The Uselessness of "What if...?" Questions

“Millions of people around the world believe we have been visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings.  What if it were true?  Did ancient aliens really help to shape our history?”

These lines open the History Channel series Ancient Aliens.  The show purports to examine and reveal the hidden truths of how extraterrestrial travelers influenced the course of human history.  Apparently alien involvement has been pretty extensive.  According to the show, aliens are responsible for pretty much every major development of the past; including dinosaur extinction, human evolution, the growth of civilization, the founding of religions, the American Revolution, and the rise of Nazi Germany, to name a few.  Now in its fifth season, I suppose Ancient Aliens would be considered a hit, but it is not without its detectors, who attempt to debunk the show’s claims on a point-by-point basis by showing how ancient alien proponents misrepresent or distort available evidence to defend their positions.  While valid, these critiques overlook a more fundamental problem, evidenced by the program’s opening lines.  The entire enterprise is based on the counterfactual question “What if it were true?”  The fact is that it is not true and engaging in counterfactual inquiry is a poor way to think about the past.

Most people probably are familiar with counterfactuals.  Some of the more popular ones include: What if the South had won the Civil War?  What if the Allies had lost World War II?  What if the United States did not drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  The facts remain, however, that the North won the Civil War, the Axis powers lost World War II, and the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan.  To consider otherwise holds little value.

In his seminal book, Historians' Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Perennial, 1970), David Hackett Fischer discusses the limitations of counterfactuals, or “the fallacy of fictional questions” as he calls them.  “There is nothing fallacious in fictional constructs,” Fischer writes, “as long as they are properly recognized for what they are and are clearly distinguished from empirical problems.”  Fischer acknowledges counterfactuals’ usefulness as metaphors or analogies of suggested inference, but concludes, “[T]hey prove nothing and can never be proved by an empirical method” (original emphasis, page 16).

I thought about counterfactuals in the wake of this week’s verdict in George Zimmerman’s trial.  There are variations on this theme, but the dominating fictional question asks “What if Trayvon Martin were white and George Zimmerman were black?”  Martin’s father advanced this idea during his interview on the Today show, further asking of the jurors “What would your verdict have been had it been your child?”

The loss of any life through gun violence is tragic.  For some, the tragedy of gun violence plays out on a nearly daily basis.  Nevertheless, the facts of this case remain that Martin was an African American male teenager, Zimmerman is an Hispanic male adult, and the prosecution failed to prove its case against Zimmerman beyond a reasonable doubt according to the rules of our system of jurisprudence.  “What if” questions and similar conjectures about this case do not alter these facts.

 

Counterfactuals may be effective for political posturing, dramatic effect, or peddling outlandish pseudoscientific ideas, but they are not useful in advancing public discourse about race, gun violence, law enforcement, the criminal justice system, or any of the myriad issues our society faces.  To paraphrase Fischer, why go out of our way to make difficult problems impossible, when they are already difficult enough to solve as they actually are?