Entertaining hypotheticals

Dakin Matthews as Colonel Stonehill in True Grit

The Coen brothers’ adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel True Grit hews very closely to the source material, with the dialogue often coming from the novel verbatim. But one of my favorite lines is a Coen creation, inserted seamlessly into Mattie Ross’s haggling with Colonel Stonehill, licensed auctioneer, cotton factor.

When Stonehill insists that he is not liable to Mattie’s family for a horse stolen from his stables, Mattie argues, “You were the custodian. If you were a bank and were robbed you could not simply tell the depositors to go hang.”

Stonehill replies with this immortal line:

“I do not entertain hypotheticals, the world as it is is vexing enough.”

I have used this line many, many times in the classroom. I commend it to other history teachers.

Entertaining hypotheticals, musing over What ifs, is the great trap of historical study. Leaving behind the already “vexing” question of what actually happened to pursue imaginary alternate histories based on decisions never made, accidents that never happened, or outcomes that one would simply prefer—this is almost always a waste of time. Such histories are fundamentally unknowable precisely because they never happened. Per the late Kenneth Minogue:

“The future is largely inscrutable; indeed we may count ourselves exceptionally fortunate if we acquire much of an understanding of the past.”

Stick just with what happened and you’ll be busy the rest of your life.

Alternate history can, however, be fun. During a sick day this week I started Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland, which takes place in Berlin in 1964, but a 1964 in which Nazi Germany won World War II and the city is preparing to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday. And it’s a great novel—an engaging, well-paced, suspenseful, carefully imagined mystery thriller. Harris has done his research and made this setting as plausible and as deeply rooted in reality as it can possibly be.

But there are the nagging details—foremost among them, how likely is it that Hitler, whose health was disintegrating by 1944, could have lived to the age of 75? (Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle does this slightly better, since Hitler is dead and Martin Bormann is the Führer by the time that one begins.)

This is less of a problem for a mystery thriller, of course. But then some people play the hypothetical game in deadly earnest. Yesterday, yet another Instagram story from a hugely popular law, government, and history “explainer” who bills herself as “American’s Government Teacher” came my way. Writing to celebrate a flute solo at the Library of Congress as a significant moment in American racial politics, the author attacks James Madison thus:

He was one of the reasons we have something called the 3/5 compromise, which permitted people who owned other humans to count them as 3/5 of a person in an effort to increase their political power.

Without the 3/5 compromise, slavery would have ended at least 60 years before it did.

Ignore the fact that the Three-Fifths Compromise was effectively stricken from the Constitution by the 13th and 14th Amendments, so that this should read “we had something called the 3/5 compromise;” that who exactly benefited from the compromise was hotly debated then and is, among honest historians, hotly debated now; and that the compromise did not assert that certain unspecified people were only “3/5 of a person” but stipulated that only three-fifths of their total population would count toward apportioning congressmen. This last is a self-congratulatory, politically useful, and therefore ineradicable myth, but a myth nonetheless.

No, ignore all that. Look at the “would have” in the second part. Whether slavery would have ended in 1805 as opposed to 1865 is unknowable. There is no way of knowing whether this is true, because it did not happen. This is pure speculation—an uninformed, irresponsible hypothetical. And the true story, God knows, is vexing enough.

So much for being an “explainer,” but keep celebrating that flute.

If you must entertain hypotheticals, think of it as a parlor game, or a delicate fictional trick that should only be attempted by a master craftsman. Otherwise, Col Stonehill’s advice should serve us all well.