What is the right side of history?
Liberals often pride themselves on being on the "right side of history". I wonder: how do they, how do we know what the "right" side is?
Is it simply "more freedom for everybody"?
Just one example: in the wake of the sexual revolution of the swinging sixties, paedophilia was considered among Progressives to be just another variant of sexuality. And the zeitgeist of that time was: freedom for the paedophiles!
In 1977, a petition to the French parliament calling for the decriminalisation of sex between adults and children was signed by a long list of famous intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir (!), Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and – that esteemed radical and father of Queer Theory – Michel Foucault.
In Britain, members of the Paedophile Information Exchange were openly campaigning for the abolition of the age of consent and found themselves welcomed warmly in some establishment circles. In the United States, NAMBLA (the North American Man Boy Love Association) was founded at the end of the 1970s and attracted support from figures including the poet Allen Ginsberg and the feminist Camille Paglia.
All these people were very much in favor of Progress, and I'm sure that they saw themselves, just like Progressives today, to be on the right side of history. Today, we call it child abuse and nobody, except some weirdoes, still campaigns for its legalization.
So here's my question again: how can we tell the wrong and the right side of history apart? Could it be that today's Progressives and Liberals are now as much deluding themselves about their current issues of progress being made as were those heroes of Social Justice I mentioned above about sex with children ?
(Edit: My guess is that it is just the winning side of cultural / political evolution which proclaims "We are the right side of history". As liberals are currently on the rise, they also claim the right to define the "right side" )
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Being on the right side of history means learning from the past and the best information available to make the correct choices for the best outcome for the greater good of society.
If poor decisions were made in the past, then we should correct them to be on the best side of history going forward. The best information available likely points to pedophilia not being good for society, so... Let's not do it.
Wrong people win sometimes. That doesn't put them on the right side of history. Being on the right side of history is more along the lines of how people in the future will think of our decisions today. Willingness to learn from mistakes and change is good.
Julie808
Level 8
Aug 25, 2022
0
There may have been some elite intellectuals saying such, but I don’t remember any such attitude in the general liberal population in the U.S. Unless you’re just talking about having some compassion for the person, rather than tolerance for the act, which might still be as strong as ever (not to say “ever” was much).
Paglia today is a darling of the right, and maybe always was. And all those post-modern philosophers were truly nothing short of disconnected from reality.
I guess I’d settle for just being on the left side of history.
skado
Level 9
Aug 25, 2022
1
@Matias
You don’t get to say what I believe - that’s my job 
.
I don’t believe in right and wrong from any ultimate or absolute perspective, so, from my perspective, there could be no “right” side of history.
What I believe in is biology.
Humans developed enough brain autonomy that they could make decisions and take actions that might not be in sync with what nature had otherwise selected.
So we went down this path of domestication. It’s not objectively right or wrong - it’s just what happened. There’s also no objective “progress”. Progress is a word humans made up to describe this process of domestication. Then as a backformation, we started calling progress “good” or “right”.
But whatever we call it, and however we value it, change over time does happen - it does “progress” (verb).
Some people are uncomfortable with change. We call them conservative. Some people like change. The English dictionaries that I have access to call them liberal.
Humans tend to be tribal. They think their tribe is right and all other tribes are wrong. But biology has a different idea. Biology makes different tribes because a population that consists of various tribes has more reproductive fitness than a monotribal population.
This is to say that conservatism and liberalism are genetically distributed in human populations in a way that balances change and stability.
It is the giraffe’s job to carry out giraffe duties. It is the squirrel’s job to carry out squirrel duties. It is the conservative’s job to carry out conservative duties. And it is the progressive’s job to continue exploring the human potential for domestication at whatever pace the conservatives can tolerate.
There was a time in our distant past when our ancestors were no more domesticated than any other wild animal. From that time to this we have become progressively more domesticated. That is a biological and historical fact. No one can determine whether that fact is on the right or wrong side of history - it’s just what happened.
Progress is not just technological. Progress is how far we have tamed ourselves. It is how wide we have made the artificial gap between human and animal. It is the degree to which we can establish and sustain moral abstractions such as equality, fairness, justice, and compassion.
That is what I believe.
@Matias
No human is free from the influence of tribal identity. And we judge other tribes by their worst examples, and our own tribe by its best examples. In reality we are all Homo sapiens being Homo sapiens. We all experience our own worldview as the correct one, and others that differ as “confused”. Every individual has a unique view. We can share them. None are complete or without error. They are perspectives. The popular meanings of words migrate across cultures and across time.
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