Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [94]
Figure 10.2. What if Auschwitz had not become a death camp? A paper trail of architectural plans documents the development of Auschwitz from a labor camp to house Russian prisoners of war for the purpose of building an ideal Nazi town into a death factory. That counterfactual may hinge on a very specific question: What if the Germans had successfully conquered the Soviet Union?
In the controversial book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, for example, Daniel Goldhagen writes in the counterfactual mode in defense of his thesis that deep-seated German anti-Semitism created the Holocaust.
While members of other national groups aided the Germans in their slaughter of Jews, the commission of the Holocaust was primarily a German undertaking. Non-Germans were not essential to the perpetration of the Holocaust, and they did not supply the drive and initiative that pushed it forward. To be sure, had the Germans not found European (especially eastern European) helpers, then the Holocaust would have unfolded somewhat differently, and the Germans would likely not have succeeded in killing as many Jews.11
Again, note the counterfactual conditional—“had the Germans not . . . then the Holocaust”—and the use of such modal thinking to infer causality: if non-Germans were not essential to the Holocaust, then Germans were. Even the oft-employed quip “No Hitler, No Holocaust” is a counter-factual conditional.
Counterfactuals and Science
Whether Goldhagen is right is not my primary concern here, although I think he is not because of another counterfactual condition: how to explain the exceptions—Germans who helped Jews, and non-Germans who aided in the Holocaust (especially French and Poles). This should be a quantifiable and testable hypothesis; unfortunately Goldhagen never attempts to do so. Like most historians, he resorts to amassing data in favor of his viewpoint without directly addressing the counterfactuals.
Thus, my prime concern is more in considering counterfactuals and contingencies as additional tools of a science of history that help us to tease apart causal vectors. As we have seen, historians already use them extensively, so what I am proposing is that we acknowledge their use and more consciously identify them in their causal (or countercausal) role.
Counterfactual thinking, in fact, is prevalent in science once you look for it. Scientists study systems of interacting elements—astronomers examine the movement of planets, stars, and galaxies; biologists record the complex web of an ecosystem; psychologists observe the interactions of people in a crowd. The component parts of these systems can be labeled, as in the conditional “if p then q.” If a star shows a certain type of wobble then it may have a planetary body orbiting it. If a chemical is introduced into an ecosystem then certain organisms may disappear. If a crowd is of a certain size then an individual in the crowd will probably comply to mob psychology. These are all real examples of conditional statements for which counterfactuals help us test hypotheses. The astronomer suspects that stellar wobble means a planetary body is present because of the counterfactual observation that when such wobble is not present in other nearby objects, no other body is present. The biologist knows about the relationship between introduced chemicals and local extinction because of the counterfactual observation that when the chemical is removed the affected species return. The psychologist understands the correlation between group size and social compliance because of the counterfactual observation that when group sizes are smaller, less compliance occurs.
In some sciences, the counterfactual conditionals are directly testable in the form of experimental