The wrong side of history. I have never liked that phrase, of which writer Michael Brendan Dougherty says, There is no more bullying or empty piece of rhetoric in political conversation today than to accuse someone of being on the wrong side of history. Those who utter it presume to have some level of prescience that their opponents lack, and that, in my opinion, is the epitome of hubris. It also suggests that history has a conscience which inexorably leads it in a particular direction. Professor Robert George of Princeton says it well: At some level do they actually believe that history---an utterly impersonal and contingent sequence of events---has a fixed direction and even quasi-deific powers of judgment? Do they believe in linear moral progress? If anything, history tells the story of movements, events and people supposedly on the right side of history, but which are no more. As Dougherty writes, The verdict of history is never really final. Man is supposedly on an unstoppable march toward progress, whatever that means, but it only takes a brief glance at our news feed to humble us, because our great advances, good intentions and noble deeds live right alongside sheer vacuity, unbridled appetites, and unspeakable evil. It is a reflection of the true nature of man, about which Blaise Pascal writes: The greatness and the wretchedness of man are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us both that there is in man some great source of greatness and a great source of wretchedness. It must then give us a reason for these astonishing contradictions. God made man in His own image, but also gave man free will to choose his path, and that choice created the dichotomy of darkness and light which is inherent in all of us. As Lou Markos told his son, Never forget that you are both the glory and the scandal of the universe: neither beast nor angel but an incarnational mix of the two. As for me and my house, I put my trust in the One who made history, and to whom the greatest of mans wisdom and accomplishments are mere foolishness. He reveals the deep things of darkness and brings utter darkness into the light. He makes nations great, and destroys them; he enlarges nations, and disperses them. He deprives the leaders of the earth of their reason; he makes them wander in a trackless waste. They grope in darkness with no light; he makes them stagger like drunkards (Job 12:22-25).
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 05:35:17 +0000