Once again, let’s look at an expression which is loaded with meaning that most people don’t think about. Some writers use it without thinking, others because they’re promoting their particular philosophy. The expression is “being on the right side of history.” If you don’t support a certain cause, you supposedly aren’t on the right side of history.

What does that mean, though, and why do you want to be on that side? It’s an idea that comes from the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and its two bastard children, Marxism and Fascism. This idea, called historicism, holds that history inexorably follows a certain path. Your only choice is to go with the tide or against it.

If you put the phrase into your writing without thinking about it, you could be lending support to historicism without knowing it.

Karl Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies, describes Hegelian historicism this way:

Thus only one kind of “judgement” can be passed on World-Historical deeds and events: their results, their success. Hegel can therefore identify “the essential destiny — the absolute aim, or, what amounts to the same, the true result of the World’s History.” To be successful, that is, to emerge as the strongest from the dialectical struggle of the different National Spirits for power, for world-domination, is thus the only and ultimate aim and the only basis of judgment; or as Hegel puts it more poetically: “Out of this dialectic rises the universal Spirit, the unlimited World-Spirit, pronouncing its judgment — and its judgment is the highest — upon the finite Nations of the World’s History; for the History of the World is the World’s court of justice.”

Being on “the right side of history” merely means being on the winning side. Why is that so admirable? For that matter, what counts as the winning side? Every shift in power eventually has a successor. Were Napoleon’s supporters on the right side of history because his armies swept over much of Europe, or the wrong side because he was later sent to St. Helena? Trends which seem irresistible and permanent today may be reversed in a few years or decades.

The idea that being on the right side of history is good comes from the notion that the new is always better than the old, aside from some short-term reverses. It’s an optimistic view, and it’s true that life has generally improved over the centuries. That doesn’t mean, though, that the new is better because it’s new. The twentieth century gave us huge advances in general well-being during peacetime, but it also gave us mechanized warfare, nuclear weapons, and concentration camps.

Which is better: to march with the mob and help bring about the next, inevitable Great Empire and Great War, or to fight and lose a good fight for what’s right? If those are the choices, I’d rather be on the wrong side of history. Besides, you never know what history will be until it happens, and you never know what might have happened if you’d chosen differently.

Please don’t throw “the right side of history” into an argument just because the phrase sounds good. Just talk about being on “the right side.”