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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24983 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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By itself, "the right side of history" is clearly fatuous, yes. It assumes firstly what the people of the future will believe, which we obviously cannot know (and is likely to be diverse and contested regardless), and secondly that the beliefs of these hypothetical people of the future will be correct, which obviously may not be the case.

I think you have to factor in double standards on the "your fave is problematic" argument, though. There are, I think pretty clearly, major figures in the history of left-wing politics who seem just as cancellable. Marx wrote awful things about Jews. Beauvoir and Sartre were sexual predators. Che Guevara was, well, Che. The left has many heroes whose feet are just as clay as those on the right. So I think at least something about the argument has to do with what we envision the people of the future caring about - Marx is good because his politics were (supposedly) liberatory; Churchill was bad because his politics were about preserving Britain's imperial power. The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.

Thus with examples like Lincoln - yes, there are people who point out that by modern standards Lincoln was terribly racist, but widespread left-wing approval of Lincoln is acceptable because Lincoln can easily be fitted into an overall narrative of progress. Lincoln had his flaws, but he tried to point the motor in the right direction. Churchill doesn't get that sympathy because he was trying to point the motor in the wrong direction, i.e. towards the preservation of the British Empire.

As such I think a driving concept here is that of progress. It's MLK's "moral arc of the universe". The natural course of things is for society, customs, norms etc., to improve, those who hasten that improvement on are goodies, and those who oppose it are baddies.

Now, I think it's only possible to believe in this moral arc if you are extraordinarily selective about the movements and social causes you consider. Everything else must be dismissed as aberrant, a temporary setback, even just a blip, in an overall course of ascent. But it nonetheless seems to be the case that people are that selective. We take the movements of which we retroactively approve and declare them to be history on the march; and we ignore those movements of which we do not approve.

Take an issue where the course of history over the last few decades seems to skew conservative - gun rights in the United States, for instance. Over the last fifty years, gun rights have expanded, as has gun ownership, to my knowledge. Imagine you jumped in and said that this is progress, the moral arc of the universe, and that those who support expanding individual rights to own and use weapons are on the right side of history. How far do you think you'd get?

Valid point, although this theory has a lot of degrees of freedom. One might argue that it would predict that Churchill would get a pass from the anti-fascist collective, given that the thing he's most famous for is helping to defeat the most prominent example of fascism in human history.

One might argue that it would predict that Churchill would get a pass from the anti-fascist collective, given that the thing he's most famous for is helping to defeat the most prominent example of fascism in human history.

Not if the argument is that Churchill was in charge of an only-slightly-less-fascist state, whose conflict with the greater was merely about Who Should Dominate.

Among quasi-Marxist (this is misleading because contemporary leftists almost uniformly haven't read Marx) people in the present they have already decided that the Soviet Union, near-alone, defeated Nazi Germany.

The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.

"We have Roko's Basilisk at home"

Quote of the week, hands down, no contest.

Congratulations - that earned a real laugh from me.

This one's actually scary though, especially if your contributions have been reevaluated within your lifetime.

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