Do you really want to be on the “right side” of history?

Robert P. George writes: "The next time a supporter of the latest fashionable belief, whatever it is, taunts you with the claim "history is on our side," you might consider who made those words famous. It was Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1956: "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!" He was confidently predicting the ultimate triumph of communism. "I do not mean we will bury you with a shovel," he later explained, "but that your own working class will bury you."

Things didn't quite turn out that way. *Their* working class, beginning with the union-based Solidarity movement in Poland, buried European communism. It was a double victory, defeating not only communism, but the Hegelian view of history that it presupposes and is based upon.
The truth is that what we call "history" is filled with contingencies. Triumphs and defeats are not written in the stars. Progress is not inevitable. Nor is decline.

The future will be determined by, among other things, the deliberations, judgments, and free choices and actions of human beings, including ourselves. And we can't judge a view or movement to be right or wrong depending on whether it succeeds or fails, or seems likely to. Anyone who proposes to decide whether something is right or wrong based on a prediction of whether it is likely to be popular or unpopular, widely accepted or rejected as time goes on, simply has no idea what it means for something to be right or wrong.

Sometimes when people lose faith in God, they deify history, treating it as the equivalent of a divine judge--a quasi-personal force that gets the final say as to what is good and bad, just and unjust. "You had better get in line," they say, "with [here fill in the name of the thing that is supposed to be inevitable] or you will find yourself on the wrong side of history!" But that's a silly threat. History is an impersonal sequence of events. It is not morally normative and it has no more power to judge than does a stone outcropping or a carved and painted totem pole. To believe otherwise, as do Hegelians of both the right and left (including those who've never heard of Hegel), is to succumb to idolatry and superstition.

The idea of a "judgment of history" is contemporary secularism's vain, hopeless, and, in the end, pathetic attempt to fashion a substitute for the judgment of God.

We need to bear in mind that what matters is whether a view is sound or unsound from the moral point of view, not whether people in the future are likely to hold or reject it. What is worth worrying about is whether a view one holds or is considering is right or wrong, consistent or inconsistent with the true requirements of justice and the integral good of human beings as creatures fashioned in the image and likeness of God and, as such, bearers of profound, inherent, and equal dignity--not whether it is on the allegedly "right side of history." " Oct. 31, FB post.

George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University