Thought experiments

I have been reading about Niall Ferguson, the Scottish historian who teaches at Harvard. I was reading about his "thought experiments". His thought experiments involve history and are like "what if" argument, such as what if John Kennedy had not been assassinated or what if Hitler had been killed when a truck hit his car. Such thought experiments, also known as counterfactual thinking, can be used to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. However, mostly they are just intellectual parlor games because as we know history can't be changed.

Ferguson does not believe the world is governed by Reason or by a class struggle or by any other deterministic laws. Therefore he is no a Hegelian. Hegel believed history is the product of Reason and determinants, and sculpted by the actions of all humankind. However, Ferguson thinks that world history could have been different if events had handled differently by its leaders. For instances, he believes Britain could have avoided getting involved in WW1 if its leaders and diplomats had acted differently. And the same goes for WW2. A Hegelian thinker, though, would explain that those two events could not have been avoided because they were a culmination of other inextricable events. In other words, a world ethos determined those events, not just a few wrong decisions made here and there. To paraphrase Emerson, history was in the saddle riding humankind, meaning those wars were in the works long before they happened.

I don't think you can particularly isolate world’s event as Ferguson has done in his thought experiments. He has particularly isolated two events, WW1 and WW2. He thinks Britain could have avoided those wars if it had used more diplomacy or if had acted earlier on their causes. Why I don't think you can isolate those events and think they could have been prevented is because they were embedded with too many variables, which, even with hindsight, are impossible to separate.

Many things can cause wars and they happen for a multiple of complex reasons. One reason I think WW1 and WW2 happened is because the political will or wisdom – the political technology - didn't sufficiently exist to prevent them. There was another friction factor that could have ignited those wars, a collective stubbornness for political change. Another reason was that there were very few legitimate democracies in those days that may or would have counseled against war, being that democracies don't go to war with each other. No, history culminated itself into those two wars for a number of human shortcomings and intransigencies. Conflicts tend to insinuate themselves because of human inadequacies, as a means of transcending and resolving them. What I think also made the wars unstoppable is the collision of two histories, a world history that was on a course of integration and globalization and a nation or state history that still had the attitude of isolationism. World history being the more powerful induced those wars as a way of transcending the opposition to internationalism.

Had the nations who were victorious in WW1 been wiser, most likely WW2 would not have occurred. Received wisdom believes that WW2 was an extension of the unfinished WW1. Had a League of Nations been put in place after WW1, as the United Nations was after WW2, WW2 most likely wouldn't have occurred. Had Germany been forced into an unconditional surrender, like it was after WW2, WW2 most likely would never have happened because the conditions for future European wars would have been greatly diminished. Had Germany not been burdened with payments of remuneration to the countries it attacked, a burden that destroyed its chances for a peacetime recovery, but instead been rehabilitated like it was by the allies after WW2, WW2 most likely would not have occurred. Alas, the victors of WW1 were none the wiser and had not yet learned the art of preventing global wars.

However, when counterfactual thinkers like Ferguson reshape history in their minds they don’t consider the fact that people back then were not privy to the wisdom or the wherewithal we have today to stop conflicts and maintain peace, hence the reason why leaders acted as they did. Also, in the past there was a different attitude towards war. Men were more apt to go to war because of a greater allegiance to the state. Also, back then war was viewed more as the courageous, honorable think to do. That attitude towards war doesn't exist much anymore.

The famous historian Edward Gibbon said that history is essentially the recounting of “the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind”. There have been so many crimes, follies and misfortunes committed during the span of humankind that they are virtually impossible to separate and unravel. I think all this entanglement makes speculating about what may or may not have happened in history quite a questionable endeavor.