Yeah man, I read the same Wikipedia article, and now I know way more about "Whiggery" than I ever really wanted to. It's also got a couple people trying to add

Yeah man, I read the same Wikipedia article, and now I know way more about "Whiggery" than I ever really wanted to. It's also got a couple people trying to add that Forbes article and "intellectual dark web" Sam Harris into it [1]. Presentism is a very specific kind of Eurocentrism founded on the teleological idea that, essentially, this is all God's plan and we're on the right side of it. Its meaning is changing a little in the modern era, now that we're looking back on our (human) history and recoiling. This naturally causes us some dissonance; the classic example is Jefferson's devotion to liberty... as a slaveholder who personally ordered his slaves flogged [2]. And classically, presentism would say that the US was on the correct course, and these other peoples (indigenous Americans, people we brought over to enslave, etc.) would inevitably lose out, because they're not on the right side of history [3]. But again in the modern era, we're seeing the meaning change from "we're on the right side of history and therefore can do no wrong" to "our values now are so different, if Andrew Jackson were alive today he'd be in prison". I think this is right; I don't want to erase Jefferson from history, but I do think I'd feel weird as an African-American to see slaveowners exalted everywhere (even money, save Lincoln and Grant everyone on there was a slaveowner). I mean, as a white guy I feel weird about it anyway. But while I think the wiki article is pretty thinly cited, it does reference an opinion piece from the president of the American Historical Association which I actually really like. Here are some good bits: > I'm not arguing that identity politics have no place in historical study; women's history, African American history, Latino history, gay and lesbian history, and the like have all made fundamentally important contributions to our understanding of history. It is hard to imagine American history in this country without some element of national identity in it. And present-day concerns have helped revivify topics, such as imperialism, that needed reconsideration. > Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forbears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards. This is not to say that any of these findings are irrelevant or that we should endorse an entirely relativist point of view. It is to say that we must question the stance of temporal superiority that is implicit in the Western (and now probably worldwide) historical discipline. > Students readily absorb these attitudes of temporal superiority, but they also stand in some ways as our best bulwark against it. When I teach Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history to students in UCLA's history of history class, they at first seize upon his Eurocentric, indeed racist, comments about Africa's place in world history, but they quite readily see that their condescension toward Hegel derives from Hegel's own worldview. Hegel was the great codifier of Western temporal superiority; for Hegel, all truth is revealed through the progression of history, which means that those in the present always have a better shot at grasping truth than do people in the past. Students understand quite quickly that those who follow them will have the same retrospective advantage over them that they enjoy vis à vis Hegel. So, specifically, I'm not dismissing your characterization of my comment as presentist (?) because it's got some new modern relevance. I'm dismissing it because I buy the moral relativism critique: I think these things (colonialism, here) were always bad, and I think your attempt to dismiss my characterization as presentism is applying moral relativism (or whataboutism, less charitably) to acts that are universally, eternally immoral. Which is why I wrote: > Generally, I think slavery and mass murder/subjugation are pretty awful, no matter the era, no matter if someone else is also doing it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Presentism_(liter... [2]: This is a great example actually; read about American exceptionalism or the Jefferson's Empire of Liberty. That's textbook presentism right there. [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history#cite_ref-28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history#cite_ref-28