It upsets people when you question things that have been taken for the true metaphysics. The earth isn’t the center of the universe, gender isn’t a fixed binary, and there’s nothing holding up truth or goodness apart from us feeble little mortals.

And I thought I might be decontextualizing it too much

This seems a sane and liberal way to think about history. It doesn’t treat the past like a puppet show or a weirdo utopia.

Real historians may object because it favors the present, but pretty simply I do think modernity is worth saving. If we can’t say so, the alternatives seem few and bad.

I’m not a Whig historian… I don’t think. But it could be that:
—The past sucked
—The present is better
—We got here, not through a teleological process, but through an unintended, unforeseen process; and
—We must understand that process it in order to preserve it.

If we kill Whig history, *something* takes its place. We need grand narratives! If not Marxism, there’s always retreating into the actual past—which had authentic community, less exploitation, and a settled, orderly lifestyle in place of all the unsettling progress. Or so we’ve all learned.

And yet the past was a deeply unpleasant place. The Whig interpretation errs when it makes the past all into a prologue. But even so, humanity today is richer, healthier, more socially equal, and more literate. Those are good things.

It remains unspeakably gauche to say them.

In that light, a revolution might not seem so unreasonable. Conservatives stretch when they say the academy teaches students to be Marxists, but I get why they say it. Marxism is a reasonable response if the premises are true. (They aren’t.)

The academy fights Whig history with fire, and maybe it’s too much. Progress is always an illusion. We are exploited today in ways that our ancestors could never imagine. Capitalism is killing what little remains of our humanity. We live in an old, sick, declining world. Wisdom means seeing it.

…even when they did, their goals and values were usually very different. Whig history usually brushes all that aside and treats them as instruments for achieving modernity. It makes the past into a flattering puppet show about the present.

Whig history sees the past as a just-so story in which past people spent their lives kindly building the present day for us to live in. It’s a history all about us—and that’s a serious problem. Past people had their own dreams and hopes. They didn’t usually act with posterity in mind. And…

When a bright high schooler gets to his first college class, he’s probably already absorbed a view of history that the academy has long been at war with: the dreaded Whig interpretation of history. It’s everywhere in popular culture, especially pitched to young people.

I graduated from an elite university around the same time (Johns Hopkins, 2005). I think I have some insight into this.

It’s about how the academy teaches history, an activity that spans across the humanities and more, not just the history departments.

I think that’s a good frame. Also in the United States in particular there’s an unspoken premise that both major parties have something valuable about them, and the wise citizen’s job is to watch and learn as the dialectic unfolds. Explaining away cruelty can look like civic virtue.

There is a similar nationalist bias in a lot of liberal political theory.

It’s not very specific though

I don’t usually think of that as a demonym