Light On Dark Water

On the Wrong Side?

Dick Cheney's daughters are feuding because one of them is a lesbian who has a "wife," and the other believes marriage requires two people of opposite sexes. The former says the latter is on the wrong side of history.

It's a charge one hears pretty frequently. I can imagine few things less likely to make me switch sides in a controversy than the admonition that I am on the wrong side of history.

 

It puzzles me that it should even be necessary to point out the problems with this argument to any moderately intelligent person. It really means nothing more than "you're on the wrong side," period, since history has not yet spoken and in any case does not have the last word. A Google search for the phrase turns up mostly progressive, but a few conservative, invocations of it, and also this amusing objection at the Intercollegiate Review.

Maclin Horton
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7 responses to “On the Wrong Side?”

  1. Art Deco

    I like your selection of video. I think I will plagiarize it the next time I insert myself into one of these pitiless arguments.
    It’s a charge one hears pretty frequently. I can imagine few things less likely to make me switch sides in a controversy than the admonition that I am on the wrong side of history.
    Yes, but the world is shot through with other-directed people. The idea positively addles Rod Dreher and J. Bottum (to take two examples).

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  2. Mac

    It’s funny, it’s not as if that’s one of my favorite movies or one I’ve seen repeatedly. I saw it once when it came out, and I think that’s the only time. Perhaps I saw it once more around the same time, which means it was somewhere around 40 years ago. But that scene popped into my mind when I was reading about the Cheney gals’ squabble.
    Hadn’t thought of it in terms of other-directedness, but yeah, I suppose it does have to do with that.

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  3. Louise

    Don’t they say it because they truly believe (poor souls!) in progress and that it’s inevitable?

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  4. Mac

    Oh yeah, definitely, although maybe not entirely consciously.

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  5. Gary

    I started pondering a response but then played the clip, which is probably the best rebuttal to the pseudo-argument that you’re “on the wrong side of history.” While the young lad was singing “Tomorrow belongs to me,” I thought: yeah, but not the next day.
    Re Louise 11/21: I agree that the implication of those using this verbal tactic is that History is progressing and therefore those who are on the “wrong side of History” must be anti-progress. But sometimes there is also a whiff (if not a stench) of intimidation in the subtext: ie we are ascendant now, at the wheel of History, a steamroller that squashes all who fail to get behind it.

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  6. Craig

    Chesterton: “He who marries the spirit of the age soon makes himself a widower.”

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  7. Mac

    A rather lonely one, and subject to mockery, and possibly contempt.
    True, Gary, there is definitely an element of intimidation. I see it expressed pretty openly whenever I read a web comments argument on the subject of same-sex marriage. There are always a certain number of proponents who don’t really argue but just sneer about how pleased they will be to see opponents scorned and driven out of public life.

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