There is a popular rhetorical device which is used, particularly on the internet. It is that whoever you disagree with is on the “wrong side of history”. The argument’s main strength seems to be its versatility. It can be (and often is) deployed on issues ranging from how we tackle the climate crisis to the correct approach to helping children with gender dysphoria; from eating meat to Black Lives Matter; from abortion rights to the nuances, or lack thereof, of the Israel–Hamas conflict.

It is though a rather curious idea. It assumes that we can know what future generations will think – and that future generations will be better judges of the subject in dispute than my opponent and that they will, inevitably, agree with me. Rather a lot of assumptions. There is also an assumption that history has an easily discernable meaning and trajectory, something which historians might disagree with – just as they often disagree with each other.

But on this basis, what is right in our times will be the subject of a retrospective decision by a committee – but consisting of who? Perhaps the great and the good? Historians? And when will history have its final say? In the next year or two? In the next century or two? Will it ever be final? Unfortunately, in the absence of a functioning time machine, no proof can be offered of how the past will look from the future.

There are quite a lot of opinions which have been widely held for many years only for them to fall into disrepute. Watching a Poirot episode the other day, I was reminded of one of them. The plot related to a very beautiful young lady who had disappeared. She was though referred to in various ways as not being very bright. I won’t bother with the plot itself, but one of the other characters says to Poirot that he thinks that all the feeble-minded and disabled people should be killed off. He, of course happens to be a biochemist and so knows how it could be done. (spoiler alert – he’s not the murderer). But eugenics was at one time a very popular idea, amongst intellectuals at least.

Marie Stopes was hailed for much of the 20th century as a pioneer of women’s reproductive rights and autonomy, having opened during her lifetime a network of clinics offering contraception and other health advice to women who wanted it. However, like many liberal intellectuals of her time, Stopes was a convinced eugenicist, and those beliefs underlay her wish to promote contraception, particularly for the underclasses. The modern-day version of her organisation, trying to leave such ideas in the past, has effectively dropped their association with her name. It was changed from Marie Stopes International to MSI Reproductive Choices in 2020. No approval by history there then.












A 1930s exhibit by the Eugenics Society.
There are signs which read "Healthy and Unhealthy Families",
"Heredity as the Basis of Efficiency" and "Marry Wisely" 

Marie Stopes though was certainly not alone. Eugenics was supported by many prominent figures of different political persuasions before and after World War 1. They included the Conservative economist William Beveridge who designed what was to become Labour’s 1948 welfare state. Famous socialists who supported eugenics included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Beatrice Webb and Sidney Webb along with other literary figures such as D. H. Lawrence. Conservatives Winston Churchill and Arthur Balfour held the same view.

The economist John Maynard Keynes Keynes was a major supporter of eugenics, serving as Director of the British Eugenics Society. He wrote that eugenics is "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists".

That we should breed out certain types of people is now looked upon with distaste.

Or perhaps not.

In the course of IVF treatment, the embryos which are available for selection are invariably checked for genetic defects. It is actually vital amongst those, such as Ashkenazi Jews, who are particularly susceptible to a genetically determined brain disorder producing nerve degeneration where both parents have the recessive form of the gene. So then I’m not sure which side history is actually on.

Perhaps a distinction is somehow to be made between those genetic defects which cause severe, life-limiting disability and those character traits such as physical strength, personality and intelligence where there is and always has been a natural variation in the population. The devil, as they say, is in the detail.

In reality, history is not a straightforward march towards inevitable “improvement”. Public opinion in the UK is now in favour of gay rights and protections against discrimination after a difficult and decades-long campaign by activists. Arguably, their coming into the light and being seen as people like us, with jobs and homes and mortgages has, over time, reduced feelings of prejudice.

But we know from the lessons of the past that things can change, and change quickly – growing tolerance and even acceptance of homosexuality during the 1970s and 1980s was rapidly reversed at the onset of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, when it must be presumed that, likewise, history had changed its opinion.

Meanwhile, modern praise for that era of human rights activism has to be moderated by the inconvenient fact of the acceptance into their circle of so-called paedophile “rights” activists. The notorious “Paedophile Information Exchange”, which called for the abolition of the age of consent, was tolerated within the National Council for Civil Liberties from the 1970s until 1983. Although child marriage was commonplace in the middle ages, especially amongst the aristocracy seeking to make alliances, history is definitely not currently on the side of paedophiles.

Something which has been a fixture in the thinking of the United States is the desirability of the death-penalty. But over the past three decades the death penalty has gradually been falling out of favour with officials and the broader public alike. The ‘Death Penalty Information Center’ attributes this to “society’s greater understanding about the fallibility of our legal system and its inability to protect innocent people from execution.” The number of states that have rejected capital punishment has increased steadily since the late 1990s. Twenty-nine states have now either abolished the death penalty or have paused executions by executive action, up from 12 states in 1999.

But other recent data shows that the downward trend in the number of executions that had prevailed for two decades — there were 11 in 2021, way down from the peak of 98 in 1999 — has recently reversed. There were 18 executions in 2022 and another 24 last year, an increase driven in part by governors and prosecutors seeking to burnish their crime-fighting credentials in a rather extreme way.

In the meantime, in other authoritarian countries, the death penalty continues as a way of maintaining control. Where and when history will alight on a final decision, I’m afraid I cannot tell.

We have heard a great deal lately about group-think. It has featured heavily in the inquiry into the Post Office and the infected blood scandal. It will cost us, the tax-payers, tens of billions of pound in compensation. I am not therefore a great supporter of it.

Arguably, however, with the idea of history being somehow the final arbiter, we seem to have adopted an extreme case of group-think. The ‘group’, consisting of future generations, will judge us and decide whether our thinking was good or bad.

I notice, however, that our new education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has said she wants to change the curriculum in primary and secondary schools to embed critical thinking across a number of subjects. This is to arm children against “putrid conspiracy theories”. It could include pupils analysing newspaper articles in English lessons in a way that would help differentiate fabricated stories from true reporting. In computer lessons, they could be taught how to spot fake news websites, and maths lessons may include analysing statistics to help them see what is likely or unlikely.

Maybe Mr Trump could be invited to join one of our primary schools for lessons. And maybe Ms Phillipson will also include lessons against assuming that history will finally and inevitably prove to be on any particular side.

12 August 2024

Paul Buckingham