Would You Go Back to 1889 and Take Out Baby Hitler?: Time-Travel Expert James Gleick Answers the Philosophical Question

The vast major­i­ty of us have no incli­na­tion to kill any­one, much less a small child. But what if we had the chance to kill baby Adolf Hitler, pre­vent­ing the Holo­caust and indeed the Sec­ond World War? That hypo­thet­i­cal ques­tion has endured for a vari­ety of rea­sons, touch­ing as it does on the con­cepts of geno­cide and infant mur­der in forms even more high­ly charged than usu­al. It also presents, in the words of Time Trav­el: A His­to­ry author James Gle­ick, “two prob­lems at once. There’s a sci­en­tif­ic prob­lem — you can set your mind to work imag­in­ing, ‘Could such a thing be pos­si­ble and how would that work?’ And then there’s an eth­i­cal prob­lem. ‘If I could, would I, should I?’ ”

By the sim­plest analy­sis, writes Vox’s Dylan Matthews, the ques­tion comes down to, “Is it eth­i­cal to kill one per­son to save 40-plus mil­lion peo­ple?” But time-trav­el fic­tion has been around long enough that we’ve all inter­nal­ized the mes­sage that it’s not quite so sim­ple. We can even ques­tion the assump­tion that killing baby Hitler would pre­vent the Holo­caust and World War II in the first place.

Maybe those ter­ri­ble events hap­pen on any time­line, regard­less of whether Hitler lives or dies: that would align with the Novikov self-con­sis­ten­cy prin­ci­ple, which holds that “time trav­el could be pos­si­ble, but must be con­sis­tent with the past as it has already tak­en place,” and which has been dra­ma­tized in time-trav­el sto­ries from La Jetée to The Ter­mi­na­tor.

Gle­ick does­n’t have a straight answer in the Vox video on the killing-baby-hitler ques­tion above as to whether he him­self would go back to 1889 and put baby Hitler out of action. “When you change his­to­ry,” he says of the moral of the count­less many time trav­el sto­ries he’s read, “you don’t get the result you’re look­ing for. Every day, every­thing we do is a turn­ing point in his­to­ry, whether it’s obvi­ous to us or not.” This in con­trast to for­mer Flori­da gov­er­nor and Unit­ed States pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Jeb Bush, who, when he had the big baby-Hitler ques­tion put to him by the Huff­in­g­ton Post, returned a hearty “Hell yea I would.” But giv­en time to reflect, even he con­clud­ed that such an act “could have a dan­ger­ous effect on every­thing else.” It appears that some of the lessons of time-trav­el sto­ries have been learned, but as for what human­i­ty will do if it actu­al­ly devel­ops time-trav­el tech­nol­o­gy — maybe we’d rather not peer into the future to find out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s the Ori­gin of Time Trav­el Fic­tion?: New Video Essay Explains How Time Trav­el Writ­ing Got Its Start with Charles Dar­win & His Lit­er­ary Peers

What Hap­pened When Stephen Hawk­ing Threw a Cock­tail Par­ty for Time Trav­el­ers (2009)

Pro­fes­sor Ronald Mal­lett Wants to Build a Time Machine in this Cen­tu­ry … and He’s Not Kid­ding

Carl Jung Psy­cho­an­a­lyzes Hitler: “He’s the Uncon­scious of 78 Mil­lion Ger­mans.” “With­out the Ger­man Peo­ple He’d Be Noth­ing” (1938)

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

The New York Times’ First Pro­file of Hitler: His Anti-Semi­tism Is Not as “Gen­uine or Vio­lent” as It Sounds (1922)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.