Motus Mentis

We are hearing, once again, a lot of incoherent prattle about “the right side of history”. It’s no surprise, given current events, but as time goes by, I find it increasingly annoying. It’s a vain and silly expression, full of swollen and virtuous self-pride; all it really refers to, in most people’s mouths, is whether they approve of what someone else is doing. (After all, pretty much anybody, throughout mankind’s long and bloody saga, would, if you had explained the concept to them, have said they were “on the right side of history”. Was Alaric the Goth on the “wrong side of history”? Was Tamerlane, or Suleyman the Magnificent? I doubt you’d even have been able to make them understand the question.)

Taken at that level, it’s just silly. But if you examine it more closely, it smuggles in a sneaky little enthymeme — a hidden premise — that almost nobody who uses the expression acknowledges.

History’s having right and wrong “side” assumes that it has telos, an intrinsic purpose — but if so, where does it come from? (It would have to come from somewhere, after all.) Doesn’t it seem a curious truncation to stop at “sides” of history, and not just appeal directly to the source of that purpose?

Simply put: history in itself, being just “what happens”, isn’t the sort of thing that can have intrinsic aims and values. Either they aren’t in there at all, and so the aims are entirely our own, or there really is a telos to history, which requires an external author.

It’s important to pause for a moment here to distinguish between mere social and political regularities, such as Robert Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy”, or the recurring phenomena observed and described by Machiavelli, Mosca, Pareto and others – and moral laws, aims, and valuations, which imply purpose. Saying “the Right Side of History” assumes the latter. And if that’s so, then what (or whom) we should be appealing to is the source of that purpose, not the mere outworking of the process itself.

We should be clear: both “history is meaningless, and is just what happens”, and “there is a higher moral Purpose at work in the world, and we are drawn to it”, are philosophically defensible positions. (I’m still grappling with this difficult choice myself.) We are free to believe the former, with the abyss of nihilism that it necessarily implies — but if there is no objective, transcendent source of meaning and purpose in the world, then the “right side” is just your personal opinion, and you have no footing upon which to lecture anyone about it.

If, however, we choose the latter, then the “side” to be on is not that of mere “history”, but of the ultimate source of history’s underlying purpose: the creator and author of moral truth. Stopping short of this, and imagining that History anchors and embodies the Good all by itself, is a pathetic, “humanistic” cop-out. It steals a base by assuming the transcendent while being too proud to admit it; it yearns for God, and for the comfort of higher guidance, while barring the door. It illustrates with clarity why Pride is thought the most dangerous of sins: because it puts Man in the place of God.

Most people, I am sure, don’t think about any of this when they use this expression, and aren’t aware that, in its implicit reference to transcendence, it shows the lingering influence of the Old and New Testaments in our militantly secular society — whose world-changing innovation was the idea that History is not circular, or endlessly recurrent, but is instead a linear unfolding of a Creator’s purpose, with a beginning, middle, and end — and an Aim.

So: you can have it either way, but saying “the right side of History” tries to have it both ways at the same time — and so it is a pitiable self-deception, a sign of our persistent hunger for higher meaning while in the grip of a proud, naturalistic pseudoreligion that shoots the transcendent down from the sky.