The Right Side of History?

Quite often these days I’ve heard someone claim that they, or their political party, is “on the right side of history.” 

I’m afraid that this bit of bluster conceals the truth: There is no right side of history.

First, there is certainly no short-term right side of history. Having lived a short 65 years I’ve seen my own life, country, and world change directions so many times that every prediction about the right side of history over the short term is at best unreliable.

On a longer scale there are three contemporary basis for claiming that history has a right side and that some people and movements are on it and some aren’t. 

The oldest claim, based on some form of revelation, is that God (or some sort of divinity)  created the universe with an inexorable purpose, and continually guides it according to that purpose. If you knows that purpose you can be on the right side of history, 

The problem with this model is that among those who claim to understand God’s purposes there is intense disagreement concerning just what God wants. To claim, while holding a minority view of the correct interpretation of scripture (and they are all minority views) that one is “on the right side of history” goes beyond bluster to arrogance. 

Other religions such as Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism also have multiple variations on whether and in which direction history moves, and in none is there a single widely accepted answer. Even the idea of a final judgement, shared by Christians, Muslims, and Jews is subject to multiple temporal and eschatological variations.

A second claim to know the right side of history comes from the assertion that the world is progressing along certain historically discernible lines. The leaders of the American and French revolutions believed they had discerned these lines, as did Karl Marx and eventually the Communists. The problem with this claim is twofold. First, if Tom Holland in Dominion is correct then all of these are just variations on some form of Christian eschatology rooted in the wider culture of Christendom that preceded modernity. But even if these modern interpretations of history broke free of their cultural heritage they are sufficiently contradictory as to call the whole project of finding an arc of history into question. 

The third possibility is that the direction of history is determined by the purely natural causes characterized by scientific theories of evolution. 

Initially evolutionary theory seemed almost completely antithetical to the high ideals of progress found in the revolutionary movements of the 18th and 19th century. Survival of the fittest seemed to imply the inevitable triumph of the strong over the weak and a process of human history characterized by continual conflict over the control of resources. The peaceable kingdom dreamed of by religious people was definitely the wrong side of history, as were the egalitarian dreams of the founding fathers. 

Science has now taught us that nature is a complex system made of complex subsystems all possessing degrees of equilibrium and change. The equations that characterize this change are non-linear, making prediction of future changes impossible. What we do know from the study of the past is that the fittest in one situation (like dinosaurs) can quickly become extinct, replaced by others more suited to the ever changing system. Species that hold within their gene pool the greatest diversity of potential paths forward will be the survivors in the long run.

Diversity, as it happens, is a key survival characteristic of both species, eco-systems and societies. Under the right circumstances the weakest and most marginal may be the key to the future for the strongest and most central. Maybe. 

Because history in evolutionary theory is much like a mutual fund; past performance is no guarantee of future success. All it takes is a meteorite or a virus to change the course of history and rewrite the evolutionary list of the survivors and the extinct. 

As a result, to get to the present we humans must always rewrite the past, keeping historians and scientists always in business. The arc of history must be constantly redrawn, as indeed it always has been. The objective evidence shows us only this: humans have learned to value those things which help us to survive. Then when we survive we attribute to history the affirmation of our values, calling it progress. The only thing that puts you on the right side of history is living long enough to write it.

The view that humans determine the future by their choices, and calculate its arc by constantly recalibrating the effects of those choices may seem antithetical to Christian tradition. It is not, although choosing the Christian alternative is purely a matter of faith. 

The teaching of scripture, the key teaching from God for Christians, is that we humans have been put in charge of three things: the care of the natural world, the development of our social world, and the writing of its history. In short: making history and writing history. The first two were bequeathed to Adam, and the third to the prophets. God reveals God’s self as the judge of our efforts, not the doer of our work. 

There isn’t an arc from Eden to the New Jerusalem, only human decisions sometimes faithful to God’s calling and sometimes not. The End described in the Bible isn’t the conclusion of a logical progression. It is a sudden intrusion of a force more powerful than either comet or virus, with the assurance that no one will know the day and hour when it will come. God redeems history, we write it.

We live in the meantime. It is the time in which God has charged us to bend history to our will with the caveat that if we wish to survive God’s will must be our own. Be fruitful and multiply, essentially survival, is our only mitzvoth. We already know enough to know that the few signposts toward survival God has revealed continue to serve remarkably well, but only if, in our making and writing of history, we continue to take note of them. 

For now, if you ask who is on the right side of history well, I am. At least until I become history, or at least hopefully a couple of good anecdotes at the wake.