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Notes -
Woah, what happened to the formatting there?
I had a similar insight in an old, now deleted, comment. Allow me to repeat it for posterity:
Lacking (or refusing to use) the rhetorical condemnation of hellfire and the violence of the noose, the language that comes out when modern progressives hate their interlocutor or feel prone to self-justification involves, in some way, the hatred or approval of the future: "the right side of history," "your children will hate you," "the future is female," "let the elderly bigots die, then we win."
Now, I think their take is bogus, even if one agrees with their view: as I've argued before, history is a fickle mistress, and I think it is much more likely that "history" or social consensus will condemn all of us for some bizarre thing none of us realize than to affirm the entirety of any one of our belief systems.
And if your views are defined by social consensus, or what we anticipate the social consensus to be, then are we truly philosophers? Are we not the same as any witch-burner or troglodyte convinced that the world will not change from what we anticipate? In this sense I fear the progressives who follow this chain of thought have become the very thing they swore to destroy: hegemonic oppressors.
No one in the America of 1900 would ever imagine that two men and two women would ever be permitted to have sexual relations with each other, let alone that they would be not only permitted but encouraged to couple up and call it marriage. Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying that's a good argument against it! But it certainly demonstrates that what is imagined about the future by the past doesn't always work out. Things change, now more than ever, and the progressives pushing for radical social change while believing they are entirely on the "right" or "winning" side of it are acting, in my view, incredibly foolishly.
Robespierre didn't think the French Revolution would conclude with his head on the chopping block, or with the establishment of a dictatorial empire. But it did. Neither did Lenin believe his great people's revolution would end with a personality cult and a dictatorship -- not of the proletariat, but of his general secretary, the guy who took notes at meetings. But it did. You push for a revolution for the people, and sometimes what you get is a new regime just as wicked as the old. Different words, but the same melody.
Ian Hacking's Rewriting the Soul discusses how modernity reconceived people as their memories, instead of e.g. an immortal soul unimpacted by general experiences. Thus trauma, history etc. come into play. This "right side of history" blends well here. He also uses a concept "acting under description" for the reason something's done (demonic possession, trauma, because of bipolarity etc.) Very clearly, these people's worldview sees them embodying the wheel of history inexorably plodding....
Perhaps this relates to the "axial revolution," where people began to conceive of history as something that progresses instead of repeating in cycles? Maybe also ideas of reincarnation and the afterlife, from Ancient Greece to Ancient India.
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I wanted to put in a horizontal line to separate the body of the post from the footnotes. If you neglect to put a paragraph break between the preceding paragraph and the four hyphens, it treats the entire paragraph as a header.
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