It’s in the accusation that a viewpoint is “on the wrong side of history”. Apparently, history is headed somewhere—somewhere that can be known in advance. Somewhere better. Such a belief in progress is not a human universal by any stretch. In previous cultures, it was the past that was viewed as better than the present. After all, the past was

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What we have lost, and what we desperately need to reclaim, is a different mode of cognition, a historical sensibility . This is not about memorizing dates and facts. It is, as the historian Gordon S. Wood describes it, a “different consciousness,” a way of understanding that profoundly influences how we see the world. It is a temperament that is... See more