I don’t recall when I started hearing the warning about being “on the wrong side of history.” At the end of 2013 New York Magazine quantified the surge in its usage. In 2006 there were about 524 articles that used the phrase. That number had grown to 1,800 in 2013.

President Obama’s fondness for the phrase no doubt contributed to its rise. Jonah Goldberg wrote that nobody had ever wielded the phrase as often as Obama. Others on the left picked it up from Obama, Goldberg thinks. Other critics have argued that Obama overused it as a way to block critic of his policies.

Nobody wants to be “on the wrong side of history.” But what does that mean? How do we know who will or will not wind up on this shameful outer darkness, when future historians write about it?

It does not mean being on the wrong side of what we now call history: what has happened before now. People today care less than ever what those in our history thought or wrote. More on that in a moment.

No, the “history” in this phrase is, ironically, the future. To avoid being “on the wrong side of history” is really an attempt to avoid being despised by imaginary future thought leaders. We’re trying to be careful not to let the future’s more enlightened and evolved people think poorly of us.

Of course, this presupposes that history is following the path preferred by progressives. One of Jonah Goldberg’s main criticisms is the way the phrase smacks of Marxist doctrines of inevitable social progress. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev told the capitalist West in 1960, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side.” The phrase served a rhetorical purpose at the time, but was less than useless as a prediction about the future.

There continues to be a progressive mindset that says we’re always on march toward a better tomorrow — as defined by progressives. But do we have any reason to think that’s true?

I’m suspicious of the claim since the ones who make it have so little regard for the past. How do we reconcile their disregard for history with their claim to see the future so clearly, and care so much about it?

Only those who know history can see the present for what it is.

“History is a hill or a high point,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “from which alone men see the town in which they are living and the age in which they live.” Just as a person gains better perspective on his own culture by traveling away from it, so a student of history gains perspective on his or her own era by visiting other times and places through the study of history.

Those who ignore history have refused to climb to the right vantage point. Too often they condemn the past simplistically, seeing nothing there but racism, oppression, unscientific ignorance and unevolved barbarism. We need not study that, they think. We’ve risen above it.

It’s a childish view of history, an exercise in falsely honoring ourselves simply for living in one time period rather than another. C. S. Lewis called it “chronological snobbery.” The snob doesn’t know much about “those people” from way back then, but he’s heard rumors, and they’re nearly all negative. So he turns up his nose in self-righteous, xenophobic distrust of their values or traditions.

This toxic attitude clouds the times rather than clarifying them. Only those who know history can see the present for what it is. They alone truly possess a cultural identity. They alone can speak knowledgeably of where we are and should be going.

Maybe 50 or 10 years from now, people will see today’s progressives as forerunners to be admired, as the users of the phrase “right/wrong side of history” readily assume. Or maybe they will see the current progressive movement as a misguided endeavor that peaked quickly then thankfully faded away. Again, we can’t know. Even if we could, what would it prove? How could we know they were right? What if they were on the “wrong side of history”? We need better ways to determine what’s right and what’s wrong.

The events of the past are the prequels to our current historical episode. We can’t understand this current episode, let alone future ones, without knowing what came before. If we want to bequeath to the future a civilization worth preserving, the best thing we can do is get on the right side of truth by returning to the theological, moral and intellectual foundations on which our civilization was built.

If there’s anyone who’s really on the wrong side of history, it’s the ones who have put their confidence in the future “history” we can’t know, and have decided to ignore the history that we can.