the &^#@*! side of history

Somewhat masochistically, I now keep an eye out for uses of my least favorite phrase. In case you're interested, here are some recent gems:

• From HuffPost, "Donald Trump once again cemented himself on the wrong side of history, pleading Tuesday not to remove statues honoring the Confederacy."
• From the NYTimes, "Sometimes standing on the wrong side of history in defense of a cause you think is right is still just standing on the wrong side of history."
• From Vice, "Let's keep it simple: The statues should come down because they honor men who fought on the wrong side of history."
• From The Cut, "But then, Google might simply want to be on the right side of history. Using science to explain the differences between groups of people is a look that has never aged well."

(As an aside: while my frustration extends equally to anyone making claims about the right or the wrong sides of history, the latter formulation seems more popular these days. We are clearly feeling less triumphant and more reproachful.)

In every instance, "the wrong side of history" could be replaced with a simple normative statement and the sentence would be all the better for it: "defending a unjust position, even in defense of a just cause, is still wrong"; "the statues should come down because they honor men who fought for an unjust cause"; "but then, Google might want to do the right thing," etc, etc.

Clearly the authors are uncomfortable with making simple judgments about right and wrong. I sympathize: it's often hard to demonstrate why something is wrong. So they appeal to history instead, as though doing so would definitively show the reader how people ought to act now. But most people have no idea what to do when confronted with political or moral dilemmas, and history (at least none that I've read) does not give us any reason to believe otherwise.

Yes, slavery has been eliminated, the confederacy was defeated, and scientific sexism and racism have been proven wrong, but that doesn't mean we've moved beyond injustice. The one thing history does show is that humans are brilliant at finding new and interesting ways to torment each other. 

learn to cook

From a NYTimes profile of the novelist Claire Messud:

"I had a sense that the costs [of having a family] were high,’’ she said later. ‘‘And I had a sense that I didn’t want that to be my fate. I had a sense that I’d better not learn to cook, which I never did."

From a Harper's magazine article on women in the alt-right:

In late 2016, two pundits started an online advice column...a female reader looking for an alt-right spouse got [this] advice.“Become as attractive as you are capable of. Commit to having many white babies!...Learn to cook.”

Why is a woman learning to cook making a "traditional" statement of some kind? Cooking is a skill, and a crucial one at that.  You will eat thousands and thousands of meals in your lifetime. Why would you cede the responsibility for preparing all of those meals to others? By learning to cook you are neither resigning yourself to a lifetime of drudgery nor preparing to find an alt-right husband: you are learning a basic skill. 

Obviously this applies to all humans, regardless of gender. It always seemed insane to me that anyone could make it to adulthood without learning to prepare a simple meal for themselves. This is poor parenting! Learning to crochet can be optional, learning to feed yourself should be mandatory.

And maybe if Claire Messud ever learned to cook, her husband—who, according to the article, is an excellent cook—could finally be free to have a career! Poor man. 

values ≠ morals

There's an article from Harper's Bazaar floating around the interwebs, which argues that if you should happen to find yourself married to a Trump supporter you should divorce them. Here's a part with only minimal hyperbole:

Supporting Trump at this point does not indicate a difference of opinions. It indicates a difference of values. Values aren’t like hobbies or interests. They don’t change over time, and they more or less define who you are. Trump’s administration may have been, for some of us, a time when what we value has become much clearer to us.

Re: Trump divorces, all I have to say is that people get divorced for a lot of stupid reasons and we hardly need another one.

Also, can I pause here to kvetch about how writers (who are presumably paid to choose their words carefully?) use the word values when what they actually mean is morals. Value pertains first of all to the monetary worth of something. So the word you use to justify the price of the used bathing suit you just posted on eBay should not be the same one you use to discuss morality. I know that using value as a synonym for moral is here to stay—thank you, Nietzsche—I just wish that writers would, you know, think about words more.

Anyway, all of that aside, my true beef here is with the idea that people's morals don't change. I'm going to take the author seriously and assume she really believes this. If so, then she's suggesting that she was born with the correct political and moral ideas and that absolutely nothing has changed since. (I would really like to speak to her middle school classmates to verify this.) Or maybe let's be generous and say that by the age of 20 she was morally developed enough to be able to make just decisions about absolutely everything for the rest of her life. I guess in a perfect world this is conceivable—after all, she could be Jesus!

And Jesus would be totally chill about your divorce if it was for totally justifiable Trump Reasons, right? And if you don't currently agree with this lady about Trump (for any reason) then he would totally understand that you are not just irredeemable during this election cycle, you are irredeemable forever. You cannot change! Not even if she tries really, really hard to persuade you one afternoon on twitter! No. If you voted for Trump you deserve to be divorced and, most likely, expelled from the Republic. This woman is clearly the soul of moral probity. You should most definitely take marriage advice from her.