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.

Moral Convictions - the Wrong Start in Human Relations

Recently on the PBS show "Hidden Brain” they discussed recent research on moral convictions. What research shows is that psychologically these moral convictions are seen as facts, objective facts in the world, even though if the person holding them could step back they could see that they are subjective states of mind.  

But the problem isn’t merely that we see moral convictions as objective facts. We associate our own moral character with upholding our moral convictions.  Thus, if someone disputes our moral convictions they are equally calling into question our moral character.   If they cannot be convinced to agree with us, at the very least we have a deep psychological need to remove them from our presence in order to maintain our psychic balance. Or we need to remove ourselves from their presence.  Either way, the emotion associated with this need to move apart from somebody is hatred.  The person who disputes our moral convictions is a person that to some degree we have a psychological need to hate. 

Of course any Christian can see that  the psychology of moral convictions demonstrated through scientific tests and reasoning comes into direct conflict with the command of Christ that we love one another without reserve. But to fully understand how we can learn to love and include those who do not share our moral convictions we need to talk about the Bible, and some rather unfortunate history. 

Part of the long story of the Hebrew Bible, our Christian Old Testament, is a story of how the Hebrew people became more and more aware of the breadth and diversity of God’s love. By the time we reach the 8th century prophets we have learned, with Israel, that God’s love and concern for humans is truly universal. In Amos chapter 9 God reminds Israel that Divine guidance not only led Israel out of Egypt, but the Philistines out of  Caphtor and the Arameans out of Kir. Whether in blessing or judgment Israel has no special place. 

In the Psalms, in Isaiah, in Malachi we find the same affirmations not only that God cares for all humanity, but that all humanity in some way worships and honors God. 

This idea, hinted at poetically when Psalm 87 asserts that all the peoples have their birthplace in Zion comes to its fulfillment in the universality of inclusion found in the teaching of Jesus. He not only finds faith among the nations of the earth, the universal impact of his death and resurrection breaks down the last barrier between righteous and unrighteousness. All, are saved when he is lifted up above the earth, and he draws all people to himself. 

Unfortunately at a fairly early stage in its history our Christian community turned away from the trajectory that began when Abraham was called to be a blessing to all the families of the earth and the apostles were send to the ends of the earth. 

By its second and third century the church, instead of focusing on the breadth of God’s love began obsessing over who was saved and why. Rightfully eschewing the divisions Paul so clearly decried the church instead focused on new divisions:  between the baptized and unbaptized, between those who held orthodox beliefs and those who didn’t. 

In Christ there may be neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. But for the emerging Catholic Church there was certainly a difference between the saved and the damned, or the orthodox, the heretics, the apostates, and the pagans. The old categories that might have divided the nascent Christian church in the time Paul were replaced by new categories suited to an empire, a civilization. Everything was based on whether you were baptized or not, whether you held the right beliefs or not. The practice of damning the pagans and anathematizing fellow Christians became a Christian habit.  

These new divisions were complimented, if we may use the word, by a hierarchical view of the created order drawn from the Genesis account of creation and neo-Platonism. Paul’s poetic vision aside, his own hierarchical understanding of the orderliness of God’s creation eventually justified the perpetuation of social hierarchies as exclusive as any in the pagan world. 

Nor were these finally overcome by Enlightenment egalitarianism and universalism, which the church fought tooth and nail. Instead Enlightenment Christians like Schlieremacher would devise their own hierarchies, now all quite scientific. And in the United States emerging scientific theories of race were readily read back into biblical accounts of ethnic distinctions to justify the enslaving of Africans.  The mark of Cain, the descendants of Ham, were blessed with forced conversion and then cursed with slavery. 

The result of all this is that contemporary Christian church inherited a dearth of traditional resources for comprehending diversity of its world in its emerging forms. And it is thus ill-equipped to realize in its life, or the larger life of society, the inclusiveness that is the natural result of the universality of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ. 

Instead, and indeed despite a century of ecumenism, differences in belief quickly devolve into differences between the saved and the damned, and a diversity of cultures and customs is all too quickly mapped onto the distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous.  

And this brings us directly to what I spoke about earlier in terms of moral convictions. The traditional church has imbued us with a set of moral convictions, and indeed a moral order, that only grudgingly makes way for genuine diversity and inclusion. 

But we do have a resource and that resource is Jesus Christ and his teaching. It takes little effort when one reads of the conflicts between Jesus and the teachers of the law to see a new revelation that actually interrogates moral convictions. That is what Jesus does with great consistency - he questions the moral convictions by which the Jews of his day lived, and loved, or hated. 

Even the disciples of Jesus are sometime aghast at his breaking of conventional moral codes, whether in conversing with the woman at the well or mixing with the unclean and uncouth. 

In our time Jesus is the one who leads us into the questioning of our own moral convictions. It is precisely the old law law written on our hearts and leading us into hateful hearts that we need to question. It is that old law that must be replaced by a new law, the law of love. 

Instead of letting our neighbor’s disagreement with our moral convictions lead us into just another form of ritual cleanliness and isolation, another variation on the old hatred for apparent unrighteousness, we need to see in our neighbor the probing of Jesus himself. The neighbor who will not let us rest easy in our convictions is just ike the prisoner, the sick, the hungry, the naked: an incarnation of Christ demanding that we love our neighbor as ourselves. Not merely when, but particularly because he or she is puncturing our posture of moral confidence and asking us to find ourselves not in our own righteousness, but the righteousness of Christ. 

In a time of deep divisions, exclusion, and hatred the teaching of Christ provides a guide for those who have been blind guides. 

34 When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

And on these we must hang together, or we will fall apart.