Ross Douthat, with whom I rarely agree, has an important column today in The New York Times. In it, he makes the point that the Obama administration’s attempts to paint ISIS as being on the “wrong side of history” is based on a flawed view of history as in some way being pre-ordained.
Douthat writes that “liberalism’s current dominance is contingent rather than necessary,” and that “its past victories have often been rather near-run things.”
The arc of history, another favored Obama phrase, has at times bent toward pogroms and chattel slavery, totalitarianism and genocide, nuclear annihilation. (For the Middle East’s persecuted Christians and Yazidis, it bends toward annihilation even now.) The ideals of democracy and human rights are ascendant in our age, but their advance still depends on agency, strategy and self-sacrifice, no matter what date the calendar displays.
Essentially what he is saying is that it is dangerous to assume that good will always win out. History is agnostic — not in a religious sense, but in a logical sense. What is coming cannot be known or assumed, so we must constantly work to create the kind of world in which many of us wish to live.
Chris Hedges has written about this, as well — his book The World as It Is is a collection of his columns that, when taken together, question what the book’s subtitle calls “the myth of human progress.” In a more recent piece, he describes American elites as believing “naively in the notion of linear progress and in assured national dominance.”
Both men are making an important claim — that we must, if we are to actually move forward (and they have very different visions of what moving forward means), we must relinquish the false narrative of agency-less progress. The arc of history is not predetermined. It is not even an arc. Groups like ISIS are not leftovers from another time. They are, as Douthat says, a reaction on some level to the world as a it is. Same goes for the reactionaries here in the United States who oppose marriage equality or abortion. They are reacting to things as they are — out of fear, out of tradition, or what have you.
Change is inevitable — is the only thing that is inevitable — but the shape that change will take is not. The narratives we live by today — that the market is inviolable, that democracy must win out — are not set In stone. They are written and rewritten daily by the participants, by us. To assume that the history’s arc will inevitably bend toward our goals, that there is an inevitable place history is taking us, is the best way to ensure that we never get where we want to go.
Hank Kalet 