Fantastic October 1961, Mike Christie, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“A single choice can branch out to infinite realities.”
– The Watcher
As historians, we’re often taught to be skeptical of counterfactual history, speculations into how historical events would be different if things had gone differently. History, we’re told, is an account of the past, of things that actually happened. Not the things that didn’t happen, not the things that could almost have happened. Imagining a world where Hitler stays in art school or Castro makes the Major Leagues can be fun and fanciful, but also unserious and unprofessional. The headline to a 2014 Richard Evans’ Guardian essay bluntly stated: “‘What if’ is a waste of time.”1
Evans wasn’t referring to the Marvel Cinematic MultiUniverse’s animated Disney+ series What If…?, but he might as well have been. In his view, counterfactuals belong to the realm of cartoonishly, absurd speculation. If a world where magic, superpowers, and extraterrestrials are taken for granted, what could be even less realistic than a TV show premised on alternate histories of that universe? Perhaps the answer is forthcoming in the impending release of Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.
Yet making up a world in which, for example, “there had been no American Revolution” seems no less far fetched as a Marvel timeline in which a zombie plague spreads across the world. A seeming target for Evans’s derision, Niall Ferguson’s 1997 Virtual History is a compendium of speculative fantasies, each trying to outdo the other for most sensationalist outcomes. Its effort to titillate and shock is proclaimed boldly with a cover displaying a Nazi flag draped on Big Ben—a far more outlandish fake history than one in which the Third Reich is battled by super-soldier Peggy Carter instead of Steve Rogers. In fact, despite the disbelief-stretching excesses of Marvel’s superheroism, What If…? is still more realistic and offers a more complex meditation on historiography than that self-proclaimed “academically respectable” book. At times What If…? illustrates exactly what’s ridiculous about “virtual histories,” but it also highlights why, in some ways, counterfactual thinking is necessary, more inevitable than Thanos.
When we scholars of the past indulge in counterfactual history, we place ourselves in the position of imagining how some change in the past would affect subsequent events. Writing at the beginning of World War One centenary commemorations, Evans observed that often-patriotic Britannic speculations about Europe’s fate had the U.K. not entered the war are impossible to substantiate.2 We can’t actually point to concrete evidence of what happened in a counterfactual world. In a fictional multiverse such an objection is moot. In What If…?, The Watcher, a narrator-cum-frame story character, stands outside the multiverses and eponymously watches what takes place within countless timelines. The Watcher is in some ways a caricature of what an objective historian would be if given the surveillance powers of a multi-dimensional panopticon and infinite time to observe. The Watcher possesses a glowing gods-eyed view of everything from an outside vantage, and proclaims himself to be a passive curator.
Unlike the Marvel Multiverse, we non-Watchers can’t simply look into the next world over and observe how things unfolded. How can we know how German or British internal politics would have evolved under different circumstances, whether the U.S. would have entered the conflict, whether any of these differences would have led to a Germany that didn’t come under the sway of Hydra the Nazis later in the century? In the real world, counterfactuals require an active construction, an imagination, a tacit declaration of the landscape of possibilities. To paraphrase Carl Sagan: in order to make a counterfactual apple pie from scratch, you must first invent an alternate universe.
But the Watcher’s self-professed passivity is an impossible one. The show illustrates that in the later episodes, as the Watcher is first tempted (while watching characters searching in an archive, no less!) and then compelled to “break his oath” and intervene. But even before the fourth wall is literally broken, the Watcher acts by selecting which stories we view along with him. Where every story represents an alternate reality defined by a single difference from the actual reality of the original MCU Infinity Saga, these choices are tantamount to telling us which choices, which actions, actually matter – and which ones don’t.
Tacitly, we historians make decisions like this all the time: when we say that a particular battle, a particular election, a particular act of human will matters—we imply that if these hadn’t happened, history would have been different. This is what it means to make claims about cause and effect, about influence or motivation: logically embedded such conclusions are a statement about counterfactual scenarios. Even when we don’t dwell on the details of those non-real narratives, we make use of that conceit. In fact, often we put potential critics in the position of having to invoke counterfactuals against our claims of cause and influence, forcing them to prove a negative claim. In a universe with only one timeline, this is a fiendish difficulty. On the other hand, in a multiverse where such thought experiments actually have happened, the Watcher becomes the omnipotent Reviewer 2.3
Nonetheless, writers use counterfactuals, unavoidably, not to glorify or lament what might have been, but to emphasize the moral and social complexities of the history of this real world. The animated thought experiments of Marvel’s entertainment juggernaut makes that sense clearer to us than any reductio ad dystopia that most sensationalist virtual histories describe. What If…? isn’t part of the MCUM because the episodes hold up well as independent stories (most don’t.) They matter because they get us to think in a new light about the original “real” world of the Infinity Saga. Even in the world of Marvel, the alternate histories also actually exist, the emotional and narrative power in What If…? comes from giving us a deeper sense of the personalities and social circumstances that shaped the original story. We see that some moments that were portrayed as life-changing may not have really made much difference, while others truly lead to much different worlds.
What If…? ’s premise (at least in the few alternate realities that the Watcher chooses to curate for us) is that out of seemingly small choices, worlds are made. This conceit is one of radical historical contingency. This is a typical objection people raise with counterfactual history, that it places too much emphasis on individual agency and far less attention to larger social or environmental forces that shape events.
As a result, counterfactual narratives frequently tell stories about actual history that emphasize those individuals, that places their agency at the center of the story. They often center moments of violence, as if intellectual, political and moral conflicts are ultimately only resolved by war.4 Counterfactualism that resorts to such violence relies upon a cheap and lazy theory of history that undermines the richness of human experience. It’s embellished and caricatured by the superhero tropes, in which singular individuals are granted extraordinary ability to act and exert their will, and often morally complex issues are resolved by action-packed combat. But at the same time the powers of these superheroes illustrate the absurdity and moral poverty of seeing the world as shaped by great men. The primary timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe deals with the humanitarian fallout of the snap/unsnap in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the complex sociopolitical world is trivialized by the thought that if aliens had just abducted the wrong child twenty years earlier, it could all have been avoided. In effect, What If…? illustrates the intellectual laziness of “Great Man” theories of history by showing how greatly powered individuals fail to bend history to their will.
When history turns to counterfactuals to tacitly confirm our suppositions about the importance of cause and effect, our failures of imagination become lapses in morality. If Tony Stark can turn from hero to villain because a different soldier rescued him; if Thanos’s genocide in one timeline can be excused because he missed out on the eye-opening talk with T’Challa that proved so effective in another; then we witness the excuse making that comes from simply chalking up historical cruelties as the work of men acting by the “standards of their own time.” This is the refuge of the Lost Cause mythologist, the apologist for slavery, slaughter, and supremacy. We cannot condemn the Thanoi of real history, when we see that he had the potential to be a good guy after all.5 Counterfactual history isn’t merely a waste of time, it’s a political Panglossian celebration, suggesting that things today are good because they could have been worse. Bad things may have happened, but at least there aren’t Nazis in the Parliament.
Counterfactual history allows us this indulgence in a morally flat history, the intellectual and ethical equivalent of a parent-free party in Vegas. “Anything is possible,” Ultron declares, “in a multiverse.” For those to whom anything is possible, the only true threat to history is the revisionist: the historian who intervenes, the oath-breaking Watcher who literally changes some universes in order to oppose some evil. But while Marvel treats its multiverse as a library of infinite permutations from which to explore new narratives, in our real history where alternate worlds are only counterfactual, we have moral topology. Some counterfactual outcomes are more plausible, more stable, more proximate to the actual world. That’s what makes them worth considering, at least to some extent.
Perhaps this is what explains the popular appeal of counterfactual history, whether it’s in a cinematic world of superheroes or banging the podium at a local school board meeting. What If…? begins as a story where the existence of alternate timelines means never having to say you’re sorry, screaming “party pooper” at those who harsh your proclaimed passivity by suggesting that you clean up after your messy use of available facts. It’s perhaps counterintuitive, but it’s a fictional story that shows us the moral consequences of fictional history.
- Richard J. Evans, “’What if’ is a waste of time,” The Guardian, March 13, 2014.
- Yoav Tenembaum, “Counterfactual History and the Outbreak of World War I,” Perspectives on History, May 1, 2015.
- For the unfamiliar: “Reviewer 2” refers to often anonymous peer review reports which are presented to authors who submit academic articles for consideration. Is an academic joke that Reviewer 2’s comments are often critically dismissive of the manuscript, often for ill-informed or cantankerous reasons. For more detailed discussion, see: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/empirical-analysis-tells-reviewer-2-go-f-yourself/
- Mark Grimsley, “Forays into “What If” History: An After Action Report,” Perspectives on History, May 1, 2015.
- Adam Serwer, “The Myth of the Kindly General Lee,” The Atlantic, June 4, 2017.
