Time Travel and Mrs America
A reader asks:
May I ask your opinion regarding something in Avengers: Endgame? Did you find Cap’s decision to stay in the past a little … irresponsible?
I mean, not in the sense that he left behind folks in the present or that he chose to retire but that his decision made a lot of changes to how Peggy’s life would have turned out.
His whole arc in the MCU up until that point was to live in the present and to let go of the past. I would have expected that he respected how Peggy’s life turned out and the choices she’s made too much to even consider altering anything.
Did that decision (which was very satisfying romantically) seem to you like something the character would have considered?
My answer is twofold: first, if this were not a time travel story, the decision of a man to woo and wed of course make a lot of changes to how his wife’s life will turn out. That is sort of the point.
It goes without saying that a bridegroom no duty, under normal circumstances, to avoid asking for her hand in marriage, if he honestly loves her, and she him, and they will cleave to each other for better or worse, richer or poorer, sickness and health, forsaking all others, till death do them part. Indeed, not only his passions and his reason but also his duty to the girl he loves requires he marry her and make a happy home.
This leads to the second question, which is, since this is a time travel story, does it change the duty and responsibilities of the heroin this circumstance? Does time travel change the logic of story telling, to make a tragic ending more apt than a happy ending?
To answer the specific question, we have to answer what duties and responsibilities apply to time travelers in general which differ from those that apply in normal life.
So let us answer the more general question first. At the same time, let me explain why, as an author, I hate the idea of time travel, even though I enjoy to read (and write) stories based on the idea.
The problem afflicting all time travel stories, which makes cause and effect paradoxical, is that time travel makes moral law is paradoxical.
In a universe without time travel, the things done by a man in the past are done.
What is in our past cannot be changed, and the future cannot be known. But introduce time travel, and, suddenly, anyone whose future actions you know (because he is from your past) can be treated as a creature without free will, that is, an entity with no moral self determination. He is an NPC.
This includes the past self of the time traveler himself: from the point of view of the Wednesday Dr Who, Tuesday Dr Who is a like a robot, or a historical character, someone who cannot change his actions because they are set in stone. An NPC.
With time travel, an immoral act like killing an innocent baby, whom the Time Traveler knows will grow up to be a tyrant, seems moral, and a moral act, like saving that same innocent baby, seems immoral.
To make matters worse, if the time traveler on Thursday wants to undo an act he did on Tuesday, such as killing a child fated to be a tyrant, and he leaps backward in time to shoot his Monday self in order to preempt the Tuesday attack on the child fated to be a tyrant, he is killing a man who is, at that moment on Monday, not yet guilty of any crime. Is this moral or immoral? Is this suicide or self defense?
So if yet another version of himself from his own future leaps out of Friday afternoon to land in front of Wednesday, pistols ready, to prevent his Thursday self before the fated this Monday crime of killing his Tuesday self preemptively, can the Wednesday time traveler rightfully defend himself?
Because if it is wrong for Thursday on Monday to kill his innocent younger self in order to prevent the killing of the child on Tuesday, logically, by the same token, it must also be wrong Friday to kill Thursday on Wednesday to prevent Thursday from killing Tuesday on Monday to prevent the prevention.
And yet, also equally logically, on Wednesday, the Time Traveler is guilty of killing a child, and so can be killed in retaliation, or, better yet, killed before he commits the crime, because, unlike human justice, time traveler justice actually can unmake the crime and restore the dead.
Therefore, logically, the fact that killing the innocent is immoral makes it moral for a time traveler to kill the innocent.
I won’t even mention the moral problems arising from the possibility that the tyrant the child is fated to become turns out, in a plot twist, to be the Time Traveler himself, and the one event that warped and embittered his young mind to set him on the path of tyranny was seeing all these murders taking place in the nursery when he was young.
That is the problem with time travel stories.
Allow me to digress here to explain why I hate time travel stories. Everyone instinctively knows what makes a good story. Even young children grasp the basics. A story is an imitation in art of life. Humans learn through mimicking behavior. Stories are concrete examples either of good behavior leading to happiness or bad behavior leading toward tragedy.
There is more to stories than this, of course. Stories also have lyricism and other examples of craft to engage the audience and enchant the imagination. Verisimilitude in character and setting gives stories a more immediate relevance, whereas open moralizing cheats the art by being too blatant. An Aesop’s fable or a parable is not a story in this sense, since they are too sparse and curt for things like character development, plot development.
Insight into the human condition is addressed, even if shallowly, in a boy’s adventure story, and more deeply in other stories, but not in a myth or parable. The Prodigal Son in the parable of that same name, for example, is neither named nor described, nor is his tumultuous relationship with his mother on stage, nor do we learn the fate of the dancing girl, Zenobia, whom he recklessly seduced, and who bore him a bastard son in Babylon.
But introduce time travel, and the time traveler stands in relation to all the flatliners as playwright to character in a play, or as a god to a mortal. (NB: “Flatliners” is time traveler slang for non time travelers, in the same way that “muggles” is the wizard slang for non-wizards, “groundhogs” is spaceman slang for non-spacemen, and “flesh-slug” is robot slang for non-robots.)
The time traveler does not and cannot treat the flatliners as real people treat real people, for the simple reason that he has the power to edit their current actions based on sure knowledge of future actions, or reduce their current actions, or even their existence, into the realm of never-had-been by changing the past. Even if he never uses this power, the time traveler still has it, and is responsible for sins of omission as well as sins of commission for its misuse.
And, since time travel also makes immoral actions moral (such as killing a murderer before he commits or even contemplates his crime) or makes moral actions immoral (such as waiting until a murderer kills a victim the time traveler had the foreknowledge hence the power to save), misuse is logically unavoidable.
The moment your future self appears in your bedroom and puts the time-travel belt in your hands, you are responsible for letting Henry Tandy or Michael Keogh spare young Adolf Hitler on the battlefield or save him from rioters. The whole Holocaust is on your conscience. And, by the same token, any historical event that foreknowledge could prevent: Pearl Harbor, the Bolshevik revolution, the French Terror, the Black Plague, the Suicide of Cato, the Murder of Caesar, the Death of Socrates, the Abduction of Helen! And why didn’t you go back and find Lamech, Adah and Tsillah, Tubalcain, Jubal and Jabal, and pass out inflatable rafts?
Even if you do nothing, you know what historical characters, including your own past self, will do and have done, all things you could have prevented, but did not. You are responsible, throughout all time, for everything the mortals do that you could have prevented, but did not. You are not just playing at god, you cannot stop playing.
At the same time (no pun intended) you are not responsible for anything that happens because at any time, your future self, should he regret what present-you is about to do, can bampf back and jump in front of you and call halt.
He explains that without Hitler’s leadership, there is no rocketry program in the 1950s leading to the moonshot in 1969, therefore no moonbase in 1980 to hinder the UFO attacks which prevented the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s, which prevented the liftoff of the FTL saucer Jupiter 2 in 1997, and Earth’s Moon getting blown out of orbit into deep space in 1999, which prevents the launch of Discovery in 2001, leading to contact with the Monolith Builders and the evolution of the human race into the Danellians who built the time belt you are using!
Your children will use the time belt to create the First Era of Time Travel, which will litter the timestream with anachronisms and paradoxes leading to the Second and Third Era disasters, eventually leading to the creation of the Nexxal Brain of the Fourth Era of time travel. But if the Nexxal agent Ravel never comes into being, ergo the Legion of Time will never launch their great ship Chronion!
Hence the sexy but evil empress Sorainya of Gyronchi and the hellish future she represents will prevail in the final era of time against the lovely doe-eyed princess Lethonee of Jonbar, consigning the shining utopia of Jonbar to oblivion! So killing one tyrant in one time creates another tyrant in another!
But since you are a time traveler, no matter which you decide, if you have any regrets, you can merely bampf back to the decision point again and play out the other set of results. Nothing need happen because cause does not lead to effect for a time traveler, until and unless he permits it.
That is why I hate the idea of time travel.
But the moral calculation changes depending on what limits, if any, the story places on time travel.
The less one can do with time travel, the more like normal life it is, the more the normal rules of morality still apply.
In DOCTOR WHO, for example, the possibility of redoing or revising a scene containing the Doctor himself is ruled out as impossible: the TARDIS can only be used as machine to get the hero to the haunted house or Scottish countryside where the mysterious murders take place, it cannot be used to bampf into the future and read a newspaper and find out that the alien murderer was actually Mr McGreedy from the Haunted Museum all along.
Likewise, in THE MANY COLORED LAND by Julian May, the time travel is a one-way exile to the remote Pliocene, so no time paradox is likely to plague the plot there.
In Heinlein’s ‘By His Bootstraps‘ free will is an illusion, and you cannot even try to change the past. And, again, in Fritz Leiber’s ‘Try to Change the Past‘ you can try (as the title suggests) but the universe will shoot you through the head if you do. In “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester, the universe lets you think you can change the past, but all you do is consign yourself to the Phantom Zone.
All time travel stories hinder and limit the power of time travel in some way, because, without some limit to restore cause and effect, there is no cost hence no conflict hence no drama to anything the time traveler does.
In the ENDGAME film, it is explicitly stated that changing the past has no repercussions and does not change the future. That is the limit given here.
This makes no sense if you think about it logically, but if you think about anything too much in a superhero film, you spoil the magic, so let us merely grant that the time travel in MCU is somehow free from time paradox.
If we take this seriously as the rule, that means that no paradox applies: entering the world-line at a point in the past is merely treated the same as if you entered a parallel world, where, no matter what you think the future version of event may do or might do, no act of the time traveler can change his own memory or his own past: the time traveler’s acts only change one might-have-been into another might-have-been. The original timeline is untouched.
In effect, the time traveler sojourning the past is in the same position as a prophet or visionary who has remarkably clear and detailed expectations of what would otherwise happen should he chose not to act. As in A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Dickens, the time traveler has seen shadows of things that may come to pass rather than must come to pass.
In a story where this is the rule of time travel, Captain America’s knowledge of the future is merely a remarkably clear guess about a might-be.
When he stumbles across Peggy Carter, still young and living in the Cold War years, Cap is in the same situation, morally, as a man who merely but mistakenly thought his true love was long dead, and discovers she is alive.
His arc of letting go of the past was because he had been frozen in ice for so many decades that all of his past life was lost beyond reach. The stoic resignation of a man stranded on a desert island with no boat and no means to make one coming to realize rescue is impossible is a perfectly understandable character arc. The stoic does what he has to do because he has to do it.
But if a rescue ship arrives, and his old home and his faithful fiancee are still waiting, why, then, that arc is over because the necessity is no longer necessary.
Neither Cap nor anyone owes anything to Peggy Carter’s life without him, or decisions she is fated to make in the future but has not made yet. Robinson Crusoe owes no loyalty to the island which formed his prison.
The timeline where Peggy never sees Cap again is the timeline that only happens if Cap the time traveler decides not to save her from her life of lonely emptiness. In that time line she never looks at the face of her little sons, James Rogers or her beautiful daughter, Sarah Rogers.
(Yes, I know the names of Steve’s children in two alternate continuities. How is THAT for geek knowledge, fanboys?)
Why in the world should such phantom non-events about a non-future that Cap edits out of existence be something Cap should respect or honor or seek to preserve, even at the cost of his own happiness?
Besides, any maiden who ponders whether or not to wed, knows she is erasing one possible future, either a future of being a lonely and childless spinster, in order to create a new future, or of being an obedient and dutiful wife and mother, queen of her household, and a love goddess in her nuptial bower.
For myself, I cannot even fathom or even imagine what possible argument could be erected to support the idea Captain America feels or should feel some sort of duty or obligation to the might-have-been possible timeline where Peggy is a childless and lonely spinster, miserable and unfulfilled.
He comes from the 1940s. Men had sane and normal ideas about women in those days. The disastrous pinko idea about shoving nubile damsels into the rat race or onto the battlefield, so that they could become crude and unfeminine under the stress and competition of man’s world, was not even on the radar back then.
That timeline is nothing more than the bad outcomes issuing from the sad decision of Captain America to ditch a Nazi superplane filled with bombs in the icy North Sea before New York was struck and destroyed. He made an ultimate act of self sacrifice, but it was the Red Skull who forced him into the position where that sacrifice play was the only possible move.
If Cap owes the timeline of spinster Peggy any loyalty or respect, this is the same as saying he owes the evil outcomes springing from the crimes of Red Skull loyalty and respect, and that is absurd.
I submit that is it perfectly clear that fate, or fortune, or some cosmic superbeing such as Eternity, or the One Above All, or Stan Lee, intended Cap and Peggy to wed and live a long a happy peacetime life.
Ergo the Red Skull’s evil was an abhorrent aberration, an interruption. If time travel and reality altering shenanigans all had to conspire to undo this interruption, so be it.
Because happy endings and sweet romance are the only proper endings to a tale like this.
And Peggy was smoking hot in that red dress, so any other considerations of time travel and respecting the past or future, no red blooded American soldier boy should bother spending a thought on.
The Future Mrs. Peggy Rogers
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
