The whole obsession with being “on the right side of history” seems to me to really miss the point. The “right side” of history...
The whole obsession with being “on the right side of history” seems to me to really miss the point. The “right side” of history isn’t what’s objectively morally correct; it’s what the victors decide it is. You’re basically saying that your goal is winning in and of itself, not creating a better world. As though “being the person who decides what the right side of history is” and “being the most ethical person” were necessarily one and the same.
I mean, it’s all part of that secular-christian whiggism complex you encounter constantly, right? The idea of history as a linear progress toward righteousness eventually reaching a millenarian utopian state, where here “history” is a desanctified but no less mythological substitute for Jesus separating the sheep from the goats at the end of time, and “the better future” functions like the afterlife both in providing hope to the living and in offering the solace of future vindication for present wrongs. So much of the popular secular-humanist worldview consists of this sort of clumsy patch for psychological and social functions that were formerly performed by religion. The idea that God is on your side is more enduring than the idea of God.
And, I mean, I don’t want to overstate the Christian aspect of it, because “the time after your life will right present wrongs” and “people are either good or bad, and even if we have trouble distinguishing them in the present, the distinction will always be made correctly by an incorruptible supernatural principle” are two of the most fundamental religious ideas. But I do think the specific form of humanism that we got in Christendom was adapted to the terroir, and this is part of that.
I agree with both of you in general (that “future generations” serve as a Big Other to judge morality that is not the same thing as an actual moral compass), but I think what people are talking about here is somewhat more concrete and less mystic than “secular-christian whiggism complex.”
Let’s take for example statehood. We are presently engaged in an argument over whether DC and Puerto Rico should be treated as states by the federal government, and we get to see Senators make various preening speeches about this.
Now, if those two jurisdictions *do* become full states, is there any doubt that future generations (ie, Americans who still give a hoot about this) will think the Senators arguing for statehood were right and the ones arguing against were wrong? Whereas there’s no scenario I can think of when the wide consensus is “what were those Democrats thinking?”
By and large, while arguments for including more people under “who counts as people” don’t always succeed, when they do, everyone in the polity from there on treats that as the Obviously Right Position All Along, in a way many other arguments don’t get such future moral support from.
I don’t think this is whiggism or christianity, so much as a form of entropy. There is *some* universalist ethics such that humanity mostly proceeds one way. (It most definitely does not always *win*, MLK nonwithstanding, but often its set backs are material or due to military actions, rather than cultural choices.) Once a subgroup is accepted, it’s very hard for people to summon the gut-level fear of them that motivated a lot of the arguments against inclusion or equal rights before. Some people always do of course, but they tend to be a stigmatized minority.
And while I don’t particularly care what future generations think of my opinions on monetary policy, I do think Republicans with an eye to their legacy are being extremely foolish with regards to what they say about DC.
When Alaska and Hawaii were proposed for statehood there was pushback explicitly on the basis of their nonwhite populations, does anyone even care today?