Former US president Ronald Reagan was wrong. The nine most terrifying words in the English language are not “I’m from the government, 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. However, it is terrifying because it produces unjustified confidence that history is on your side, and this has consequences. US President Donald Trump might well not be in the White House if progressives had not been so convinced that the moral universe was bending in their direction.
The phrase presumes that history has a predetermined 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 artificial intelligence), and we cannot predict what these will be.
Illustration: Constance Chou
Every day brings yet more evidence that the liberal vision of history is wrong. In the 1990s, 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.
However, the first defining act of the 21st century was the destruction of the World Trade Center by 19 religious fanatics hijacking airplanes. Today, 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-18th century (though more sluggishly in recent decades), but the idea that this produces moral or aesthetic progress is nonsense. Hitler took power in Europe’s best educated and most 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 US establishment, Republican as much as Democrat, to embrace China with open arms, subcontracting much of the US’ manufacturing to the People’s Republic of China, even though the Leninists who ran the regime were determined to replace the US as the world’s leading military and industrial power.
The second reason it is terrifying is it encourages people to subcontract their moral judgements to history. Most progressives did not treat the problem of transgender people’s rights as a nuanced moral issue that involved the careful balancing of the rights of biological women against trans women or an even more careful consideration of the potential harms of powerful drugs or invasive surgery. They simply 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 judgements 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 service 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 inevitably triumph of communism even as communism was visibly collapsing.
The danger is that today’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. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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