'The Wrong Side of History'

This is a re-thought and  much improved version of a post that first appeared on this weblog on 15 May 2012. 

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I once heard a prominent conservative tell an ideological opponent that he was 'on the wrong side of history.' This question I want to raise is whether this is a phrase that a self-aware and self-consistent conservative should use. For if there is a 'wrong side,' then there must be a 'right side.' 'Right side of history,' however, suggests that history is moving in a certain direction, toward various outcomes, and that this direction and these outcomes are somehow justified or rendered good by the actual tendency of events. But how could the mere fact of a certain drift justify or render good or attach any positive normative predicate to that drift and its likely outcomes? For example, we are moving in the United States, and not just here, towards more and more intrusive government, more and more socialism, less and less individual liberty. This has certainly been the trend from FDR on regardless of which party has been in power. Would a self-aware conservative want to say that the fact of this drift justifies it or renders it good?  Presumably not.

'Everyone today believes that such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is true. 'Everyone now does such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is morally permissible.  'The direction of events is towards such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is a good or valuable outcome. (If a mountaineer is sliding into the abyss and fails to self-arrest, would you say that he is headed in a salutary direction?) In each of these cases there is arguably if not obviously a logical mistake. One cannot validly infer truth from belief, ought from is, values from facts, desirability* from the fact of being desired, or progress from change.  Progress is change for the better. But that a change is for the better is not validly inferable from the change qua change.

One who opposes the drift toward a socialist surveillance state, one in which 'equity' (equality of outcome) is enforced by state power, a drift that is accelerating, and indeed jerking under President Biden, could be said to be on the wrong side of history only on the assumption that history's direction is the right direction. Now an Hegelian might believe that.  Marxists and 'progressives' might believe it. Alexandre Kojève reads Hegel as claiming  that the master-slave dialectic in the Swabian's Phenomenology of Spirit (ch. 4, sec. A) is the motor of history, which, I note, clearly anticipates the opening paragraph of the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Logically prior to the question of what the motor of history is, is the question of whether it has one. If history has a motor, it lies deeper than the succession of events and any empirical regularities the events display; it lies deeper as the driver of these events and the ground of their patterns and regularities.  The Hegelians and the Marxists, despite their important differences, have their answer: there is a motor but the motor is immanent, not transcendent, and the end state will be attained in the here and now, in this material world by human collective effort, and not hereafter by transcendent divine agency.  Crudely put, the 'pie' is not in 'the sky' but in the future. This is what is meant by the immanentization of the eschaton.  

For Kojève and his fellow travellers, 'right side of history' has a legitimate use: you are on the right side if you are hip to, and in line with, history's internal 'logic,' dialectical to be sure, a logic driven by a spiritual Logos in Hegel, which is a secularization and immanentization of the triune God of Christianity, but in Marx arguably the same except stood on its head and materialized.  You are on the 'right side' which is also the left side if you march in step with the beat of  the internal 'drummer' toward the immanent eschaton whereat all alienation and class distinctions will be at an end, a state in which the State will have withered away (V. I. Lenin), all coercion will cease, a state  in which all will be free and equal, mutual recognition and respect will be universal and humanity will realize itself fully als Gattungswesen, as species-being, and embrace this life, this world, and its finitude, making it so beautiful and so satisfying that there will be no hankering for the nonexistent hinter worlds of the metaphysicians and the religionists. The friends of finitude will achieve such a rich state of self-realization that their finite lives, albeit extended somewhat by technological means,  will suffice and there will be no longer any craving for nirvanic narcotics or religious opiates.

So while the mere fact of a certain empirically discernible drift of events does not justify or render good the drift and its probable outcomes, a drift driven by a hidden motor might. This brings us to the theocon, the theistic conservative. 

Many if not most conservatives are theists and theists typically believe in divine providence. God provides and he fore-sees (pro-videre). God created the world and he created it with a plan in mind. The teleology is built in and not up for decision by such frail reeds as ourselves. He created it for a purpose and in particular he created us for a purpose. For theists God is the hidden motor, the Prime Mover, and First Cause, both efficiently and finally. God is Alpha, Omega, and everything in between. He caused the world to exist ex nihilo and he gave it its purpose which in our case is to  share in his life and to achieve our ultimate felicity and highest good thereby.  A theistic conservative, then, has a legitimate use for 'right side of history.' You are the right side when you submit to the divine plan and live you life in accordance with it.  You are on the wrong side when you don't, in rebellion and glorifying your own miserable ego.

To conclude, I see two ways of attaching a legitimate sense to the expressions 'right side of history' and 'wrong side of history.'  One is theistic, the other atheistic, as above.

I now refer you to Malcolm Pollack's effort in a similar direction. We pretty much agree, except that he doesn't credit the atheist option which is a secularization and immanentization of the theistic.  I am a theist myself, for the record. 

Is the secularization a betrayal, a fulfillment, or a disaster which is the inevitable consequence of the false Judeo-Christian starting point?

Before logging off, I would like to recommend to Malcolm and the rest of you Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, which includes the Strauss-Kojeve correspondence and a very clear and informative introduction.

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*Note the ambiguity of 'desirable' as between 'worthy of being desired' and 'able to be desired.' I intend the former.

Comments

[Elliott]

Bill,

This is a very interesting post.

You wrote: “Logically prior to the question of what the motor of history is, is the question of whether it has one. If history has a motor, it lies deeper than the succession of events and any empirical regularities the events display; it lies deeper as the driver of these events and the ground of their patterns and regularities.”

As I see it, this is exactly right.

You also noted that according to theistic views that accept divine providence, “God created the world and he created it with a plan in mind... He created it for a purpose and in particular he created us for a purpose. For theists God is the hidden motor, …”

As a theist, I accept this view, namely, that God created the world for a purpose and according to a plan sufficient to accomplish that purpose.

But there are problems with this view, particularly if human beings have libertarian free will (LFW). I’m a libertarian myself, and I’ve explored this problem in two articles published in Philosophia Christi.

In short, the first paper raises and answers objections to the claim that God created the world according to a plan and purpose. The objections suggest that God is practically irrational, which is absurd. I argue that if Molinism is true, the objections fail. The second paper presents an argument that if Open Theism is true, then logically prior to creation God cannot reliably plan the actualization of a world that goes according to his purpose if that world contains creatures with LFW.

[BV]

Elliot.

Thanks for the comment. There is of course the problem of reconciling LFW with divine foreknowledge. Feel free to insert links here to your Phil Christi papers.

[Elliott]

Bill,

Here are the links to the papers at Philosophy Documentation Center. I emailed you the pdfs for reading if you'd like.

https://www.pdcnet.org/pc/content/pc_2018_0020_0002_0401_0413#:~:text=PT%20holds%20that%20fulfilling%20the,absurdity%20that%20God%20is%20irrational.

https://www.pdcnet.org/pc/content/pc_2019_0021_0002_0407_0417

[Elliott]

Bill, yes, there is a problem of reconciling LFW with divine foreknowledge. It's a tough nut to crack.

But it seems to me that the problem of reconciling LFW with an atheistic motor of history is even more difficult. I wonder if it is even coherent to accept both LFW and a worldview that appeals to an atheistic driver of human history. And if there is no room for LFW in such a worldview, then it's difficult from the perspective of that worldview to hold someone morally responsible for what side of history he is on. (I'm skeptical that soft determinism or any other form of causal determinism has the resources to account for free will and moral responsibility.)

[Malcolm Pollack]

Thank you for this clarifying post, Bill. I overreached in my own post, perhaps, when I insisted that "history in itself, being just 'what happens, isn’t the sort of thing that can have intrinsic aims and values." This doesn't mean that there mightn't be forces that drive history in a particular direction, or that we can't form a picture of what these forces might be by studying the book of history - just as we can learn about gravity by watching things roll downhill. I should have been clearer about the point being normativity.

That said, the theist's case is easy (leaving aside the problem of free will), but the atheist has a difficult job to do, if he is to read any telos into history: first, he must demonstrate that the drift of history actually is moving toward some definite end, and second, he must explain why that end is objectively good (after all, we'd need a reason to rule out the possibility that history is in steady motion toward some end that is morally neutral, or even wholly undesirable).

We might also ask him, if history does indeed just happen to be moving toward an end that is normatively good, why, in the absence of God, it should happen to be doing so!

Professor JM Smith left a good comment about the first of these difficulties, over at my place:

Eric Voegelin wrote that modern materialists extrapolate the telos of history from observed trends. Voegelin points out that these extrapolations are meaningless, even when they are not tendentious, because we cannot know that our sample size is large enough to be significant. If we imagine history as a book, we have no idea whether we are near the end, in the middle, or still on the first page.

If we look at the Hegelian roots of this idea, we see that Hegel believed he could extrapolate the telos of history from the trend of events in his own lifetime. Marx is just the same. And disconfirming evidence was coming in before Marx could finish Capital, which is why the old fabulist suppressed it.

So: the atheist who talks about the "right side of history" has "some 'splainin' to do"! And if he does have answers for these questions, we can still ask why, then, he bothers talking about History at all, and doesn't just refer to whatever it is that puts the "sides" into history in the first place.