Ronald Reagan was wrong. The nine most terrifying words in the English language are not “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” They are: “The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.”

This is a pretty phrase that was invented by a good person, Theodore Parker, and revived by another good one, Martin Luther King Jr. But it’s terrifying because it produces unjustified confidence that history is on your side, and this has consequences. Donald Trump might well not be in the White House if progressives hadn’t been so convinced that the moral universe was bending in their direction.

The phrase presumes that history has a pre-determined direction. But Karl Popper demonstrated that such historical determinism is based on a fallacy: The direction of history is clearly shaped by inventions (the internet or AI), and we cannot predict what these will be.

Every day brings yet more evidence that the liberal vision of history is wrong. In the 1990s, liberals predicted that, thanks to the “moral arc,” democratic capitalism would triumph globally. Great sociologists such as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim predicted that modernity would bring bureaucratization and secularization in its wake.

But the first defining act of the 21st century was the destruction of the World Trade Center by 19 religious fanatics hijacking airplanes. Today, democracy is in retreat, strongmen are on the rise, and Trump is dismantling the rules-based global order. These leaders are recreating patrimonial regimes in which the governments are more like royal courts and the state is treated as family property. This is much more Vladimir Putin’s world than the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s benevolent “end of history.”

Economic productivity has certainly improved since the mid-18th century (though more sluggishly in recent decades), but the idea that this produces moral or aesthetic progress is nonsense. Hitler took power in Europe’s best educated and most culturally sophisticated country. The reality is, progress in one area often brings regress in another.

The illusion of history begetting justice is terrifying for two reasons.

The first is it encourages a false sense of confidence that is often counterproductive.

The Democrats’ confidence that history was on their side led them to underestimate Trump so badly that they stuck with Joe Biden even though it was obvious that his powers were fading. This confidence also led the party to endorse a collection of unpopular causes, which might be conveniently lumped together as “wokery,” on the grounds that they were the contemporary equivalent of the civil rights movement. To hell with the people who question these causes even if they happen to be the numerical majority.

Before that, the same confidence persuaded the U.S. establishment, Republican as much as Democrat, to embrace China with open arms, subcontracting much of America’s manufacturing to the People’s Republic, even though the Leninists who ran the regime were determined to replace the U.S. as the world’s leading military and industrial power.

The second reason it’s terrifying is it encourages people to subcontract their moral judgments to history.

Most progressives did not treat the problem of transgender people’s rights as a nuanced moral issue that involved the careful balancing of the rights of biological women against those of trans women or an even more careful consideration of the potential harms of powerful drugs or invasive surgery. They simply rushed to be on “the right side of history.” The notion of the moral arc encourages groupthink and all the blindness and bullying that comes with it.

It is far healthier to treat history as an open-ended process that is made by individuals who have to wrestle with their own moral judgments rather than go with the supposedly progressive flow. “History is all things to all men,” as Herbert Butterfield put it in his great critique of the idea of history as progress, The Whig Interpretation of History. “She is in the service of good causes and bad.”

Progress is something that is made rather than predetermined — and thinking that you are on the winner’s side too early often puts you at a disadvantage.

The last group of “progressives” who thought they knew the direction of history were the Marxists who preached the inevitable triumph of Communism even as Communism was visibly collapsing. The danger is that today’s progressives will preach the triumph of progressivism even as — thanks in part to their arrogance and incompetence — strongmen dig themselves deeper into power across the world. Events only move in your direction if you put in the work to steer them that way.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”

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TAMARA DEAN: Introduces her essay collection “Shelter and Storm: A Home in the Driftless,” about her experiences living in the area of Wisconsin that was not touched by glaciers, leaving a landscape of steep hills and deeply carved valleys, forests and streams.

(Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press)

The author and her husband bought an old farm and built their house of earthen blocks. Not sure of how she wanted to farm, Dean meanwhile kept a huge garden, researching the best ways to use the land while confronting prairie fires, floods and tornadoes, and the ravages of climate change.

The couples’ aim was to find ways to a more sustainable way to live. Her book is filled with adventure, hard work, history of farms and farming, and always consideration for what she and some of the neighboring farmers can do for the land, including hard choices such as whether to destroy a beaver dam that helps the environment but hurts farmers, or letting blown-down trees rot in place to provide animal habitat instead of selling to loggers.

In conversation with Jeannine Ouellette. 6 p.m. Tuesday, Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul.

HERMAN DIAZ: Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Trust” is hosted by Friends of the Hennepin County Library’s Pen Pals series. 7:30 p.m. Monday, 11 a.m. Tuesday, Hopkins Center for the Arts. In-person programs sold out; virtual only. Go to supporthclib.org.

Jason Reynolds (Courtesy of the Guthrie Theater)

CLARK/ELLIS: Crime writers Tracy Clark and David Ellis, both from the Chicago area, team up for Totally Criminal Cocktail Hour. Ellis, whose latest book is “The Best Lies,” is an Edgar-winning author of 10 crime novels and eight books co-written with bestselling author James Patterson. “The Best Lies” features a diagnosed pathological liar who’s also a crusading attorney. Clark is a two-time Sue Grafton Memorial Award winner whose latest book, “Echo,” concludes her Det. Harriet Foster series. Hosted by Valley Bookseller of Stillwater. 5 p.m. Wednesday, Lowell Inn, 102 Second St. N., Stillwater. $10. Go to valleybookseller.com.

JASON REYNOLDS: An Afternoon With Jason Reynolds features the award-winning author of popular novels for young people in lively conversation with Minnesota writer Shannon Gibney joined by South High ninth-graders Boisey Corvah and Asher Parks. Free. 1 p.m. Thursday, Guthrie Theater, 818 S. Second St., Mpls. Presented by More Than a Single Story and Hennepin County Library.

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Kathy Berdan rode the carousel at Como Park, enjoyed the leafy quiet of Swede Hollow Park, explored Newell Park, one of St. Paul’s oldest public spaces. And that was just the beginning of her travels through our city parks.

“I just got on my bike and went. It was so much fun and a learning experience,” Berdan said of biking or walking through 19 iconic St. Paul parks as she did research for “Parks & People: A Colorful History of Saint Paul Parks” ($12.99). This softcover coloring book for adults is published through the first partnership between Ramsey County Historical Society and St. Paul Parks Conservancy.

Kathy Berdan, author of “Parks & People: A Colorful History of Saint Paul Parks,” a celebration of St. Paul Parks. (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Historical Society and St. Paul Parks Conservancy)

One of the most surprising facts in the book: 99% of people who live in St. Paul are within a 10-minute walk from a park.

“I loved the diversity of the parks, their history and people I met,” said Berdan, retired Pioneer Press entertainment editor  For diversity she cites Frogtown Community Center and General Vang Pao Fields as well as one of the newest parks, Unci Makha, the Dakota name for Grandmother Earth. She says she came to realize the history of our parks is also the history of our city.

“Parks & People,” illustrated with attractive, meticulous line drawings by Jeanne Kosfeld, includes the importance of park visionaries such as Horace Cleveland, whose influence dates to the late 19th century, as well as information about early St. Paul parks including Smith (Mears) Park and Rice Park. (Irvine Park, the oldest, is not in this book because it was the subject of a previous Ramsey County Historical Society coloring book “Irvine Park: St. Paul.”)

Matching Berdan’s enthusiasm for “Parks & People” is C. Michael-jon Pease, first executive director of St. Paul Parks Conservancy, a nonprofit partner of the St. Paul Parks and Recreation Department that raises money and provides expertise to the parks system. Established in 2008, the conservancy has raised about $4 million to improve, expand, renovate and help parks serve changing community needs.

“We are joyful colleagues in this connection with the Historical Society,” says Pease, who lives on St. Paul’s West Side. “Our conservancy staff loves parks and partnering with the society gave us access to their archives, such as the history of Swede Hollow.”

Pease and Berdan intersected often when Pease was executive director of Park Square Theatre and Berdan was covering arts for the Pioneer Press.

Michael-jon Pease, executive director of the St. Paul Parks Conservancy. (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Historical Society and St. Paul Parks Conservancy)

“I knew Kathy was exactly the person we needed to write this book,” recalls Pease, an Illinois native who moved here from Rhode Island in 1992 to earn a master’s degree at St. Mary’s University of Minnesota. He later taught fundraising as an adjunct faculty member in the school’s arts and cultural management program.

Berdan was happy to do the book after turning down an earlier suggestion that she join the conservancy board of directors.

“I told them I don’t do boards of directors but I’d help with communications,” recalled Berdan, a Minnesota native who worked at newspapers in Fergus Falls, St. Cloud, and Des Moines, Iowa, before joining the Pioneer Press in 2000.

Now that the book is published, Pease is looking forward to expanding the scope of the conservancy’s partnership with Ramsey County Historical Society through projects that help visitors enjoy these spaces even more. These might include better signage, more publications, and a website that helps people access information about the parks when they are out and about.

The first of these is The Great Park Walk game. Using the Goosechase app on their phones, people are invited to take selfies at each of the parks featured in the book. Those who visit all the parks are eligible to win a copy. The game is live now through Aug. 3.

Berdan and illustrator Kosfeld will sign books at the launch from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday at Waldmann Brewery, 445 N. Smith Ave., St. Paul, with beer and music. The book will also be available at Parks Giving Day celebration from noon to 1 p.m. May 16 in Irvine Park.

More info at saintpaulparksconservancy.org/2025/04/get-your-parks-people-coloring-book/

Trivia

How much do you know about St. Paul parks? Take this quiz and find out.

Which park is:

on a site that was once a hill?
one of the most popular, drawing 2 million visitors annually?
where a bronze eagle protects her chicks?
the home of a replica of a pavilion in China?
named for a man who organized Black porters on Pullman Company trains?
a former refuge for immigrants with a creek running through it?
an area with remains of kilns left from when bricks were made there?
previously known as Navy island, used as a military base and training facility?
where water diverted to a culvert for more than a century flows as centerpiece?
named for a family known for luggage who had owned the land?

Answers:

Mears 2. Como 3. Summit Lookout 4. Phalen 5. Boyd 6. Swede Hollow 7. Lilydale 8. Raspberry Island 9. Unci Makha 10.Pedro

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A 400-year-old Shakespeare mystery has gotten a major shake-up.

In a paper published in the journal Shakespeare on April 24 — the day after the Bard’s 461st birthday, if you happened to have candles and an extremely large cake on hand — Professor Matthew Steggle, Chair in Early Modern English Literature at University of Bristol, presented research that finds potential significance in the scraps of a letter first discovered in 1978.

Incredibly, the letter scraps were found by accident inside a nearly 1,000-page religious tome housed in the library of the U.K.’s Hereford Cathedral.

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The letter appears to have been addressed to “Good Mrs Shakspaire” concerning an apprentice named John Butts (or Butte) and the young man’s interactions with her husband. As well, the letter says that the Shakespaires had lived on Trinity Lane, a street that still exists today in London. If this, in fact, turns out to be true about the Shakespeares, it’s a biographical nugget that has never previously been known and places them living together in London during the period when he wrote “Hamlet,” “Twelfth Night,” and other plays.

The life story of William Shakespeare, as it’s usually told, is that he left Stratford-upon-Avon to make his name in the London theaters. It’s been thought that his wife, Anne Hathaway, stayed behind with their children, separated from him for unknown lengths of time until he returned to spend the last few years of his life in retirement. Then, upon his death, he left her “my second best bed with the furniture,” which scholars still puzzle over whether it’s a loving gesture (as it could refer to their shared marriage bed) or a final snub.

Amazingly, the correspondence wasn’t saved for its historical importance; it was essentially used as scrap paper, as Steggle writes in “The Shakspaires Of Trinity Lane: A Possible Shakespeare Life-Record”: “The two strips of the letter were used by the binders as ‘guards’, or padding to prevent the text block from chafing against the binding they were fitting to it, so the binders evidently regarded these strips as waste paper.”

The book’s publisher was Shakespeare’s Stratford neighbor Richard Field, who was also the playwright’s first printer.

Why wasn’t the 1978 discovery by librarian F.C. Morgan taken more seriously at the time? Steggle explains: “That Morgan did not do more with this discovery is understandable. He had recently celebrated his hundredth birthday, and in fact was dead by the time this note appeared in print. It was a late and startling highlight in a long career spent in English history.”

Steggle’s research was done for his forthcoming book, “William Shakespeare and the Early Modern World,” and throughout his piece, he is careful not to overstate the findings and suggest areas where it might be bolstered or challenged. Steggle answered questions via email about the letter and his research.

Q. How did you find the significance of this piece of letter?

I’m writing a Shakespeare biography, and found the document referenced briefly in one or two places, but nobody actually seemed to know anything about it. Then when I obtained photos of the two fragments, I thought, you could do things with this, especially with modern information technology that previous generations of scholars didn’t have access to. 

 Q. If true, what might it mean?

There’s this prevailing narrative that the Shakespeares’ marriage was very much an arms-length affair, with the wife as a distant encumbrance while he lived an exciting life in the city – the kind of thing you see in “Shakespeare in Love.” This suggests an alternative scenario in which they are living together, at least a bit, in London, with Anne involved in William’s social networks and financial affairs. 

Q. Might there be other scraps to search for?

Yes! It shows that new discoveries are still possible in 17th-century manuscript material, particularly in binding waste. In particular, as I say in the article, it makes one passionately curious about other books, printed like this one by Shakespeare’s associate Richard Field, which might still be in their original bindings. 

Q. Is there anything else about this that you’d like to say?

Only that this is part of a number of recent bits of work which are starting to reassess the Shakespeare womenfolk — in particular, the work of Katherine Scheil on other aspects of Anne Hathaway’s life. For a long time it was assumed that they were all illiterate yokels, and maybe that’s a simplification.

 Q. Could this explain why there isn’t much original Shakespeare writing or paperwork?

Funnily enough, I’d argue that actually there’s quite a decent paper trail for Shakespeare, by the standards of his day. There are dozens of, individually perhaps rather dry, documents collected on the fabulous site Shakespeare Documented: tax records, law cases, to say nothing of the numerous documents around his professional career. Those are the kinds of things that survive, by and large, whereas more personal papers almost invariably disappear. I’ve spent 20 years looking in archives for people whose lives are only known from half a dozen grubby bits of paper, and William Shakespeare is actually quite lavishly documented in comparison to many of them.