We are living in unprecedented times.
That statement is always true, but as events around us continue to unfold, it’s difficult to awaken each morning without wondering what development of the day will become history in the making.
Unanticipated incidents, be they acts of God or assassination attempts, define themselves. Others, from proposed legislation to controversial court cases, are subject to the manipulation of their acolytes.
Claiming to be on “the right side of history” is a common tactic such people employ. The phrase, usually emanating from the Left, is used as a debate-stopper, an argument-ender, a moral cudgel, as if the one who invokes it has special insight into the ultimate judgment of things (which, ironically, implies an ultimate judge, an implication most of them are unwilling to accept).
But the judgments of man are notoriously fickle. As the eminent 20th-century journalist John Chamberlain said: “There is no compulsion on the decent human being to be ‘with history’ when history is driving headlong toward an abyss.”
There was a time when the Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott decisions by the Supreme Court were thought to be on the right side of history, to say nothing of Roe v. Wade. Royalists thought they were on the right side of history during the American Revolution, as did Jacobins and Bolsheviks during the French and Russian revolutions.
All were mistaken, and the world is better off for having recognized that forward doesn’t always equate to progress. British writer and lay theologian C.S. Lewis pointed out:
Progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
Progressives’ preoccupation with being on “the right side of history” is both ironic and cynical given their generalized disdain for that which has come before. Conservatives, by contrast, tend to be proven “right” on so many things—economics, education, good governance—because they are “on the side of history.”
Wise policymakers don’t behave as if the world began with their coming of age. They believe in knowing and learning from those who have gone before. They respect generations of accumulated insight, “the democracy of the dead,” in the words of English author G.K. Chesterton, in contrast to “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
Claims to be on “the right side of history” fail to recognize that throughout time, immense progress has come as the result not of arrogantly pressing forward but humbly hearkening back. It’s no accident that two of the world’s most consequential advances, the Renaissance and the Reformation, both begin with the prefix “re,” a Latin root that means “again.”
Describing the milieu of that time, British historian and author Alec Ryrie says: “The Renaissance gave western Christendom a slogan: ad fontes, ‘to the sources,’ an urge to return to the ancient, and therefore pure, founts of truth.”
Among those truths was the concept of metanoia, a Greek word that biblical scholar William Tyndale translated into English as “repentance.” For his service to humanity, Tyndale was burned at the stake in 1536, demonstrating the arrogance of those who presume to know the future.
There is, as it turns out, no predetermined “right side of history,” at least this side of eternity. Events may be as cyclical as they are linear; the world repeatedly has devolved into disarray only to be regathered by a return to first things, balance, and centeredness.
The more we abandon the wisdom of the ages in favor of our own arrogant assumptions, the more we hasten the day when there is no more history, the world having descended into barbarism—or nuclear winter.
The right side of history is not something that can be proclaimed, only revealed. And only over time and by One whose judgment is inscrutable. This calls for humility, something those who casually invoke the phrase tend to desperately lack.
History will take its own course; the best way to ensure we’re on its good side is to learn from what has gone before, respect our role in its current unfolding, and revere its ultimate judge.