I sometimes annoy my friends with my obsession with history. I’m always trying to steer our conversations toward it, whether we’re talking about politics, pop culture or the endless potholes on Chicago streets.

I understand their occasional gripes about the use of history as an analytical framework. It isn’t always the best lens for understanding a problem or hypothesizing a solution. But sometimes history teaches us things in a way no other academic discipline or intellectual lens can.

Often I’ve been reminded of one of the most important lessons history can teach us: Human progress is not inevitable. That reminder has come many times in many different settings and contexts, but never in more impactful context than history classes at Northwestern.

I’ve been reminded of this lesson recently in my class on the history of the Civil Rights Movement with renowned historian Kevin Boyle. In our first classes of the quarter, Boyle introduced the brutal context from which the movement emerged: the system of segregation, discrimination and violent oppression named after the minstrel caricature Jim Crow. It was essential to understand, he said, that the view from Reconstruction after the Civil War was in many respects a promising one: African-Americans retained full citizenship rights, voted in local and federal elections and held political office on nearly all levels of government. The future seemed to many an invariably progressive one. But then came the backlash, the Southern counterrevolution and the construction of a system that would go on to disenfranchise, humiliate and ritualistically murder African-Americans throughout the American South.

Liberals, particularly liberals like me who identify as progressives but spend more time pontificating from afar than actually fighting in the trenches of activism, tend to see the world as stumbling toward an invariably more liberal future. We think eventually an enlightened society will awake one morning and suddenly embrace the righteous causes of contemporary progressivism, like combating climate change, or ending racial discrimination in policing and prisons, or guaranteeing the fundamental rights of LGBT people, or pursuing serious gun control.

But history tells us that’s not the way progress happens. There’s no sudden moment of collective self-actualization that changes the world for the better. If anything, history teaches us moments of progress can be lost at any time to apathy.

Take the issue of gun control, which President Barack Obama called his biggest frustration so far as president. After the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012, the need for gun control seemed to strike an emotional chord for many Americans. A Gallup poll conducted just after the massacre found 58 percent of Americans supported stricter gun laws. But Friday, Pew Research Center found public opinion had flipped. Today, opponents of gun control outnumber supporters 52 to 46. The Pew poll put recent opinions in historical perspective: In the late 1990s, just 29 percent of Americans opposed stricter gun control laws while 66 percent supported them.

The same trend against progressivism can be seen in public opinion polls on climate change. In 1990, Gallup found that 71 percent of Americans prioritized protection of the environment over economic growth. Near 2010, Gallup found that support had flipped, with only 43 percent prioritizing the environment.

These trends make clear that progressive ideas, even those backed by common sense and scientific fact, don’t invariably win the day.

Liberals today are wrong to see contemporary issues like gun control and climate change as surfing on an inevitable wave of progress. Rather, these issues are boats piloted by committed activists who steer them forward through a sea of indifference. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, with all its triumphs and tragedies, rested on the shoulders of thousands of activists who fought oppression in the streets, in courtrooms and on public buses. It emerged not from the progress of Reconstruction but from the backwardness of Jim Crow.

I don’t write this to disarm progressives of their hold on the future. Progressivism has a special claim to the future, bolstered by a belief in what Martin Luther King Jr. called the eventual bending of the “arc of the moral universe” toward justice. But we must remember that whatever progress we achieve in the future is carried forward on the backs of hardworking activists who convince the public of the righteousness of an idea or a movement.

William Kirkland is a Weinberg junior. He can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].