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?

All the News that's Print to Fit?

During a poignant scene in the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver, math teacher Jamie Escalante, who became famous for his students’ success on the Advance Placement calculus test, confronts Educational Testing Service agents investigating alleged cheating among his students.  Escalante, as portrayed by Edward James Olmos, implies that his East Los Angeles students’ cultural heritage has more to do with the investigation than any actual cheating.  “There are two kinds of racism, Mr. Escalante,” one agent replies, “singling out people because they’re members of a particular group, and not singling out people because they’re members of a particular group.”  I thought about this construction of race again this past week when reading Sun-Times columnist Alejandro Escalona’s piece about the recent release and publication of Cosmopolitan for Latinas, an English-language periodical based on the original Cosmopolitan magazine.

Mr. Escalona argues in his column that the continued growth of English-language media outlets is a cause for celebration in that major companies not only recognize the purchasing power of Latinos but also the diversity of Latino populations, an ever-increasing number of which whose first language is English instead of Spanish.  Other such high-profile demonstrations exist and have for a while.  Ever hear of the Latin Grammys?  As such, the growth of English-language news and entertainment media for Latino audiences is seen as an integration of Mexican- and similar national-origin populations’ in the United States.

Marketing such media solely to and for Latinos, however, is narrow and shortsighted.  Doing so further balkanizes these target audiences.  If the information these outlets convey is important for one group, is it also not important for the larger population regardless of national, racial, or ethnic heritage?  I think so.  Further, the larger segment of society is somewhat poorer for not knowing about issues confronting the rest, being aware of their concerns, or otherwise being exposed to aspects of their culture.  The Latin Grammys, for example, may reward musical achievement while celebrating Latin music, but do not do enough to expose non-Latino audiences to that very same music.  Relatedly, English-language Latino news and entertainment media will inform an audience but not one large enough to make a lasting impression.

Before celebrating the ever-increasing presence of Spanish-language and English-language media marketed to Hispanic, Latino, and similar populations, we should consider first who and what is excluded by its very nature.

Ozzie Guillen and the Latino Ethnic Identity

Any devotee of Chicago sports was familiar with the Blizzard of Oz long before his rise to infamy during this past week.  Some of us learned to tolerate his verbal antics while others of us learned to be chagrined.  And while Ozzie Guillen’s latest controversy is nothing new for some, as sports columnists from the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune make clear, the reaction of Miami’s Cuban-origin community to Guillen’s remarks about Cuba’s former leader, Fidel Castro, offers another opportunity to explore the Latino ethnic identity.

Like a Rorschach test, one can read just about anything into this story.  One read is how the Marlins team owners seemingly misjudged Cuban’s love of the baseball.  Clearly some are willing to allow their hatred of Castro to trump any appreciation of the sport.  Another read would suggest that Miami’s Cubans are more eager to exert a Cuban nationalist identity, one that supersedes their identification with American baseball - long admired and romanticized as the quintessential national pastime shared from one generation to the next.  A more compelling read, however, is how the reaction of some among Miami’s Cuban-origin population further suggests – however anecdotally - the fallacy of a "Latino community" in the United States.

I argued recently that a Latino identity is an homogeneous monolithic that obviates the cultural heritages of diverse people.  Elsewhere on this site was discussed the Pew Hispanic Research Center’s findings that American Hispanics and Latinos do not proclaim a pan-ethnic identity, choosing instead a non-American, but nationally-bound identity.

And now we have Miami’s Cubans.  Like a switch hitter at the plate, they are exerting a nationalist identity with one hand and denying affiliation with a Latino American identity with the other.  Further, Guillen’s own Venezuelan heritage creates an additional crack in the "Latino" facade.  Miami’s Cuban-origin population does not recognize Guillen as a fellow Latino American in calling for his firing or organizing boycotts until he is fired.  Rather, they see someone insensitive if not antithetical to their own Cuban national interests.

The irony here of course is the former Cuban leader's own appreciation for baseball, evidenced by his likely or unlikely try-out for one major league team or another.  Perhaps Miamians should heed the words of James Earl Jones as Terrance Mann in Field of Dreams as they confront lingering tensions emerging from any nationalistic, cultural, or ethnic differences.  Baseball, he says, “reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again."

Amen to that.