The Right Side of History™
How comfortable it must feel to know that your victory is assured.
June 7, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
09:30
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I despise the phrase the right side of history. | |
| It assumes so much and proves so little, yet I hear people saying it all the time, because it is so intimately bound up with the liberal telos of history that they can't let it go. | |
| The problem with Whig history, as I covered in my video The Philosophy of Visibility, is that it is by far from being the only theory of history available to us, and it fails to account for those times history was not an upward linear trajectory of technological development. | |
| Aside from its technical failings, it also seems to display the speaker's moral failings. | |
| The right side of history is a phrase so smug and so self-congratulatory that it can only be uttered by someone who is currently in the wrong but so completely persuaded by the righteousness of their own cause that their current wrongness is but a cosmic mistake made by the universe which will shortly be corrected. | |
| It has already been decided, you see. | |
| We have declared it. | |
| The question is already answered. | |
| The race is already won. | |
| The future is already captured by us. | |
| We are the good people of history because we have defined ourselves that way. | |
| You, the bad people, are inevitably going to fail because the heavens themselves have decreed it. | |
| There is a moral arc to the universe, you see. | |
| Our victory is inevitable, even in the face of this present defeat, because there is a purpose to the universe, a purpose to history, and a purpose to everything in it, and that purpose is to further make the human condition more and more comfortable. | |
| Greater numbers of people than ever before must have access to a MacDonald's, ordained the creator of the heavens and the earth. | |
| This is what I, the Lord Almighty, have decreed, and thus mankind shall make it so. | |
| Only that can't be what these people actually think because they are also vulgar materialists who think that nothing exists that cannot be weighed or measured. | |
| There are no objective values, metaphysics is nonsense, and they have been lifelong avowed atheists who believe that nothing actually matters from a universal perspective. | |
| We appeal to some kind of objective standard of morality but deny that such a thing exists and then call any alternative to our own liberal morality evil. | |
| What can that possibly mean in the absence of any external standard of right and wrong? | |
| Instead, the people who use this phrase have the self-conceit to believe that they have history figured out, that they are intellectualizing the formula that underpins the mechanics of history, and lo and behold, by an incredible stroke of luck, the mechanics of the historical process just happen to line up with what they believe to be good, true and moral. | |
| What were the odds that they'd be born in just a time and just a place in just that kind of civilization that, unlike the rest of mankind, during the vast passage of history, had managed to figure out the process of history so that we could have the luxury of being on the right side of it. | |
| What incredible fortuitousness. | |
| What a stroke of luck. | |
| There is a phenomenal amount of arrogance in this phrase, so much that it just drives a drill into my brain every time I hear it. | |
| Oh, you were on the right side of history, but failed to explain why the right side of history has committed so many wrongs in its time. | |
| Lots of people from the time of the French Revolution onwards have said that they are on the right side of history, and millions have died unspeakably cruel deaths because of it. | |
| The right side of history has been wrong so many times, one might begin to wonder about the legitimacy of whoever determined that this way was right and the other way was wrong. | |
| Is there a number of deaths that the right side of history might reach before it becomes the wrong side of history? | |
| Or is there literally no limit to the amount of torment and suffering that can be inflicted upon mankind in the service of being so righteous? | |
| If one keeps telling oneself that definitionally anything we do is right, therefore any evils we inflict are in fact good, then we have arrived at the same position as the worst tyrants in history and are not really very different from them at all. | |
| What exactly would distinguish one side from the other if both were to claim they were on the right side of history? | |
| If we believe that history has a moral arc but don't believe in a creator or even if we believe in different creators, what are we actually saying with this? | |
| If it is true that history is written by the victors and history has a moral arc with which we consistently agree, then we are committed to the idea that the good guys have won every single time. | |
| What are the odds of that? | |
| If it was inevitable because the good guys triumph because they are good, then we have resolved the right side of history down to harmonise with the phrase might makes right, which of course becomes tautological. | |
| We are right because we won and we won because we are right. | |
| If history is written by the victors, then that is no different to saying that history is written by the most brutish. | |
| What makes the people on the right side of history so sure of their moral conviction anyway? | |
| Aside from their ability to kill millions of people of course. | |
| Perhaps they would say that they are in the business of doling out unlimited rights to mankind and therefore the progress of recognition and dignity validates and justifies their cause. | |
| And in the immediate it might seem like that's the case. | |
| But what happens when you pass boundaries that were necessary and cannot easily be reconstructed? | |
| Commitments to the moral negation of a previous order, which was apparently on the wrong side of history, are easy to advance and defend because they create nothing. | |
| But that makes being on the right side of history require the presence of a countervailing positive force that the liberal themselves cannot construct. | |
| What ought we to do? | |
| Well, anything that doesn't directly harm anyone else. | |
| Okay, but what ought we actually do? | |
| The right side of history cannot tell us what we should be doing, and therefore it's essentially the ultimate get-out clause. | |
| Anything you do that I don't like, I can declare to be on the wrong side of history, and anything I like is the right side of history, and I can declare these things after the fact. | |
| I don't have to construct a framework in which the right side must declare in advance what right is, and therefore I can never actually be wrong. | |
| It simply becomes a rigged game of what I like against what I don't like. | |
| Heads I win, tails you lose. | |
| The right side of history thereby becomes a philosophy of self-indulgence that essentially just means I think this is the right thing to do, which everyone already knew was your opinion from the start because that's everyone's opinion. | |
| So you may have well just said nothing because you have made no argument for. | |
| Without an objective standard to measure right and wrong against, without definite criteria known in advance of the act, and without clear expectations of the consequences by which to judge, the right side of history as a phrase is worthless. | |
| It is a pathetic, tautological, self-congratulatory, self-aggrandizing waste of breath and time, and you had the temerity to shout it at the person who disagrees with you with all of the conviction of a disciple who is about to be martyred, when in reality you are just using it to balm the wounds of your ego because things are not going in the way you think they ought to go. | |
| Thinking in terms of right and wrong sides of history is simply an easy way to abdicate having to take moral responsibility for the decisions you make and to weigh up right and wrong when forced into a dilemma. | |
| You don't have privileged access to the future history of mankind. | |
| You haven't worked out the telos of the universe. | |
| You probably don't even believe in such a thing. | |
| You don't have the strength to make your might make right and you aren't morally justified in doing something just because you like it. |
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