The Principle of Sufficient Reason and its corollary, the Hindsight Bias, are the source of many of what David H. Fischer called Historians’ Fallacies.
If everything that ever happened was destined to do so in the only possible way, according to predetermined causes, history is just a chronological narration of necessary events unfolding towards an inexorable present. As crazy as this sounds, blatant hindsight has been and still is part and parcel of much historical analysis. In explaining the past, historians are faced with a strong impulse to presume the inevitability of what happened, and to see it in the light of what was then an unknown future.
Was Nazi Germany destined to lose World War II? Of course not. But it did, and the historian’s mission is to provide a satisfactory explanation of why. But what is a satisfactory explanation? As we know, satisfaction is the eyes of the beholder: children are satisfied that Santa Claus comes through the chimney because he is magic, in the same way as the ancient Greeks attributed natural phenomena to the might of some god. The historians’ equivalents of magical explanations are apparently more sophisticated, but essentially as naïve. They rest on a more or less explicit assumption that history is governed by some underlying force, which, like gravity driving a ball to the floor, leads the past towards the present. The assumption has a long and varied genealogy, culminating in Hegel’s delirious fantasies:
The only thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process. This conviction and intuition is a hypothesis in the domain of history as such. In that of Philosophy it is no hypothesis. It is there proved by speculative cognition, that Reason – and this term may here suffice us, without investigating the relation sustained by the Universe to the Divine Being – is Substance, as well Infinite Power; its own Infinite Material underlying all the natural and spiritual life which it originates, as also the Infinite Form – that which sets this Material in motion. (The Philosophy of History, p. 9).
Camouflaged in Hegel’s verbal acrobatics is the disarmingly vacuous notion that history has a predestined direction, a higher purpose that, unsurprisingly, ends up coinciding with one’s own ideals – the Prussian state in Hegel’s case, or communism for the ‘upturned Hegelian’ Karl Marx, or, to take a more recent example, liberal democracy for Francis Fukuyama, author of the incredibly unwisely titled The End of History and the Last Man.
Obviously, history has no purpose. There is no such thing as historical necessity, no grand law of historical progress enabling us to explain the past and foretell the future. The point has been made, forcefully and definitively, by Karl Popper in The Poverty of Historicism. This doesn’t mean that ‘history is just one damn thing after another’ (as Arnold Toynbee, another visionary inventor of universal historical laws, protested it wasn’t – according to an overly cited but untraceable quote. Another case for the Quote Investigator). As in any other field of enquiry, historians ask historical questions and build explanations based on historical evidence. They don’t just recount what happened: they explain why, linking a countless number of events in a coherent causal chain. But causes can only be seen after the event. Before it happens, an event is only one of several possibilities, each of which can happen with some probability. Contrary to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, what happened was not bound to do so and its cause was not the only necessary explanation. Causes are only as predictable as the events they explain. They appear as predictable or even perfect evidence only after the fact.
‘What happened’ is the epitome of soft evidence: unrepeatable, uncontrollable, unique. But we can still learn from it, provided that we allow for the possibility that historical reality might have been different from what turned out to be the case. Hugh Trevor-Roper thus made the point:
At any given moment in history there are real alternatives, and to dismiss them as unreal because they were not realized is to take the reality out of the situation. How can we ‘explain what happened and why‘ if we only look at what happened and never considered the alternatives, the total pattern of forces whose pressure created the event? It is only if we place ourselves before the alternatives of the past, as of the present, only if we live for a moment, as the men of the time lived, in its still fluid context and among its still unresolved problems, if we see those problems coming upon us, as well as look back on them after they have gone away, that we can draw useful lessons from history. (History and Imagination, p. 363).
In his most famous book, The Last Days of Hitler, Trevor-Roper proved that Hitler had died in his bunker in Berlin and was not alive and living in the West, as claimed by Soviet propaganda. But what if Hitler had manage to escape? And what if Germany had invaded Britain in May 1940? What if it had defeated the Soviet Union in 1941? As well argued by Niall Ferguson in the Introduction to Virtual History, these are not idle questions (the last two are the subject of Andrew Roberts’ and Michael Burleigh’s essays in the collection).
Of course, what-ifs can be more or less intentionally silly: ‘If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have changed’, Pascal noted in his Pensées (392). And for want of a nail … the kingdom was lost. But if the question is plausible, and the alternative it poses is one of the relevant possibilities that contemporaries actually faced at the time, proper counterfactual history can be highly instructive. Whereas seeing history as the ineluctable product of necessary causes can leave us exposed to a resigned and undiscerning acceptance of whatever happens. In Baruch Fischhoff‘s words:
When we attempt to understand past events, we implicitly test the hypotheses or rules we use both to interpret and to anticipate the world around us. If, in hindsight, we systematically underestimate the surprises that the past held and holds for us, we are subjecting those hypotheses to inordinately weak tests and, presumably, finding little reason to change them. Thus, the very outcome knowledge which gives us the feeling that we understand what the past was all about may prevent us from learning anything from it.
What if the Nazis had won the war? Let’s venture to imagine the winners of this year’s Goebbels Music Awards:
