I didn’t post much yesterday because I was tied up much of the morning helping my dad, and for much of the afternoon taking the boys into Baton Rouge for math class. Afterward, we went to see the new Mission Impossible movie (instantly forgettable, but fun), then out for pizza, and then undertook the long drive back to the country. It was especially fun for me because this is the first thing I’ve been able to do in a long time without guilt that I had not yet finished the revision of my Benedict Option book proposal (which I did on Sunday night, and also the sample chapter).

On the way home, we came up with a game that I later thought would be a fun diversion for readers on this blog. The question is this: If you could go back to the [fill in the blank] century and prevent a single event from happening, which one would you choose, and why?

The only restriction was that the event has to be a generally applicable one, not something that affects only your family. In other words, you couldn’t say, “I would have prevented Great Aunt Sadie from marrying that Bible salesman.” But you can’t be too general, as in saying, “Prevented World War II.”

We all agreed that for the 21st century, we would have prevented 9/11. Here were my others:

20th Century: This was a difficult one. My first thought was, “Prevent the Versailles Treaty from being so harsh on Germany” — this to stop Hitler from coming to power. But that still would have left Lenin, and then Stalin, in place. Better to stop World War I, which led to the Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of Nazism, the Second World War, and the Cold War. What’s the best way to have done this? Prevent the assassination of the Austrian archduke doesn’t seem sufficient. Something else would have set off that powder keg, don’t you think? I’m still thinking of my answer. Was there a single event, the prevention of which would have spared us World War I? I don’t know that there was. Perhaps preventing in some way the extremely ambitious Kaiser Wilhelm II from succeeding his father would have been the most effective single act to prevent the suicide of the West. But I don’t know for sure.

19th Century: The world would have been better off, all things considered, if Karl Marx had never found a publisher.

18th Century: Preventing the French Revolution would have been for the best. Hard to know where to start with this one, given how complex the causes were. My guess would be preventing the failure of the King’s finance minister, Necker, to stabilize royal finances and to put the economy on more stable footing. If memory of my reading serves, Necker was thwarted by various aristocrats. Had the state’s finances been in better shape, it’s possible that necessary reform and transition away from absolute monarchy could have happened peacefully and gradually. But I kind of doubt it. As with World War I, it seems that the awful thing was bound to happen. Similarly with Marx and his publisher, if Marx himself had not lived, would the conditions of the times have produced a Marx anyway? That’s a rather Marxist question, come to think of it.

We didn’t get beyond that in the game, so I’ll stop there. If we had continued on to the 17th century, I would have said something about stopping the wars of religion, and in the 16th, the Reformation. But there too, the causes are so complex that it seems impossible to imagine the one thing that would have kept it from happening. The corruption in the Roman Catholic Church that led to the Reformation built over a long period of time. Seems to me that the more one digs deeply into these games, the more it seems that with these major events, things could hardly have happened any other way.

I”m traveling this morning to Nashville for the ERLC conference. More later.

UPDATE:Please confine your counterfactuals to specific centuries.