The Wrong Side of History

The response to my Ruparyans piece arrived exactly on schedule, humourless, brittle and threatening. Steve Laws shouted “YOU ARE A TRAITOR”, then stood back to admire the little pile-on he had goaded into being. After that came the noose. There is a genre of man online for whom a picture of a noose is the closing argument, the QED of the movement. I confess it bothered me less than intended, partly because a death threat loses something when it arrives from an anime avatar. Mostly because I had already watched what the same crowd poured over the head of my friend and former colleague Alex Phillips, which is what had prompted me to write the piece in the first place. Beside that tidal wave of misogynistic vileness, my noose was practically a bouquet. You learn quickly enough. A man who dissents is a traitor. A woman who dissents is mad, and worse than mad.

But amid the sewage one small item riled me, as it always does, the way a “less” annoys me when “fewer” is meant. I have been informed over the years, repeatedly and with evident satisfaction, that I am on “the wrong side of history“. The people saying it are, by their own lights, naturally on “the right side” of it, which must be such a comfort for them. What none of them seems to grasp is that the card answers nothing. The man who plays it has simply appointed himself spokesman for an imaginary future and announced its verdict in advance, the debating equivalent of claiming your dad works for the chairman.

The phrase has a history, and not a particularly flattering one. Its ancestry is theological. Strip out God, keep Providence, rename it Progress. The great conjuring trick of the nineteenth century. Hegel gave history a direction and a destination, Marx a mechanism and a timetable. Judging the past by whether it was hurrying towards you is not history.

The phrase found its true home further east. “History is on our side,“ said Khrushchev to Western ambassadors in 1956, adding, for clarity, “we will bury you.” Every five-year plan, every show trial, every famine could be defended in those terms. The kulaks were not people being murdered, they were people on the wrong side of history, and history was in a hurry, and could not be blamed for the bodies. So the doctrine that history has a side is no innocent bit of rhetoric. It is the licence under which some of the worst men of the twentieth century did their worst work, because once you have decided that the future has already condemned somebody, almost anything done to them can be dressed up as necessity. The Reich that claimed a thousand years got twelve. The workers’ state that claimed scientific inevitability got seventy-four. The tribunal these men kept invoking eventually sat, and history did not turn out to be quite the obedient witness they had expected.

A record like that ought to have induced some humility. Instead the phrase crossed the Atlantic, had a wash and brush-up, and re-entered polite society, until by the Obama years it was almost a tic. Fukuyama declared history over, which at least had the merit of being falsifiable, and duly was. The softer version proved more useful, asserting merely that history was going somewhere nice and that the speaker had seen the itinerary. You, poor thing, had missed the coach. My correspondents have picked the phrase out of the progressive skip and repainted it. The destination has changed. The certainty remains.

Nor are they the only current tenants of the doctrine. Certain senior Islamic figures talk about Europe in exactly Khrushchev’s mode. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, for decades the Muslim Brotherhood’s most influential jurist, ruled in a 2003 fatwa that Islam would return to Europe as conqueror and victor, having been expelled from it twice, and that the conquest this time would come not by the sword but by preaching and ideology. Gaddafi announced in 2006 that Allah would grant Islam victory in Europe without swords, without guns and without conquest, the fifty million Muslims already there being sufficient. Erdoğan urged Turks living on the continent to have five children apiece, because they were the future of Europe. Strip out the theology and the sentence is the old one. History has a side, we are on it, and your civilisation is a formality awaiting the paperwork.

Nobody on earth believes these prophecies more devoutly than the Ruparyans, who repost them, subtitle them and set them to doom-laden music. They have kept the prophecy and swapped cheering for dread. The demographic triumphalist and the demographic doomer stand in the same pulpit, preaching the same sermon on inevitability, and disagree only about whether to applaud. Neither has considered the possibility that history is not listening to either of them.

Notice, too, who says it. Almost never the historians. The people who have spent their lives in the archives are the last people on earth to tell you where history is heading, They have watched it double back too many times. The phrase belongs overwhelmingly to people whose historical knowledge extends about as far back as their own adolescence.

C.S. Lewis called this ‘chronological snobbery’, the assumption that whatever is current is therefore correct, and that the past exists mainly to be embarrassed by. Chesterton got there earlier. ‘Those who marry the spirit of the age will find themselves widows in the next’.

And the record of confident bets on history’s direction is a bloodbath. In 1912 the wrong side of history was opposition to eugenics. The right side, the scientific side, the side of every advanced thinker, included Shaw, the Webbs, Marie Stopes and a good slice of the Liberal establishment, all quite sure that posterity would thank them for improving the stock.

In 1919 the future belonged to Prohibition.

In 1936 the enlightened view, held in plenty of respectable places, was that Versailles had wronged Germany and that resistance to her reasonable demands was warmongering, and those who warned otherwise were dismissed as reactionaries right up until the moment they were proved right.

Meanwhile the abolition of slavery, the cause the phrase-users most love to retrofit, was driven not by the advanced opinion of its day but by evangelical cranks whom advanced opinion often found ridiculous. Wilberforce was not surfing the tide. He stood in it, being laughed at, for forty years.

All of which reveals what the phrase is really for. It turns an opinion into a destiny, sparing the speaker the tedium of defending it, and lends him a courage he has not shown, since there is no particular bravery in siding with a future whose spokesman you have appointed yourself. Above all it dehumanises the opponent, no longer a fellow citizen to be persuaded but debris to be swept aside. From there it is a short walk to the noose picture, which is only the phrase with the manners removed.

If history has already condemned me, the sentence is a formality, and some obliging soul on the timeline will volunteer to draw the gallows. This is moral certainty for people who have skipped the moral reasoning, wielded by prophets who could not tell you what happens next Tuesday.

The truth is duller. History does not have sides. It has sources. It is not a courtroom but a record, kept badly, argued over forever, and constantly revised by the living for purposes of their own.

It does not bend towards justice, or progress, or anything else. It winds. It winds through Rome falling, through causes that triumphed and curdled, through heresies that became orthodoxies and then became heresies again. Anyone who tells you he knows where it is going is selling something, and what he is usually selling is the cancellation of your right to disagree.

So to my recent correspondents, one question. Name a single year in which the consensus of people certain they held history’s proxy turned out to be entirely right. You will not manage it.

Try something old-fashioned instead and make an argument. If your case is good, it will survive without a fictional endorsement from the unborn. If it is not, no amount of ventriloquising the future will save it.

The future, whatever else it holds, keeps its own counsel. It always has. That, at least, is one thing history really does teach, to the small number of people still on speaking terms with it.