\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe whole obsession with being\u00a0\u201con the right side of history\u201d seems to me to really miss the point. The\u00a0\u201cright side\u201d of history isn\u2019t what\u2019s objectively morally correct; it\u2019s what the victors decide it is. You\u2019re basically saying that your goal is winning\u00a0in and of itself, not creating a better world. As though \u201cbeing the person who decides what the right side of history is\u201d and\u00a0\u201cbeing the most ethical person\u201d were necessarily one and the same.\u00a0
I mean, it\u2019s 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 \u201chistory\u201d is a desanctified but no less mythological substitute for Jesus separating the sheep from the goats at the end of time, and \u201cthe better future\u201d 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.
\nAnd, I mean, I don\u2019t want to overstate the Christian aspect of it, because \u201cthe time after your life will right present wrongs\u201d and \u201cpeople 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\u201d 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.
\nI agree with both of you in general (that\u00a0\u201cfuture generations\u201d 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\u00a0\u201csecular-christian whiggism complex.\u201d
Let\u2019s 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\u2019s no scenario I can think of when the wide consensus is\u00a0\u201cwhat were those Democrats thinking?\u201d
By and large, while arguments for including more people under\u00a0\u201cwho counts as people\u201d don\u2019t 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\u2019t get such future moral support from.
I don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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?
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