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Notes -
Yes, it will, but I have my doubts that you will like it.
I think the “right side of history” narrative is the left's greatest asset. Popularly, it casts history into a battle between faces and heels, where the faces are these plucky upstarts on their heroes' journey, who have invented every good thing, who are always good, are always right, and always win – and on the other side, the heels are the evil goons who hate goodness just because, who are always bad, are always wrong, and always, in the end, lose.
The main advantage of this narrative is that it means that, whenever there's some controversy, one doesn't need to think about ideas, or events, but only people. One doesn't need to spare a second's thought to the actual merits of the issue, but instead just look at who's on which side: which side has the faces, and which side the heels, and there you go: all that's left is to accept the inevitable. The bend of the moral arc of history is clear; the inexorable weltgeist has spoken. The future will come, like it or not – and, well, if you want to stay a face, you'd better try to like it.
The problem with this narrative is that it lacks predictive power, outside of the short-term. Though every point in support of it is true, that doesn't mean that they tell the whole story, as Scott's recent series on “bounded distrust” has talked about. To me, what it looks like is so much painting the bullseye over the bullet holes, and we can see this because we can still see the peeling remains of previous bullseyes over older clusters of bullet holes. Eugenics, prohibition, communism, harsher sentences for crack cocaine – the march of history hasn't vindicated these, and not only have these been left out of the current narrative of inexorability, not only have (most of them) been disavowed, but in the popular understanding, they're ascribed to the machinations of the heels.
If one is able to control what that popular understanding of history is, though – what's important, and what doesn't matter – then one can exert a great deal of power without even telling any lies of commission. “Whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the present controls the past.” Unfortunately, those “whoevers” don't tend to last.
So the issue is this: you know which side looks like the faces today, but will they have been the faces in retrospect? Is the story one can tell oneself about what all the True Faces throughout history have in common something that is actually going to endure, or will it be cast aside when it is no longer convenient like all the previous stories of its kind?
Perhaps Cthulhu always swims left, or perhaps “left” is the direction in which Cthulhu is currently swimming. Or maybe even it's not Cthulhu at all, but instead Azathoth, the blind idiot god, not swimming with purpose but thrashing without, and all the stories we tell ourselves about moral progress are just rationalizations about the random swells of moral fashions rising and falling beneath us. (Though personally I doubt – and hope not – that it's entirely that far!)
Ultimately, I think your dilemma is this: if you hold your convictions firmly and sincerely, eventually, despite the grasp you think you have on the direction of progress today, its shiftings and windings will call upon you to abandon some of those principles and support things you and I now consider abhorrent. Either you hold to your sincere beliefs, and not let temporal popularity break your convictions, and then you'll get thrown into the pit with the rest of the regressive heels, or you can abandon them, in which case you may as well be a moral loose cannon, throwing your weight behind whatever way the ship is already rocking irrespective of whatever must be smashed in your path.
Or, maybe, I am wrong, and at last we know, now and forever, the true way forward. Frankly, that would be a great relief, that we won't ever have to change direction again (as a lot of what bothers me about this progress is its churning: revolutions aren't much fun to live through, especially the “eating their own” part.) But I can't bring myself to believe that now is the time when the churning will stop, so I'll do my own best to find a solid place to stand.
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