Book review: What If?
What If?: the world's foremost military historians imagine what might have been / ed. Robert Cowley. (Berkley Books, 2000)
A collection of essays on great turning points of history, when little changes might have had big consequences. A very uneven collection: some of the contrafactuals are carefully worked out, some are just "OMG everything would be totally different!"; some of the turning points are quite plausible (what if Cleitus the Black had been a second slower and Alexander died at the Granicus? a matter of split-second timing, everyone's motivations still the same), some are harder to posit (what if Chiang Kai-shek had settled for a divided China? but why would he change his mind, and there'd be more to it than that); some don't even suggest an alternative at all, just point out how contingent the situation was. The "foremost military historians" include John Keegan, David McCullough, William McNeill, James McPherson, and the like, so some of these essays are good history, well written; some of them are less so (lookin' at you in particular, Lewis Lapham). Call it two woofs on average.
Grappling with the whole question of how one thing that did not actually happen could be "more likely" than another thing that did not happen reminded me of that football game in Gödel, Escher, Bach, where the guys sit around and watch hypothetical instant replays where: the ball didn't take that funny bounce, there was no puddle on the field, footballs are spherical instead of football-shaped, the game was baseball instead of football, and 13 is not a prime number. None of those things actually happened, but some can "more nearly" happen than others.
A collection of essays on great turning points of history, when little changes might have had big consequences. A very uneven collection: some of the contrafactuals are carefully worked out, some are just "OMG everything would be totally different!"; some of the turning points are quite plausible (what if Cleitus the Black had been a second slower and Alexander died at the Granicus? a matter of split-second timing, everyone's motivations still the same), some are harder to posit (what if Chiang Kai-shek had settled for a divided China? but why would he change his mind, and there'd be more to it than that); some don't even suggest an alternative at all, just point out how contingent the situation was. The "foremost military historians" include John Keegan, David McCullough, William McNeill, James McPherson, and the like, so some of these essays are good history, well written; some of them are less so (lookin' at you in particular, Lewis Lapham). Call it two woofs on average.
Grappling with the whole question of how one thing that did not actually happen could be "more likely" than another thing that did not happen reminded me of that football game in Gödel, Escher, Bach, where the guys sit around and watch hypothetical instant replays where: the ball didn't take that funny bounce, there was no puddle on the field, footballs are spherical instead of football-shaped, the game was baseball instead of football, and 13 is not a prime number. None of those things actually happened, but some can "more nearly" happen than others.