Alternative histories
sushidog asked (in a friends-locked post):you have a time machine, in which you can make three (and only three) trips. You may use one trip to change something in your own past, one trip to witness a past event, and one trip to change the world. No cheating, any attempts to game the system will dump you in a primaeval swamp with no way back to the future. What do you do with your three trips?
Taking the last one: what would you do with a trip to change the world?
What a responsibility! And what an interesting question.
My first thought was to try to get the germ theory of disease established much earlier than it was, to lift the huge disease burden from humanity sooner. But thinking about it, to be able to prove it thoroughly - and thus be able to come up with improving infection control and treatment measures - you need the microscopes and glassware that weren’t available until the C19th anyway, and to get the scale of benefits (think vast sewers, water treatment plants) you really need C19th industrial capability too.
So you’re kind of stuck with embedding a superstition that just happens to make people do things like washing their hands a lot - unless you try to hack technology-industry to happen earlier (of which more in a moment). In which case, perhaps persuading Galen of the importance of very-basic cleanliness and sanitary measures in preventing disease is the best one can hope for.
Trying to jump-start the process of industrialisation and technological development so it happens earlier might help with not just disease but all the other cool stuff we have now. Again, there’s lots of interlocking moving parts to industrial history, so it’s hard to see a simple intervention point. I like the idea (influenced by Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt) that with a bit of a change in Chinese history, industrialisation could’ve taken root there a lot earlier than it did in Europe, and they'd have been the Old World power that contacted the New World, which not only means better public health and medicine earlier, but - with some wishful thinking - avoids the bad bits of the rise of Europe (of which more later).
If I was really hopeful, a little bit of work with Aristotle might shift him decisively in the direction of doing actual experiments. He was nearly there anyway. With a bit of nudging, he could have set off the scientific explosion that happened in the C16th-C17th, and we’d have clean water and sewage systems, aseptic technique, vaccines, anaesthetics and antibiotics - all by the time of Christ. Or if that's too ambitious, perhaps you could do something similar in Medieval Islamic times with someone like Al-Kindi or Avicenna.
After disease, the main cause of human misery in history has overwhelmingly been other humans. Maybe if I went back to Mosaic times or thereabouts and managed to get a big dose of human-universality stuff in to the Torah (perhaps along Ba’hai lines), that’d head off all the religiously-supported conflict involving Abrahamic religions, which is really quite a lot of it - or at least, a lot of the stuff that seems most salient to me.
But, of course, even if you managed the job (bit of a challenge to synthesise ‘all humanity is one’ with the whole chosen-people business in Judaism) it wouldn’t prevent all the Abrahamic religiously-linked conflict in history by a long chalk. Some conflicts really do seem to have been driven by religious conviction (the earlier Crusades, for instance), and one might hope that those would go, but in many of the others it looks a lot more like straightforward secular motivations with religious backing brought in to provide backup moral justification. I suspect if you managed to tweak Christianity and Islam in to avowedly pacifistic religions, they wouldn’t have been quite so popular with leaders bent on conquest, which would simply lead to those religions being less widespread.
And it probably wouldn't prevent colonialism. You can fairly easily imagine ways in which, say, Indian Partition at independence could’ve gone better, but really it looks like problems set up way back and the better solution to having a smooth path avoiding genocidal war after British rule is to not have British Rule in the first place. But it didn’t get started with religion. Famously, the East India Company was massively resistant to letting Christian missionaries in at all, because they guessed - probably rightly - that doing so would have them driven out fairly promptly. Also, while you might be able to intervene to stop Elizabeth I giving them a Royal Charter to get started, there were many other European powers up to similar stuff at the time, and I doubt that, say, a Portuguese Raj would’ve been so much better than the British one was. A similar argument applies to colonialism in the Americas and Africa - you can imagine ways of blocking one particular colonial ruling power, but not the lot of them.
There’s the obvious single-points-in-history political lines. Killing Hitler has been done to death (sorry); I quite like Stephen Fry’s guess about how that might work out in Making History. And it’s common folk wisdom that preventing the assassination of Franz Ferdinand wouldn’t have made much difference to World War I. Lenin and a bunch of fellow revolutionary exiles were carried across Germany in a sealed train to foment revolution in Russia in 1917, though. The advantage to the Germans is obvious in retrospect: it ensured that Russia dropped out of the war. But it was controversial, to say the least. It seems likely that simply tipping off a high-ranking official in the German Provisional Government would be enough to thwart the scheme, or failing that the train could be stopped by, say, the accidental explosion of an ammunition supply train. The hope there is that by a chain of only-slightly-far-fetched events, the whole misery of totalitarianism in the C20th would be stopped. With the hardcore revolutionaries trapped in Germany, the Russian revolution doesn’t take an authoritarian turn and becomes a stable social-democratic state. The exiles are expelled back to Britain, where they don’t succeed in fomenting a hard revolution, but do trigger velvet one with a Labour landslide in 1918 like the one in 1945 in our timeline. Principles of international solidarity lead to a peaceful European Union founded in the 1920s, and coordinated action in the 1930s heads off the Great Depression there. Hmm, bit of a stretch.
While we’re on the great large-scale oppressions of the C20th, we might want to do something about Mao. One fun idea in my mind is if we imagine that Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of the nationalist Kuomintang, met some Scottish medical missionaries in the 1930s, who became close friends with his Christian, Western-educated wife, Soong May-ling. They convinced him, inter alia, of the importance of acting with rectitude, which led him to prioritise anti-corruption in the KMT. The KMT becomes significantly more effective as a result, and not only resists the Japanese invasion better, but is able to defeat the Chinese Communist Party - not just Mao - in the post-WW2 part of the Chinese Civil War. (The reason I like this idea is that my grandparents were Scottish medical missionaries in China in the 1930s, who became friends with Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Family legend does relate that they didn’t think Chiang was a terribly good egg, but as word has reached me it doesn’t say what efforts they made to improve corruption in his ranks.)
Back on the classic single-assassination-saves-millions front, we have getting rid of Genghis Khan. That yields great savings in lives lost if you imagine that it stops the whole of the Mongol conquests entirely, and racks up even more if the lack of that historical example prevents Tamerlane/Timur doing something similar later.
There’s other small tweaks that might be big helps. Giving Leopold II of Belgium a cerebral haemorrhage might’ve spared millions of deaths and untold suffering in the Congo Free State in the C19th. As with Hitler, it’s very tempting to read that particular horrible bit of history as a result largely of an individual in power being really pretty nasty.
It’d be very tempting to try to save the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas from the wave of disease that European contact brought. Not sure I can see how with an easy, single time trip, though. You could sink Columbus’ ships, or less-viciously, simply persuade his backers that it was a crackpot plan (which it was), but that would probably only defer the problem, not prevent it. Really you’d want to set up occasional contact from much, much earlier - which probably gets you back to an early Chinese link to the New World. But if you do manage that, you end up with a not-decimated population after European contact, which as well as saving lives directly would’ve made the subsequent history go very differently and perhaps much better. It might even have put Europeans off colonialism all together, which would be a massive win.
That Chinese link reminds me - there’s all the many, terrible wars in China before the C20th: off the top of my head, there’s the An Lushan rebellion in the C8th, the Manchu conquest in the C17th, the Taiping rebellion (and the subsequent Dungan revolt) in the mid-C19th, and even the Boxer rebellion (although the casualty list is shorter there). Some of those don’t look like they could be knocked on the head with a single tweak, but some do. For instance, you could zap An Lushan himself. He was even sentenced to death at one point in his youth, which looks an easy intervention place. But it’s worth noting that the fighting continued for years after he died anyway, so that might not work. On the other hand, the Taiping rebellion is one of my favourites, though, for lives-saved-vs-intervention-required. For this one you don’t have to kill anyone, or even persuade their parents to marry someone else. All you need to do is edit the results of the imperial civil service examinations, so that Hong Xiuquan passes, instead of failing so many times, and he’d have spent a longer, happier and considerably more peaceful life as a mandarin, rather than being the proximal cause and major leader of one of the most bloody wars in human history, which is going some considering when it happened.
Much more recently, there’s the Rwandan Civil War and the wars in the Congo, ongoing since the 1990s. Here it seems ludicrous to suggest that a simple tweak in history would’ve made a profound change. I think that’s probably because it’s more recent, and I lived through it, and it seemed very complex and didn’t (and doesn’t) admit of a single easy solution. I mean, there were obvious things that probably would’ve helped - for instance, the US could’ve pressured Mobutu to be less authoritarian back from the 60s - but I’m not convinced that would’ve fixed it all. (It probably would’ve done little to prevent the Rwandan Civil War, for instance, even if it worked.) You could pick off individual political or military leaders - but that doesn’t look obviously a win, since several died anyway and were replaced. Really to avoid the whole situation it looks like you need to go back to colonial times and avoiding colonialism altogether (as mentioned above). But that’s getting back in to history-I-don’t-remember. This makes me think that all my other ideas above only seem feasible because of the simplification yielded by historical distance.
Which brings me back to where I started. I’m not a Marxist, but I do think the material circumstances of historical events are massively important and that individual humans very rarely have such outsize impacts that changing those individuals would have a massive impact on human history. Which is why I prefer the idea of trying to kick-start general improvements earlier. But, of course, most of those are large-scale societal changes.
Anyway. What about you lot? What’s your favourite use of a single-trip time machine to change the world? Can you do better than the kill-Hitler cliche?
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/276306.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.
Taking the last one: what would you do with a trip to change the world?
What a responsibility! And what an interesting question.
My first thought was to try to get the germ theory of disease established much earlier than it was, to lift the huge disease burden from humanity sooner. But thinking about it, to be able to prove it thoroughly - and thus be able to come up with improving infection control and treatment measures - you need the microscopes and glassware that weren’t available until the C19th anyway, and to get the scale of benefits (think vast sewers, water treatment plants) you really need C19th industrial capability too.
So you’re kind of stuck with embedding a superstition that just happens to make people do things like washing their hands a lot - unless you try to hack technology-industry to happen earlier (of which more in a moment). In which case, perhaps persuading Galen of the importance of very-basic cleanliness and sanitary measures in preventing disease is the best one can hope for.
Trying to jump-start the process of industrialisation and technological development so it happens earlier might help with not just disease but all the other cool stuff we have now. Again, there’s lots of interlocking moving parts to industrial history, so it’s hard to see a simple intervention point. I like the idea (influenced by Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt) that with a bit of a change in Chinese history, industrialisation could’ve taken root there a lot earlier than it did in Europe, and they'd have been the Old World power that contacted the New World, which not only means better public health and medicine earlier, but - with some wishful thinking - avoids the bad bits of the rise of Europe (of which more later).
If I was really hopeful, a little bit of work with Aristotle might shift him decisively in the direction of doing actual experiments. He was nearly there anyway. With a bit of nudging, he could have set off the scientific explosion that happened in the C16th-C17th, and we’d have clean water and sewage systems, aseptic technique, vaccines, anaesthetics and antibiotics - all by the time of Christ. Or if that's too ambitious, perhaps you could do something similar in Medieval Islamic times with someone like Al-Kindi or Avicenna.
After disease, the main cause of human misery in history has overwhelmingly been other humans. Maybe if I went back to Mosaic times or thereabouts and managed to get a big dose of human-universality stuff in to the Torah (perhaps along Ba’hai lines), that’d head off all the religiously-supported conflict involving Abrahamic religions, which is really quite a lot of it - or at least, a lot of the stuff that seems most salient to me.
But, of course, even if you managed the job (bit of a challenge to synthesise ‘all humanity is one’ with the whole chosen-people business in Judaism) it wouldn’t prevent all the Abrahamic religiously-linked conflict in history by a long chalk. Some conflicts really do seem to have been driven by religious conviction (the earlier Crusades, for instance), and one might hope that those would go, but in many of the others it looks a lot more like straightforward secular motivations with religious backing brought in to provide backup moral justification. I suspect if you managed to tweak Christianity and Islam in to avowedly pacifistic religions, they wouldn’t have been quite so popular with leaders bent on conquest, which would simply lead to those religions being less widespread.
And it probably wouldn't prevent colonialism. You can fairly easily imagine ways in which, say, Indian Partition at independence could’ve gone better, but really it looks like problems set up way back and the better solution to having a smooth path avoiding genocidal war after British rule is to not have British Rule in the first place. But it didn’t get started with religion. Famously, the East India Company was massively resistant to letting Christian missionaries in at all, because they guessed - probably rightly - that doing so would have them driven out fairly promptly. Also, while you might be able to intervene to stop Elizabeth I giving them a Royal Charter to get started, there were many other European powers up to similar stuff at the time, and I doubt that, say, a Portuguese Raj would’ve been so much better than the British one was. A similar argument applies to colonialism in the Americas and Africa - you can imagine ways of blocking one particular colonial ruling power, but not the lot of them.
There’s the obvious single-points-in-history political lines. Killing Hitler has been done to death (sorry); I quite like Stephen Fry’s guess about how that might work out in Making History. And it’s common folk wisdom that preventing the assassination of Franz Ferdinand wouldn’t have made much difference to World War I. Lenin and a bunch of fellow revolutionary exiles were carried across Germany in a sealed train to foment revolution in Russia in 1917, though. The advantage to the Germans is obvious in retrospect: it ensured that Russia dropped out of the war. But it was controversial, to say the least. It seems likely that simply tipping off a high-ranking official in the German Provisional Government would be enough to thwart the scheme, or failing that the train could be stopped by, say, the accidental explosion of an ammunition supply train. The hope there is that by a chain of only-slightly-far-fetched events, the whole misery of totalitarianism in the C20th would be stopped. With the hardcore revolutionaries trapped in Germany, the Russian revolution doesn’t take an authoritarian turn and becomes a stable social-democratic state. The exiles are expelled back to Britain, where they don’t succeed in fomenting a hard revolution, but do trigger velvet one with a Labour landslide in 1918 like the one in 1945 in our timeline. Principles of international solidarity lead to a peaceful European Union founded in the 1920s, and coordinated action in the 1930s heads off the Great Depression there. Hmm, bit of a stretch.
While we’re on the great large-scale oppressions of the C20th, we might want to do something about Mao. One fun idea in my mind is if we imagine that Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of the nationalist Kuomintang, met some Scottish medical missionaries in the 1930s, who became close friends with his Christian, Western-educated wife, Soong May-ling. They convinced him, inter alia, of the importance of acting with rectitude, which led him to prioritise anti-corruption in the KMT. The KMT becomes significantly more effective as a result, and not only resists the Japanese invasion better, but is able to defeat the Chinese Communist Party - not just Mao - in the post-WW2 part of the Chinese Civil War. (The reason I like this idea is that my grandparents were Scottish medical missionaries in China in the 1930s, who became friends with Madame Chiang Kai-shek. Family legend does relate that they didn’t think Chiang was a terribly good egg, but as word has reached me it doesn’t say what efforts they made to improve corruption in his ranks.)
Back on the classic single-assassination-saves-millions front, we have getting rid of Genghis Khan. That yields great savings in lives lost if you imagine that it stops the whole of the Mongol conquests entirely, and racks up even more if the lack of that historical example prevents Tamerlane/Timur doing something similar later.
There’s other small tweaks that might be big helps. Giving Leopold II of Belgium a cerebral haemorrhage might’ve spared millions of deaths and untold suffering in the Congo Free State in the C19th. As with Hitler, it’s very tempting to read that particular horrible bit of history as a result largely of an individual in power being really pretty nasty.
It’d be very tempting to try to save the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas from the wave of disease that European contact brought. Not sure I can see how with an easy, single time trip, though. You could sink Columbus’ ships, or less-viciously, simply persuade his backers that it was a crackpot plan (which it was), but that would probably only defer the problem, not prevent it. Really you’d want to set up occasional contact from much, much earlier - which probably gets you back to an early Chinese link to the New World. But if you do manage that, you end up with a not-decimated population after European contact, which as well as saving lives directly would’ve made the subsequent history go very differently and perhaps much better. It might even have put Europeans off colonialism all together, which would be a massive win.
That Chinese link reminds me - there’s all the many, terrible wars in China before the C20th: off the top of my head, there’s the An Lushan rebellion in the C8th, the Manchu conquest in the C17th, the Taiping rebellion (and the subsequent Dungan revolt) in the mid-C19th, and even the Boxer rebellion (although the casualty list is shorter there). Some of those don’t look like they could be knocked on the head with a single tweak, but some do. For instance, you could zap An Lushan himself. He was even sentenced to death at one point in his youth, which looks an easy intervention place. But it’s worth noting that the fighting continued for years after he died anyway, so that might not work. On the other hand, the Taiping rebellion is one of my favourites, though, for lives-saved-vs-intervention-required. For this one you don’t have to kill anyone, or even persuade their parents to marry someone else. All you need to do is edit the results of the imperial civil service examinations, so that Hong Xiuquan passes, instead of failing so many times, and he’d have spent a longer, happier and considerably more peaceful life as a mandarin, rather than being the proximal cause and major leader of one of the most bloody wars in human history, which is going some considering when it happened.
Much more recently, there’s the Rwandan Civil War and the wars in the Congo, ongoing since the 1990s. Here it seems ludicrous to suggest that a simple tweak in history would’ve made a profound change. I think that’s probably because it’s more recent, and I lived through it, and it seemed very complex and didn’t (and doesn’t) admit of a single easy solution. I mean, there were obvious things that probably would’ve helped - for instance, the US could’ve pressured Mobutu to be less authoritarian back from the 60s - but I’m not convinced that would’ve fixed it all. (It probably would’ve done little to prevent the Rwandan Civil War, for instance, even if it worked.) You could pick off individual political or military leaders - but that doesn’t look obviously a win, since several died anyway and were replaced. Really to avoid the whole situation it looks like you need to go back to colonial times and avoiding colonialism altogether (as mentioned above). But that’s getting back in to history-I-don’t-remember. This makes me think that all my other ideas above only seem feasible because of the simplification yielded by historical distance.
Which brings me back to where I started. I’m not a Marxist, but I do think the material circumstances of historical events are massively important and that individual humans very rarely have such outsize impacts that changing those individuals would have a massive impact on human history. Which is why I prefer the idea of trying to kick-start general improvements earlier. But, of course, most of those are large-scale societal changes.
Anyway. What about you lot? What’s your favourite use of a single-trip time machine to change the world? Can you do better than the kill-Hitler cliche?
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/276306.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.