From a recent essay by Jon Baskin, a portion of which includes an excellent meditation on my least favorite idea:
Baskin is correct to call out the left in particular, however, insofar as the phrase, "the right side of history" has a progressive pedigree. I applaud the right for avoiding the phrase, if only because it irks me mightily, but the idea is still everywhere in right-leaning thought. It's just that, for the right, history is regressive, a story of the slow withering of ideals, moral character, and general uprightness. And for the left, the story of history is the slow flowering of inclusion, enlightenment, and general wellbeing. For both sides, these tendencies are inexorable, born along by trends so all-encompassing that they seep into our mass consciousness and shape our material lives without any effort on our part. The end result is that all you, Dear Reader, need to do to ensure history happens is to jump aboard ship (the correct ship!) and dip the very tip of your oar in the water. You don't need to get sweaty at all, and there's no need to consult the map; just watch your cable news channel of choice, send out a few choice tweets, and bask in the glow of historical righteousness.
I've had people dismiss my argument about this by pointing out that if we were so sure we knew where we were headed, we wouldn't all be so anxious about the other side winning. But the anxiety is not about history, which we're pretty sure of, it's about ourselves. For the left, the right can't possibly succeed in the long-term because their goals are ultimately too small-minded, bigoted, and backwards; for the right, the left can't possibly prevail because their goals are ultimately too depraved and untraditional. Even the victory of the opposing side actually spells their defeat; they might be winning now, we think to ourselves, but it'll end badly and we'll right the ship. What makes us anxious is the everyday impact of these short-term reversals: what if the other side doesn't lose until after my 401K is wiped out? What if the other side wins before I can buy enough guns to form a well-regulated militia? What if the disaster happens before my kids need student loans? What if my life is inconvenienced by those idiots over there who chose the wrong boat?!
Baskin is quite right that this view has the terrible outcome of making history into a bus that will run us over: we don't want to ask difficult questions, or listen to the idiots in the other boat, because it's all a waste of time—history will straighten them out in the end, so why bother? But what Baskin might be discounting is the great comfort we find in this approach to history, and by extension, in ideology—even if we're about to be squashed like bugs, at least we know where we're headed, and we can plan for the approaching impact. It's a comfort that's utterly wrongheaded and breeds terrible politics, but a comfort that is nearly impossible to discard.
"The notion that history has a definite direction, and that only some people are on the "right side" of it, has always been attractive to intellectuals on the left; among other things, it offers a clear cause and mission to those of us prone to worry about being decadent or superfluous. On the other hand, it makes history into a bus that will run us all over at some point...and it threatens to render intellectual debate a strictly intramural affair. If politics is a war between the allies and the enemies of history, then arguing in good faith with the losers can only be either a sign of weakness or a waste of time. It's a high-theory variant of the mindset that animated our in-house demographers at the Center [for American Progress], who used to delight in proving, with the aid of laser pointers and the latest in data analytics, that there was no reason to consider the arguments of red-state Bush voters, since they would all be dead soon. This was 2004."It is delightful have my views on the "right side of history" upheld so perfectly—an extremely rare delight!—so my sincere thanks to Jon Baskin. I would, however, encourage him to go further: I would say that the idea of right side of history is not just attractive to those on the left, but to all humans who wish to feel secure in their ideological worldview, which is to say: pretty much everyone. (Myself included—no one in their right mind writes a whole dissertation about an idea they find uncompelling.)
Baskin is correct to call out the left in particular, however, insofar as the phrase, "the right side of history" has a progressive pedigree. I applaud the right for avoiding the phrase, if only because it irks me mightily, but the idea is still everywhere in right-leaning thought. It's just that, for the right, history is regressive, a story of the slow withering of ideals, moral character, and general uprightness. And for the left, the story of history is the slow flowering of inclusion, enlightenment, and general wellbeing. For both sides, these tendencies are inexorable, born along by trends so all-encompassing that they seep into our mass consciousness and shape our material lives without any effort on our part. The end result is that all you, Dear Reader, need to do to ensure history happens is to jump aboard ship (the correct ship!) and dip the very tip of your oar in the water. You don't need to get sweaty at all, and there's no need to consult the map; just watch your cable news channel of choice, send out a few choice tweets, and bask in the glow of historical righteousness.
I've had people dismiss my argument about this by pointing out that if we were so sure we knew where we were headed, we wouldn't all be so anxious about the other side winning. But the anxiety is not about history, which we're pretty sure of, it's about ourselves. For the left, the right can't possibly succeed in the long-term because their goals are ultimately too small-minded, bigoted, and backwards; for the right, the left can't possibly prevail because their goals are ultimately too depraved and untraditional. Even the victory of the opposing side actually spells their defeat; they might be winning now, we think to ourselves, but it'll end badly and we'll right the ship. What makes us anxious is the everyday impact of these short-term reversals: what if the other side doesn't lose until after my 401K is wiped out? What if the other side wins before I can buy enough guns to form a well-regulated militia? What if the disaster happens before my kids need student loans? What if my life is inconvenienced by those idiots over there who chose the wrong boat?!
Baskin is quite right that this view has the terrible outcome of making history into a bus that will run us over: we don't want to ask difficult questions, or listen to the idiots in the other boat, because it's all a waste of time—history will straighten them out in the end, so why bother? But what Baskin might be discounting is the great comfort we find in this approach to history, and by extension, in ideology—even if we're about to be squashed like bugs, at least we know where we're headed, and we can plan for the approaching impact. It's a comfort that's utterly wrongheaded and breeds terrible politics, but a comfort that is nearly impossible to discard.
2 comments:
I liked this essay a lot too!
Also, what you're describing is everyone immanentizing the eschaton. I've always wanted a chance to use that phrase.
It's a pretty great essay!
Er, maybe, except that it's so much more mundane than the eschaton—there's nothing apocalyptic or divine about it at all. (Not that I would encourage millenarian fantasies, either). It's more like they're all immanentizing...policy goals. But 10 points for getting to drop the phrase; it's always a thrill.
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