If the internet has a favourite argument, it can be summed up in four words – that whoever is against one’s own opinion must be on the “wrong side of history”. The argument’s main strength seems to be its versatility. It can be (and often is) deployed on issues ranging from how we tackle the climate crisis to the correct approach to helping children with gender dysphoria; from eating meat to Black Lives Matter; from abortion rights to the nuances, or lack thereof, of the Israel–Hamas conflict.
Let’s pause for a second. Is an imagined future audience really the best judge of our actions today? One clue as to the many problems inherent in this approach comes from a 2019 panel assessment by Vox, which asked a range of experts – including historians, scientists and philosophers – what actions today are likely to be looked on with shame or horror in 50 years. The social psychologist Melanie Joy argued that more and more people will wonder why we ever ate meat, given the cruelty to sentient, intelligent animals necessary for such a practice. Given increasing rates of vegetarianism and veganism, such a suggestion seems relatively uncontroversial.
Other suggestions, however, were more likely to divide your average liberal audience. Ethicist Karen Swallow Prior, for example, suggested that in 50 years, voluntary abortions (those where the mother’s life is not in danger, or other narrow exemptions) would be morally unthinkable. She pointed to probable future ease of access to reliable contraception, and advances in imagery that, she said, would show that even early-stage foetuses had distinct human characteristics. “The average progressive would object vehemently, of course,” noted Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian at the time. “But who’s to say Prior is wrong?” The point the assessment highlighted is that we simply do not know, based on the assumptions of today, how societies of the future will think.
In the here and now, it’s a fairly mainstream view among historians that the “wrong side of history” argument is at best facile, and a fallacy that shows a profound lack of understanding of the real work of historians. But we should go further: as a rhetorical device, the “wrong side of history” is amoral, it’s a cul-de-sac – and it’s also oddly dehumanising.
The problem with “Whig history”
First, let’s deal with objections from the discipline of history. The relevant concept is “Whig history”, a long out-of-fashion school whose adherents regard history as a story of gradual progress. Strictly speaking, the Whig school of history referred to scholars during the late 19th and early 20th centuries who reframed history as a journey towards British parliamentary democracy. But the term is also applied more broadly – it would be Whig history, for example, to talk about the history of scientific discovery as a direct path towards our supposedly enlightened era, were we to assume that our current understanding of the world is a “correct” one. (The history of science instead suggests that our understanding of the world is constantly evolving, and will continue to do so).
Historian Herbert Butterfield, who coined the term “Whig history” in a 1931 polemic, summarised the problem thus: “it studies the past with reference to the present”, towards a goal of delivering “drama and apparent moral clarity”.
To call upon the moral force of imagined future historians is, then, to fall into the trap of Whig history – to see the purpose of the discipline as delivering a thumbs-up and thumbs-down on different historical figures, depending on their alignment to present-day social norms and whether they contributed to what we currently see as “progress” towards a better future.
History resists categorisation
Reality is almost never so kind nor so simple. For example, Marie Stopes was hailed for much of the 20th century as a pioneer of women’s reproductive rights and autonomy, having opened during her lifetime a network of clinics offering contraception and other health advice to women who wanted it. However, like many liberal intellectuals of her time, Stopes was an avowed eugenicist, and these beliefs clearly motivated the aspects of her work that we today see as “good”. The modern-day continuation of her organisation, wrestling with this legacy, has all but dropped their association with her name – changing from Marie Stopes International to MSI Reproductive Choices in 2020.
History tends to be stubbornly resistant to easy categorisation on any issue, whether it is currently in favour or not. Public opinion in the UK is now firmly in favour of gay rights and protections against discrimination, after a difficult and decades-long campaign by activists. But we know from the lessons of the past that we cannot rely on this support, or bet against backsliding – in reality, history is not a straightforward march towards inevitable “improvement”. Growing tolerance and even acceptance of homosexuality during the 1970s and 1980s was rapidly reversed at the onset of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, for example.
Meanwhile, modern praise of that era of gay rights activism has to be tempered with the inconvenient (and often ignored) fact that the movement was hijacked by so-called paedophile “rights” activists. The notorious “Paedophile Information Exchange”, which called for the abolition of the age of consent, was tolerated within the National Council for Civil Liberties from the 1970s until 1983.
Other issues bounce around in ways that are even more difficult to contend with if you’re trying to build a coherent narrative. Many early Zionists who were not Jews, but who believed in the creation of a Jewish state nonetheless, were antisemites. For them, one of the policy’s main merits was the relocation of Jewish populations away from their own countries. The horrors of the Holocaust obviously changed the political calculus and the coalition of support for the creation of a state of Israel, which was achieved by the partition of the British-occupied territory of Palestine, in a similar manner to the partition of India, and the forced displacement of Palestinians. Jews with weak historical links to the region moved to the new Israeli state, where they were joined by others fleeing nearby Muslim-majority countries, exacerbating tensions.
The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, in which virtually all of Israel’s neighbours invaded the nascent state, set the tenor for decades of moral ambiguity. Israel, having been at war with its neighbours since its traumatic inception, was determined to have defensible borders. Its mission to secure those would go on to stoke animosities, one wrong leading to another in a cycle that has never stopped, including by occupying ever larger portions of Palestine’s land, usually illegally and indefensibly.
Israel suffered an attack on 7 October last year that would prompt counter-action from virtually any democratic nation, just as 9/11 provoked the invasion of Afghanistan, which was widely supported at the time by the American public. However, Israel has been so brutal in its response that world opinion – as reflected in the UN and its votes on the issue – is lined up squarely against its actions. If anything should be a caution against the idea of clear good-versus-evil historical narratives, it should be Israel. Yet with relentless confidence, the “wrong side of history” argument is wheeled out ad infinitum.
The purpose of the argument
To think about why it’s such an apparently satisfying approach to debate, we shouldn’t look at history itself, but instead look at what the argument does for the esteem of the person making it. Anyone who has had a row at work or at a family dinner knows the phenomenon of playing it back in your mind for hours, with it going better for us at each repetition. Why couldn’t we think of the perfect riposte in the moment? How great would it have been if we’d actually managed to say that to their face?
Arguments that we have in our head are consistently more satisfying than the ones we have in reality. Our opponents are generally better informed than we would like them to be, have counter-arguments we haven’t considered, and are rarely the two-dimensional caricature we could so easily beat.
A common counter to that in a public debating forum is to engage in the trick referred to as “playing to the gallery”, or “playing for the cheap seats” – a trick that can reliably be seen by tuning in to even a few short minutes of BBC Question Time, and one that works across any issue.
Let’s imagine the debate at hand is homelessness. An opposition politician has noted there have been significant increases in rough sleeping and families in short-term accommodation, and that government spending has dropped. A minister has been given a chance to respond, and talks about homelessness being a complex issue tied to substance abuse, domestic violence and other issues the government is working to tackle.
The biggest and best audience reaction will inevitably go to the pundit the show cuts to next, who will generally know very little about the issue, but who will offer up a great one-liner: “I wonder why we’re spending £100 billion on Trident when that money could end homelessness for ever 30 times over”, or “Even a 1 per cent tax on billionaires would be enough to end homelessness with money left over.”
If there wasn’t an audience present, these sorts of lines would elicit nothing more than an eyeroll, as they don’t actually engage with the issues at hand. But with an audience present, to disagree with the statement is to endorse billionaires or nukes over homeless families. The only viable response is a polite silence.
An audience like God
The “wrong side of history” brings an idealised audience to every debate. By implication, they are from a future that is better than our world today, giving their wise judgment as to who from our present not just had the right opinions but also the right motivations. In a strange way, future historians are invoked here in the same way that societies traditionally invoked God. There is a presence that you cannot see or feel but whose judgment you should care about, and deeply. It has the benefit of greater knowledge than mere mortals, and the rhetorical benefit of being silent and intangible – who are you to reject its verdict?
Additionally, an appeal to the “wrong side of history” comes with baggage that can be helpful for someone wanting to stigmatise those with whom they are disagreeing. There is an implied suggestion that people holding the bad opinion in question will rank among those remembered hatefully by history. Such people tend to have records mostly defined by their body counts: when we think of the wrong side of history for the 20th century, most of us would think of the heads of totalitarian states who killed millions – Hitler, Mao, Stalin, North Korea’s Kim dynasty and the like. I don’t have to explicitly say that my opponent ranks among those names, but if that’s the inference you make, well, that’s up to you.
Audiences change everything, and this holds true even when they are imagined or invoked rather than actually present. Almost all of us have (or used to have) a friend who was delightful one-on-one – interested, engaging, funny, good conversation, but entirely different when part of a group. Perhaps they monopolise the conversation, perform anecdotes everyone has heard before, or even throw hurtful jibes for the amusement of the pack.
Invoking the imagined future as an audience makes that change of dynamic possible even in policy debates. Rather than try to convince your interlocuter of the merits of your argument, you appeal to history, imagining they will see the obvious stupidity, or worse, of your opponents. The act of debate is transformed into the performance of debate, and in that transformation all hope of actual engagement is lost.
It’s today that matters
Appealing to the future is akin to invoking an imagined past – yet with the latter it is usually how rights are lost, not won. Donald Trump made the case that there was an American Golden Age to which he could return the nation – he could “Make America Great Again”. Brexit appealed to British nostalgia with “take back control”, but has yet to deliver either the economic growth or the control over borders and immigration that were promised. Reactionary arguments cast us, in the present day, as the audience looking back on history – and rule that it is those in more recent years who had lost their way. Referencing an imagined past to change the present has been highlighted by multiple scholars of fascism, including Hannah Arendt and Umberto Eco, as core to that political philosophy. Why should we imagine that those in the future would use the past any more ethically than we do today?
To achieve change, we need to win over people who are alive and engaged in the present day. The history of successful movements shows us that winning people over tends to work better than trying to shame people into silence or submission.
For years, for instance, movements calling for gay marriage tried to argue from the side of human rights, or social justice – but the evidence seems to show that the arguments that eventually moved the dial were those that simply appealed to fairness. The gay couple on your street do similar jobs to you, have a similar income and live in a similar house. Why can’t they get married like you can?
History is a lousy judge. Our understanding of history changes all the time, but even our approach to what makes for good history changes too. To suggest there is a single view on history in our multi-polar world is a nonsense. We live in the present-day world of “alternative facts”, “fake news”, “information operations” and “false flags”. Almost one in five Americans believe some variant of the QAnon conspiracy – which at its original core held that Hillary Clinton was the leader of a global Satanic paedophile ring. Any mass killing will now immediately be swamped by allegations that it has been staged.
When we can’t even agree on the simple facts of world events while the evidence is still current, we are hardly likely to be able to rely on history, even if doing so were desirable. In reality, calls to history serve only to entrench our demands, to suggest that there is no need to win over those with whom we disagree, because they will be condemned in the future.
Instead of invoking history, we need to engage in making it. That starts by dropping the rhetoric, and sticking to the here and now.
This article is from New Humanist’s summer 2024 issue. Subscribe now.