Chesterton on The Vile Assurance of Victory

Because I was rather critical of my idol G.K. Chesterton yesterday, today I want to quote one of my favourite paragraphs from his Autobiography. He is speaking of the public reaction to the Boer War in Britain:

It seemed that all moderate men were on what was called the patriotic side. I knew little of politics then; and to me the unity seemed greater than it was; but it was very great. I saw all the public men and public bodies, the people in the street, my own middle-class and most of my family and friends, solid in favour of something that seemed inevitable and scientific and secure. And I suddenly realised that I hated it; that I hated the whole thing as I had never hated anything before.

What I hated about it was what a good many people liked about it. It was such a very cheerful war. I hated its confidence, its congratulatory anticipations, its optimism of the Stock Exchange. I hated its vile assurance of victory. It was regarded by many as an almost automatic process like the operation of a natural law; and I have always hated that sort of heathen notion of a natural law. As the war proceeded, indeed, it began to be dimly felt that it was proceeding and not progressing. When the British had many unexpected failures and the Boers many unexpected successes, there was a change in the public temper, and less of optimism and indeed little but obstinacy. But the note struck from the first was the note of the inevitable; a thing abhorrent to Christians and to lovers of liberty. The blows struck by the Boer nation at bay, the dash and dazzling evasions of De Wet, the capture of a British general at the very end of the campaign, sounded again and again the opposite note of defiance; of those who, as I wrote later in one of my first articles, "disregard the omens and disdain the stars". And all this swelled up within me into vague images of a modern resurrection of Marathon or Thermopylae; and I saw again my recurring dream of the unscalable tower and the besieging citizens; and began to draw out the rude outlines of my little romance of London. But above all, perhaps, what began to repel me about the atmosphere of the adventure was something insincere about the most normal part of the national claim; the suggestion of something like a rescue of our exiled representatives, the commercial citizens of Johannesburg, who were commonly called the Outlanders. As this would have been the most sympathetic plea if it was genuine, it was the more repulsive if it was hypocritical.

Now, I don't want to get into the rights and wrongs of the Boer War. That's not the source of my interest in this passage.

It's more that Chesterton puts into very eloquent words my own reaction to the liberal-globalist-secular agenda that has been on the ascendant in the West for many decades: "I hated the whole thing as I had never hated anything before.... I hated its vile assurance of victory. It was regarded by many as an almost automatic process like the operation of a natural law; and I have always hated that sort of heathen notion of a natural law."

Although the liberal-secular-globalists have taken a bashing in the last decade or so, and their vile assurance of victory is considerably dented, I still experience a bubbling up of this feeling whenever I come across that horrible phrase, "the right side of history."

First off, who is to say what the "right side of history" is? "History" is constantly changing its mind.

Biut more importantly...even if the liberal-globalist-secular crowd are entirely right, and they have somehow identified the impersonal, unstoppable laws of history that are sure to prevail, like Isaac Asimov's laws of psychohistory...

Even then, and especially then, I would consider it cowardly and craven to identify with the coming thing, the unstoppable force, simply because it's unstoppable and destined to prevail. If I've stood up for what I truly believe to be right, I don't much care what "history" happens to say on the matter