What’s Wrong With the Right Side of History? Exposing the Roots of Progressive Pathology
By Lee Harris
Bombardier Books, 224 pages, $20
A couple years ago, on an Amtrak train, my eye caught a button proclaiming “WOKE” on the clothing of a college-age woman. She noticed that I noticed but continued settling into her seat with an expression as insouciant and self-satisfied as Greta Thunberg’s.
Harris remarks, “Boomers like myself, who had backed all the progressive causes of our youth, experience an ideological future shock daily.
The young woman’s self-advertisement for what Merriam-Webster says is American slang for being “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)” was an act of defiance against those of us who criticize it. “Woke,” I learned from Dictionary.com, is considered to be derogatory.
My use of the term in a review on Amazon of Lee Harris’s What’s Wrong with the Right Side of History? Exposing the Roots of Progressive Pathology, I suspect, was the reason I had violated Amazon’s “Community Guidelines” and thus had my review initially rejected.
But, as Harris points out, the “woke” have evolved from earlier progressives, like the French revolutionists and the 19th century Transcendentalists. However, given their alignment with international corporations, support of globalization, and promotion of “bigger and more invasive government,” Harris has doubts about the sincerity of their motivations.
The motivation, in fact, seems to be the “self-congratulatory high” of elites. Thomas Sowell, 30 years ago, called them the “anointed.” Today, they proudly wear the label “woke” and have taken their quest even further. As Harris remarks with wonder, men and women with Ph.D.’s maintain “that men can get pregnant, that mathematics is an instrument of white oppression, and that mastectomies performed on healthy 12-year-old girls is ‘gender-affirming care.’”
Harris takes the reader on a journey beyond the sociological, into the shifts in thought that led us to this point. He traces the emergence of a shattering new understanding of history. We may take it for granted, but Harris reveals that people have not always been harsh moralistic judges of the past, nor have they presumed to know what the future will bring or believe in their ability to shape it through their positions on the “right side of history” — a phrase we hear frequently.
In doing this, Harris offers a seminar-in-a-book on a phenomenon that has been poorly understood by those who are subjected to it through indoctrination, cancellation, and censorship (even in reviews of books that mention the new protected class of the “woke”!).
Harris, who studied for the Ph.D. in philosophy at Emory University, displays an encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy and history. He begins with the Ancient’s understanding of history and the great transformations that came with the Christian providential view, then the Reformation, and then the Enlightenment — the last which legitimized for some what was formerly a sinful notion: that men could be “like gods.”
Today, they think they can position themselves on the “right side of history.” The shifts in understanding wrought by Giambattista Vico, Hegel, Rousseau, and Kant are presented in a clear and engaging manner. So are the often ludicrous attempts by earlier generations of the woke.
It’s the kind of book from which the Greta Thunberg’s of the world would benefit. Today’s vegans, in reading about their 19th century predecessors, the Transcendentalists, Harris writes, “might be surprised to learn that Bronson Alcott, the father of the author of Little Women,” and founder of the utopian community Fruitlands (aptly named in more than one way) “had beaten them to the punch,” with an even more restrictive, fruit-based vegan diet. They might be impressed by Henry David Thoreau’s claim to march to his own drummer but taken aback by Harris’s revelation that the men (including Ralph Waldo Emerson) relied on the hard labor of their women and servants (in the manner of today’s woke who lobby on behalf of cheap and illegal foreign labor).
They would also profit from Harris’s overview of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s experience at Brook Farm, and the discussion of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morris’s News from Nowhere.
So too would conservatives benefit. I am thinking of those who lump together “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, and, of course, Karl Marx” as a triumvirate that provides “the philosophical underpinnings of the Antifa, BLM, and similar anti-American [Marxist] movements.” Some even go so far as to claim that Hegel “declared that within all societies, there are two groups of people: the oppressed and the oppressors.”
Harris clears up such confusions. The founders of BLM who claimed to be “highly trained Marxists,” had they read the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital, would know that “critical race theory is the most blatantly anti-Marxist ideology that has ever been conjured up in the minds of men.” Identity politics or CRT aims to subvert working class solidarity by turning members of working class against each other.
Actually, Marx and Engels “retooled Hegel’s dialectical theory of history and transformed it from a way of understanding the past into a method of predicting the future” [emphasis added].
Hegel’s view of history, in fact, eschews the kind of binary thinking that progressives deploy. Harris provides a much-needed antidote to the slander on Hegel and other philosophers who defend the Chrisitan heritage — by those who are often considered to be “conservative.”
Harris also provides a cautionary tale by using the example of a favored martyr, the abolitionist John Brown, who like today’s progressives presumed to know the “justice-to-come.” Harris’s vivid recounting of Brown’s bloody rampage should give pause to those who uncritically valorize Brown.
Similarly, Marx’s prediction that the American Civil War would result in the overthrow of the capitalist class and the uniting of freed blacks and poor whites is given as an illustration of such self-delusion. Another is about the French and German working classes during the First World War. But there is always an explanation, like the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s about false consciousness. The Marxist believes in the inevitability of Marxist history and will use coercion to bring it about!
In concluding, Harris reflects on today’s progressive who denies “the very progress that his predecessors were able to bring about during the last six decades,” in civil rights for minorities, women, and gays. But he sees David Ricardo’s law of diminishing returns (that formed the basis of Marx’s critique of capitalism) at play. Today’s progressives “plough some very barren fields” and force bakers to bake cakes for gay weddings and girls to share locker rooms with “transgenders.”
Harris remarks, “Boomers like myself, who had backed all the progressive causes of our youth, experience an ideological future shock daily, when confronted with our own thought crimes as revealed by the latest woke trend.”
But I wonder if today’s “woke” will ask the same things as they marvel at their children’s agitations for even more progressive causes. The progressive cause of abortion, or “choice” (as part of the movement for women’s civil rights), has led, as Walker Percy predicted, to legalized euthanasia. New York is about to become the 13th state to legalize medical killing with very few restrictions.
Will Generation Z be appalled when their grandchildren expect them to take a pill to get out of the way, in a manner only quicker and more scientific than the primitive methods of hunter-gatherer societies? Is the outcome of progressivism primitivism?
Perhaps we need to rethink the campaigns of the leftist boomers, who are the intellectual progenitors of today’s “woke” Millennials and Generation Z. These young people have been taught about the glories of marching, protesting, “good trouble,” liberation, and civil disobedience. The dark side of those social justice movements have been hidden or sanitized by leftist boomer gatekeepers in academia and media.
Harris’s book inspired me to think about such matters. It also reminded me of my happy days in graduate seminars at the University of Georgia contemplating Plato and Hegel before the discipline of philosophy was destroyed through radical politicization.
Sadly, with so few real scholars left in the academy, commentators, who may be good lawyers or mathematicians but lacking familiarity with philosophy, are the ones lecturing to conservatives. They are doing a grave disservice to the great philosophers of our Judeo-Christian heritage. To them, and all, I highly recommend Harris’s book.
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