, Geoffrey Hawthorn observes in his recent Plausible Worlds,25 that possibilities ‘are not items . . . about which [we] could be said to be certain, and thus to know’. ‘On the contrary. It promises that kind of understanding . . . which comes from locating an actual in a space of possibles’, sighting the real and single course of history among its attendant fuzz of counterfactuals. Hawthorn’s proposal for using imaginary history aims, modestly, at illuminating where we are, and how likely it is that we find ourselves here. It does not aim, like cliometry, to make comparisons outwith the real world.
All these, though, are ways of making imaginary history serve real history. In one way or another, they raise the ghost of another possibility in order to investigate the groundwork of the real; they raise it in order to lay it again. They treat the possibility like one of those incalculable quantities that can nonetheless be used in mathematics because it will be neatly cancelled from both sides before the equation reaches its final form. The specific imaginary histories they put forward have only the status of an illustration, or a model, or an example. But it is noteworthy how much nearly every author of a rare, serious inquiry into counterfactuals enjoys the opportunity to play at changes. Often they embroider their exemplary counterfactual to pleasurable excess: certainly far in excess of the strict needs of an example. They invent sly details. Geoffrey Hawthorn, for instance, kicks off Plausible Worlds with an updated variant on an old speculation about what would have happened if Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain had failed to conquer the Muslim emirate of Granada in 1492. Because he then has his independent Granada add early factory chimneys to its skyline of mosques, shifting the whole industrial focus of Europe southward, he can send ripples of revision through the learned literature of his own discipline which deals with industrialisation. Foundation texts of the social sciences shimmer into slightly different form. Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism becomes The Kharejite Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by ‘ibn Weber’, delicious to cite.
Some things are good to eat. Others fall into a useful parallel category invented by an Amazonian tribe, and are ‘good to think’. That is, they feel good when you think them through, they give a pleasure like the pleasure of eating. And indeed you are consuming something in this kind of thinking. Rather than pursuing a thought to a conclusion, you are dining on its aspects, guzzling its ramifications, digesting it gourmand-style. The issues and concerns that would structure your thought if you were in search of conclusions do come in, but like a menu. When Hawthorn gives himself the incidental pleasure of an altered book
title, or when David Lewis picked out for use such propositions as If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over, they are switching for a moment into this other style of thinking. They taste, in passing, the pleasure that the topic of different worlds proffers, quite independently of whether it can be turned to philosophical account. Where imaginary histories are concerned, of course, utilitarian thinking counts as the rare exception. Almost all the thinking people do about them is of the edible kind. Which does not mean that it is negligible, for it can be as alert as serious thought to a difficulty or an intellectual knot, only to different ends. It uses imaginary worlds for the sake of imagination, and because it can draw on so much that the imagination understands about history, it can be extremely revealing.
Words, which summon worlds, are its proper medium. If the money could be raised, the Science Museum would like to go ahead and build the printer Babbage envisaged for the Engine, to tabulate the results of the Engine’s calculations, stamping them – almost incising them, in the manner of an old-fashioned railway ticket punch – into broad fillets of pasteboard: which raises the bizarre prospect, at least in my mind, of the museum following through the next stage, and then the next, and in effect launching a Victorian Age of Information Technology in the upstairs gallery. Why stop? Presumably they would have to when they reached the limit of Babbage’s own designs. To start improving on the Analytical Engine would be to leave the province of museums altogether. And it will take a sobering sum even to assemble the printer. But what it is formidably expensive to execute in metal, words can perform at no cost at all, except imaginative effort and historical sympathy.
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s SF novel The Difference Engine, published in 1990, contains a world of the 1850s altered by the rampant success of Babbage’s computers. To bring about this state of affairs, preceding history has been adjusted as far back as 1815, so that the ground can be prepared, politically and economically, for Babbage’s little metal shoots to flourish. The ironmasters and the savants have taken unequivocal control of Britain, as they were prevented from doing in fact by orchestrated, conserving reforms. Instead of fissuring under pressure of diverging interests, the pro-industrial coalition of capitalists and workers and scientists, which in our world only preserved a frail existence during the 1830s and 1840s, overthrew the Duke of Wellington in a revolution around 1830. Now reason rules triumphant. It is the Young Men’s Agnostic Association which proselytises. Babbage and Lyell and Brunel sit as ‘Merit Lords’ in Westminster, influential, idolised, masters of the public purse. Data dances unimpeded across the land by telegraph, on punched cards, on spools of ticker tape. In the bowels of the monstrous Egyptianesque pyramid of the Central Statistical Office on Horseferry Road, serially connected Analytical Engines process dossiers on every man, woman and child in the country. ‘How many gear-yards do you spin here?’ ‘Yards? We measure our gearage in miles here . . .’ Smaller Engines check customers’ credit on the counters of smart emporia, automate manufacturing, perform mathematical reconstructions of dinosaur skeletons. The Irish potato famine has been avoided by rational relief measures, but London groans beneath an overload of smoke and fumes, tottering towards systemic crisis. We recognise this city. It’s a Gustave Doré drawing made more so. It’s Dickensian London subjected to an exponential growth in both wonder and horror. It’s the ville of penny-dreadful night, coloured in shades of mud and India ink, stage-lit by gas for melodramatic glare, abounding in spectacular villainy, fantastically a-swarm. In broad outline it’s also, since Gibson and Sterling make amazingly conscious and resonant use of genre conventions, somewhere that cool American practitioners of the ‘steampunk’ SF subgenre have visited several times before. A rejigged Victorian London seems to serve (it’s been observed) as a favourite kind of artificial unconscious, where anxieties can be condensed, and discharged, on the understanding that this lurid place is definitively other.
But genre is chiefly a consideration here because science fiction, by nature, offers both surprises and guaranteed pleasures. SF, no matter how good it is or how individual, tends always to hold out more specific and more predictable promises to the reader than fiction per se. To a much greater extent than the literary novel, it allows you to select the pleasures you plan to have in advance. This concentration, this extra single-mindedness, is what makes it the pre-eminent form in the culture for exploring ideas that are ‘good to think’. Sometimes SF does little else. Gibson and Sterling, interestingly, come down emphatically on the side of genre convention in their choice of a precise moment for their alteration of history to begin. SF ‘alternative history’ uses a very simple rationale: events branch at points of decision. It shows audacity to nominate some juncture as decisive that doesn’t especially look it. Despite research so thorough that historians of science who read The Difference Engine feel they are breathing air thick with allusions to their own work, Gibson and Sterling did not opt for a metallurgical breakthrough, or a paradigm shift in mathematics. They had Lady Byron decide she would stay with her husband in 1815, however disgusting his taste for practices expressible only in Latin. And the imagination is tickled, outraged: satisfied.
A partial bibliography of imaginary histories drawn up in 1980 lists about 175 fictions of one kind and another, not counting films, plays and board games. By now the number must have multiplied many times over. Alternate history has been one of the boom areas in the genre since the (relative) decline of ‘hard’, starships ’n’ rayguns SF. Branching-points have multiplied correspondingly, but the most popular probably remain the fall of the Roman Empire, Columbus’s arrival in the New World, the Spanish Armada, the American Wars of Independence and Civil War (the latter much-revised at every stage from Fort Sumter to Lincoln’s assassination), and the Second World War. The pronounced bias towards American history of course reflects the predominantly American readership and authorship of English-language SF. Almost all these most-favoured junctures for historical alteration are military events, because a war going the other way provides the most blatant and immediate possibility of change. Usually, though, a technological shift follows. It’s rare for a surviving Roman Empire not to have mastered steam power and the printing press at least, and more often machine-guns and television as well. Success for the Spanish Armada on the whole signals an aborted Industrial Revolution in Europe, with the connection between Protestants and machines, Catholics and obscurantism taken as read: under the thumb of the Popes, ox-carts generally lumber along rutted roads carrying cargoes of illuminated manuscripts. Similarly, unless the author happens to be a committed Dixie partisan, the result of a Confederate victory in 1862 or 1863 tends to be a backwoods, tar-paper-shack North America, stuck with clunky telegraphs and puffing billies, the internal combustion engine nowhere to be seen. German victory in the Second World War, on the other hand, can offer the prospect of accelerated but malignant technology, Gruppenführer Wolfgang Something replacing Neil Armstrong on the moon as he steps from his swastika’d V10 rocket years before 1969. It is impossible to exaggerate how routine these manoeuvres have become in science fiction; but equally important not to assume that the conservatism, the recourse to stereotype manifested in them, is purely a generic thing, a sign merely of a genre running according to type.
With a few exceptions, people first began to play at altering history in the first decades of the twentieth century. The two collections of essays most commonly quoted as the foundation stones, F.J.C. Hearnshaw’s The ‘Ifs’ of History and J.C. Squire’s If It Had Happened Otherwise, were published in 1929 and 1931. (Interestingly, many of the contributors belonged to that governing caste in British society which had reason, by 1930, to wish that history were working out differently, yet could still, if barely, believe that decisive moments were formed by the decisions of people like them. One contributor to Squire’s collection was Winston Churchill. Another speculated about what would have happened if the General Strike of 1926 had not been defeated by the then Home Secretary, Winst
on Churchill.) But some of the attractions of altering history had been identified centuries earlier, at the point when fiction of any kind, with its sober relation of non-existent events, seemed itself to hold out the problem of a counterfeit reality. Francis Bacon classed the invented people and invented emotions of poetry as a category of ‘feigned history’ in The Advancement of Learning (1605). Poetry’s root in the Greek poiesis, making, was uppermost in his mind:
The use of this FAINED HISTORIE, hath beene to give some shadowe of satisfaction to the minde of Man in those points, wherein the Nature of things doth denie it, the world being in proportion inferioure to the soule . . . and therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divinenesse, because it doth raise and erect the Minde, by submitting the shewes of things to the desires of the Mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bow the Mind unto the Nature of things.
Imaginary history – applying Bacon’s terms as he certainly never intended we should – is poetical history, made history; and it too gives the shadowy satisfaction of raising ‘the Minde’ higher in importance than ‘the shewes of things’.
It can be everybody’s mind that imaginary history bestows this satisfaction on. Especially when a story of what might have been plays up the extent to which history is chance-made, and therefore turns on accidents and on choices as opposed to laws or necessities, it pays in one sense a warm tribute to everyone’s powers of decision. ‘There is no history’, Gibson and Sterling have their scientist hero Mallory shout provocatively, ‘– there is only contingency!’ Which seems to promise that the course of events is a piano and not a pianola: we too can sit and pick out a tune that pleases us. If history is not inevitable, and does not operate by general rules, then it may really matter whether we turn right or left when we leave the house in the morning. In a much more obvious sense, and simultaneously, sovereignty over the imagined order of things belongs entirely to the mind of the author, and the reader participates far less than she or he does in real history: the reader can contribute nothing from memory or shared inheritance of the past. Imaginary history makes its author’s mind the sole arbiter of chance and likelihood; it makes over the superlatively intractable stuff of what has been into material; it turns history plastic and sculptable; it seats the author in the office of time. Spare kingdoms and republics fall out of the author’s pockets like loose change.