Adrian Wooldridge: The arc of history does not simply bend toward justice

Ronald Reagan was wrong The nine the majority terrifying words in the English language are not I m from the leadership and I m here to help They are The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice This is a pretty phrase that was invented by a good person Theodore Parker and revived by another good one Martin Luther King Jr But it s terrifying because it produces unjustified confidence that history is on your side and this has consequences Donald Trump might well not be in the White House if progressives hadn t been so convinced that the moral universe was bending in their direction The phrase presumes that history has a pre-determined direction But Karl Popper demonstrated that such historical determinism is based on a fallacy The direction of history is clearly shaped by inventions the internet or AI and we cannot predict what these will be Every day brings yet more evidence that the liberal vision of history is wrong In the s liberals predicted that thanks to the moral arc democratic capitalism would triumph globally Great sociologists such as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim predicted that modernity would bring bureaucratization and secularization in its wake But the first defining act of the st century was the destruction of the World Pact Center by religious fanatics hijacking airplanes In the current era democracy is in retreat strongmen are on the rise and Trump is dismantling the rules-based global order These leaders are recreating patrimonial regimes in which the governments are more like royal courts and the state is treated as family property This is much more Vladimir Putin s world than the political scientist Francis Fukuyama s benevolent end of history Economic productivity has certainly improved since the mid- th century though more sluggishly in modern decades but the idea that this produces moral or aesthetic progress is nonsense Hitler took power in Europe s best educated and the greater part culturally sophisticated country The reality is progress in one area often brings regress in another The illusion of history begetting justice is terrifying for two reasons The first is it encourages a false sense of confidence that is often counterproductive The Democrats confidence that history was on their side led them to underestimate Trump so badly that they stuck with Joe Biden even though it was obvious that his powers were fading This confidence also led the party to endorse a collection of unpopular causes which might be conveniently lumped together as wokery on the grounds that they were the contemporary equivalent of the civil rights movement To hell with the people who question these causes even if they happen to be the numerical majority Before that the same confidence persuaded the U S establishment Republican as much as Democrat to embrace China with open arms subcontracting much of America s manufacturing to the People s Republic even though the Leninists who ran the regime were determined to replace the U S as the world s leading military and industrial power The second reason it s terrifying is it encourages people to subcontract their moral judgments to history Most of progressives did not treat the issue of transgender people s rights as a nuanced moral issue that involved the careful balancing of the rights of biological women against those of trans women or an even more careful consideration of the anticipated harms of powerful drugs or invasive surgery They purely rushed to be on the right side of history The notion of the moral arc encourages groupthink and all the blindness and bullying that comes with it It is far healthier to treat history as an open-ended process that is made by individuals who have to wrestle with their own moral judgments rather than go with the supposedly progressive flow History is all things to all men as Herbert Butterfield put it in his great critique of the idea of history as progress The Whig Interpretation of History She is in the operation of good causes and bad Progress is something that is made rather than predetermined and thinking that you are on the winner s side too early often puts you at a disadvantage The last group of progressives who thought they knew the direction of history were the Marxists who preached the inevitable triumph of Communism even as Communism was visibly collapsing The danger is that at present s progressives will preach the triumph of progressivism even as thanks in part to their arrogance and incompetence strongmen dig themselves deeper into power across the world Events only move in your direction if you put in the work to steer them that way Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion A former writer at the Economist he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent How Meritocracy Made the Modern World Related Articles Zeynep Tufekci When the police have no faces Daniel Moss Is America alone Not yet but it s trying Sheldon H Jacobson TSA isn t perfect but it s way better than the 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