There are (at least) two things wrong with “the right side of history”. One is that we can’t know that history has a side, or what side it might be because a tremendous amount of history hasn’t happened yet, and the other error is that history might prefer worse outcomes in some sense.
I find the first sort of error so annoying that I normally don’t even see the second.
My impression is that Eugene is annoyed by both sorts of error, but I hope he’ll say where he stands on this.
There’s a third thing wrong with it: generally, people use the phrase in order to praise one side of some historical dispute (and implicitly condemn the other) by attributing to them (in part or in whole) some historical change that is deemed beneficial by the person doing the praising. The problem with this is that usually when you go back and look at the actual goals of the groups being praised, they usually end up bearing very little relation to the changes that the praiser is trying to associate them with, if not being completely antithetical. Herbert Butterfield (who I posted about above) initially noticed this in the tendency of people to try to attribute modern notions of religious toleration to the Protestant reformation, when in fact Martin Luthor wrote songs about murdering Jews, and lobbied the local princes to violently surpress rival Protestant sects.
What’s the precise sense of “attribute” in that claim? It’s not obviously implausible to claim that the more groups are competing with other, the less likely it is that any one can become totally dominant, and so the more likely it is that most of them will eventually see mutual toleration as preferable to unwinnable conflict. This doesn’t have to be an intended effect of the new sects to end up being an actual effect.
I hadn’t even thought of the first objection, possibly because I stopped considering “what side history is on” a useful concept after noticing the second one.
There are (at least) two things wrong with “the right side of history”. One is that we can’t know that history has a side, or what side it might be because a tremendous amount of history hasn’t happened yet, and the other error is that history might prefer worse outcomes in some sense.
I find the first sort of error so annoying that I normally don’t even see the second.
My impression is that Eugene is annoyed by both sorts of error, but I hope he’ll say where he stands on this.
There’s a third thing wrong with it: generally, people use the phrase in order to praise one side of some historical dispute (and implicitly condemn the other) by attributing to them (in part or in whole) some historical change that is deemed beneficial by the person doing the praising. The problem with this is that usually when you go back and look at the actual goals of the groups being praised, they usually end up bearing very little relation to the changes that the praiser is trying to associate them with, if not being completely antithetical. Herbert Butterfield (who I posted about above) initially noticed this in the tendency of people to try to attribute modern notions of religious toleration to the Protestant reformation, when in fact Martin Luthor wrote songs about murdering Jews, and lobbied the local princes to violently surpress rival Protestant sects.
What’s the precise sense of “attribute” in that claim? It’s not obviously implausible to claim that the more groups are competing with other, the less likely it is that any one can become totally dominant, and so the more likely it is that most of them will eventually see mutual toleration as preferable to unwinnable conflict. This doesn’t have to be an intended effect of the new sects to end up being an actual effect.
I hadn’t even thought of the first objection, possibly because I stopped considering “what side history is on” a useful concept after noticing the second one.