Does History Move Upward?
17th February 2025
A Blast from the Past, from 2017. Some things have changed, others remain very current. Marx was still wrong.
The history of writing history, or “historiography,” includes a phase that is sometimes called the Whig School of history. Historians in the late 1700s and increasingly in the 1800s assumed that things were getting better, and had been improving since the Renaissance. If you were to draw their view of humanity as a line, it started on a high note with Creation, dropped into a hole after the fruit incident, climbed some, dipped with the Flood, crept up again to Greece and Rome, dipped after AD 475 “when the barbarians kicked in Rome’s door” as one of my mentors likes to say, then inched up again. The line begins to shoot near vertically after 1815 or so. Humanity was moving upwards and on wards and things could only get better. Of course, like most things in academia, counterarguments arose, mostly from the Marxist side of the aisle once there were enough Marxist historians to become well known.
The core of progressivism is the fundamental belief that PROGRESS IS INEVITABLE (hence the name ‘progressive’). This is why progressives are always trying to change things, because if progress is inevitable, then anything that resists change (no matter what that change might be) is Delaying Progress and therefore evil. This is also the backstory behind the common trope ‘real communism/socialism hasn’t been tried’, because if it had been tried, then things would be better (because progress is inevitable), THEREFORE since things didn’t get better then real communism/socialism hasn’t been tried. It all travels in a circle and there’s no way for them to get off of this particular merry-go-round.