Without thinking deeply about it I did buy the premise behind the “right side of history”. As if the passage of time shakes out the bad ideas and the right people win. Ha now that I read your piece I see I was wrong.
Your piece is also a good reminder that the people who win write the history
What an excellent analysis. I, too, had seen this meme, thought about the pro-segregation college protestors in the US South in the 1960s, but hadn't been able to put my finger on why, besides that obvious counterexample to the meme, its point was so off. You have done so brilliantly. Bravo.
I'm going to add that I think "right side of history" falls flat now because western culture broadly, but especially team "woke" intellectuals, have rejected religion, thus rejecting a shared understanding of moral truth that would make this argument work. In an earlier time of civil disobedience and protests, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could say in response to being imprisoned, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice" to say his side is on "the right side of history". But this works as an argument because his audience was nearly-universally Christian, and believed like Dr. King in the moral claim that God's will be done, even if they didn't like his political message. Similarly, his contemporaneous audience shared his mental religious imagery--and there, who's likely to be on the right side of history, Pontius Pilate with his postmodern "what is truth?", or the guy who Pilate just checked off on having executed? In a Christian context, that's a total no-brainer. (By the way, the context of this quote from Dr. King: “Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’” n.b., Ben Shapiro gives the full quote in his 2019 book--because he is also calling to a moral truth he's assuming his readers share.)
A conservative would not frame the issue as that between protestors and counter-protesters only. There would be a recognition that there's another, if amorphous, group of people; and these people "know" things too, and humility suggests that at least some of the things they "know" even if can't express as succinctly or "nobly" (or hostilely) as their louder counterparts, probably have some equal claim on the truth.
So: I'll dive into your example of the "winners" of the protests of the civil rights era.
Undoubtedly one side won. How do you define that side though? Was it just any Americans - or particularly East Coast liberals - who were troubled by discrimination? Troubled by the discrimination in their own states - or only the South, thinking that it was not themselves that were involved? Yankees re-litigating the civil war against a part of the country that it believes should come in for censure, indefinitely? Were the winners people who were impatient for change to happen organically, because it would deprive them of enshrining their righteous sentiments into law? Were the winners lawyers generally? Were the winners feminists? Or all women, men the losers? Were the winners people who wanted the government to do more to engineer a more integrated society, and believe goverment has that power/talent? Kids who got to ride on buses away from their neighborhood schools? Was it more simply: American blacks as a whole, were the winners? Was the symbolic win so important it trumps everything? (I have a good deal of sympathy for that view.) And yet it's undeniable that the civil rights measures and the Great Society program generally, Christopher Caldwell's "Second Constitution", have not resulted in a great or even better society in many ways. Some groups are worse off. Immigrants have exploited the situation to enter the country and demand the redress that was intended for others. The business wing of the GOP has exploited the situation created by the left, the "underdogma", to make sure we bleed manufacturing jobs and then import people. We have tiers of underclass in which some now are viewed as more deserving than others, because they have a different attitude toward work - because *they are different* - was that the intent of civil rights law? People who would find my comment upsetting, routinely in their personal lives *do not do* what they believe the government was right to do all those years ago. They self-segregate. Is that a superposition of priniciples in their minds?
You don't have to want to undo any of this, to believe that no group has Olympian insight or a monopoly on grasping reality.
I will close with a little anecdote, and I hope it will not be taken to mean that I "believe in" government-enforced segregation!
I once sat next to a lady daily for nearly 3 weeks, because we were temp county workers doing the early voting. It was over across town at a market that was a sort of 3rd world bazaar and that seemed to function as a crossroads for *everybody*. She knew so many people who came in, even though she herself lived quite distant; and even though the Hispanic demographic shift had long ago overwhelmed the area, and longtime black residents had mostly scattered.
These were mostly older people such as herself, but that didn't stop her from talking up young people, trying to figure out if she knew their families. A surprising percentage of the time she did.
After a few days, she turned to me and said, you're wondering why I know so many [black] folks who come in here. Well, yes, I said, I thought it was rather striking.
We all went to the same high school, she said. We had a real sense of community then.
Perhaps because I only listened, and didn't jump in to assure her that I understood this had been a terrible injustice, for which I was heartily ashamed - she told me frankly she regretted the loss of the school.
Without thinking deeply about it I did buy the premise behind the “right side of history”. As if the passage of time shakes out the bad ideas and the right people win. Ha now that I read your piece I see I was wrong.
Your piece is also a good reminder that the people who win write the history
What an excellent analysis. I, too, had seen this meme, thought about the pro-segregation college protestors in the US South in the 1960s, but hadn't been able to put my finger on why, besides that obvious counterexample to the meme, its point was so off. You have done so brilliantly. Bravo.
I'm going to add that I think "right side of history" falls flat now because western culture broadly, but especially team "woke" intellectuals, have rejected religion, thus rejecting a shared understanding of moral truth that would make this argument work. In an earlier time of civil disobedience and protests, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could say in response to being imprisoned, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice" to say his side is on "the right side of history". But this works as an argument because his audience was nearly-universally Christian, and believed like Dr. King in the moral claim that God's will be done, even if they didn't like his political message. Similarly, his contemporaneous audience shared his mental religious imagery--and there, who's likely to be on the right side of history, Pontius Pilate with his postmodern "what is truth?", or the guy who Pilate just checked off on having executed? In a Christian context, that's a total no-brainer. (By the way, the context of this quote from Dr. King: “Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’” n.b., Ben Shapiro gives the full quote in his 2019 book--because he is also calling to a moral truth he's assuming his readers share.)
A conservative would not frame the issue as that between protestors and counter-protesters only. There would be a recognition that there's another, if amorphous, group of people; and these people "know" things too, and humility suggests that at least some of the things they "know" even if can't express as succinctly or "nobly" (or hostilely) as their louder counterparts, probably have some equal claim on the truth.
So: I'll dive into your example of the "winners" of the protests of the civil rights era.
Undoubtedly one side won. How do you define that side though? Was it just any Americans - or particularly East Coast liberals - who were troubled by discrimination? Troubled by the discrimination in their own states - or only the South, thinking that it was not themselves that were involved? Yankees re-litigating the civil war against a part of the country that it believes should come in for censure, indefinitely? Were the winners people who were impatient for change to happen organically, because it would deprive them of enshrining their righteous sentiments into law? Were the winners lawyers generally? Were the winners feminists? Or all women, men the losers? Were the winners people who wanted the government to do more to engineer a more integrated society, and believe goverment has that power/talent? Kids who got to ride on buses away from their neighborhood schools? Was it more simply: American blacks as a whole, were the winners? Was the symbolic win so important it trumps everything? (I have a good deal of sympathy for that view.) And yet it's undeniable that the civil rights measures and the Great Society program generally, Christopher Caldwell's "Second Constitution", have not resulted in a great or even better society in many ways. Some groups are worse off. Immigrants have exploited the situation to enter the country and demand the redress that was intended for others. The business wing of the GOP has exploited the situation created by the left, the "underdogma", to make sure we bleed manufacturing jobs and then import people. We have tiers of underclass in which some now are viewed as more deserving than others, because they have a different attitude toward work - because *they are different* - was that the intent of civil rights law? People who would find my comment upsetting, routinely in their personal lives *do not do* what they believe the government was right to do all those years ago. They self-segregate. Is that a superposition of priniciples in their minds?
You don't have to want to undo any of this, to believe that no group has Olympian insight or a monopoly on grasping reality.
I will close with a little anecdote, and I hope it will not be taken to mean that I "believe in" government-enforced segregation!
I once sat next to a lady daily for nearly 3 weeks, because we were temp county workers doing the early voting. It was over across town at a market that was a sort of 3rd world bazaar and that seemed to function as a crossroads for *everybody*. She knew so many people who came in, even though she herself lived quite distant; and even though the Hispanic demographic shift had long ago overwhelmed the area, and longtime black residents had mostly scattered.
These were mostly older people such as herself, but that didn't stop her from talking up young people, trying to figure out if she knew their families. A surprising percentage of the time she did.
After a few days, she turned to me and said, you're wondering why I know so many [black] folks who come in here. Well, yes, I said, I thought it was rather striking.
We all went to the same high school, she said. We had a real sense of community then.
Perhaps because I only listened, and didn't jump in to assure her that I understood this had been a terrible injustice, for which I was heartily ashamed - she told me frankly she regretted the loss of the school.