Lately I have been hearing a lot about people who are on the wrong side of history. Most recently Boris Johnson, the British Conservative MP and former London Mayor, who has urged a British exit from the EU, has found himself stranded in the rear in this inexorable march of history.
Getting on the wrong side of history is an epithet that is most often leveled by progressive critics at conservative positions, an example being the issue of gay marriage. Being a progressive myself, I sympathize with the argument even if I quibble over the words.

For it strikes me that history, which is a construct of persons and events and the meanings and interpretations attached to these things, is rarely a linear phenomena and may well be, if the philosopher John Gray is correct, circular. While we can see and measure technological change and the apparent benefit it brings humankind (though we can also debate these things vigorously), and it is clear that there has been something approximating a line of technological progress since the Industrial Revolution, this is only a small part of any metric we might use to assess actual human historical progress. The latter is decidedly bumpy, for how else do you explain the Nazi gas chambers? How do we account for the loss of knowledge that occurred after the Fall of Rome? There are many examples.

Of course I am being a rather too literal, because what is usually meant by being on the wrong side of history is that someone is swimming against the tide of public opinion or some inevitable reform that, given how far we have come come, cannot be held back. I am a little dubious about that too.

A compass that is of great use on Earth has no meaning in space. Our north and south or east or west have no correspondence in the universe, where up and down or sideways are equally incoherent. Similarly, it is hard to measure human progress and history, which has neither sentience nor agency, is largely dumb on the matter. Anything, like nothing, can change endlessly.