What this reveals is that most rentagob 'progressives' can only see history through a heady fug of anachronism. All historical experience has to be squashed into their impoverished secular-modernist perspective (which is ironically less cosmopolitan than that of Roman citizen) https://twitter.com/WalkerMarcus/status/1385520434934915072

I've noticed how cavalier left-progressives are about accurate historical understanding: it betrays, I think, a fundamental contempt towards all those poor benighted souls who lived in the past. If you have faith in the inevitability of progress, I suppose this is understandable

In their view, the mere fact that they were born chronologically later makes them metaphysically superior to any historical figure. Why bother about the gamut of tradition, superstition and irrational idiocy of the entire past history of humanity? Nothing to learn there, right?

It never occurs to them that under a superficial sheen of technological advance we remain, fundamentally, the same: as liable to follies, irrationality and delusion as any medieval monk, Roman Emperor or grand Victorian adventurer. We just can't see our own blind spots yet

The 'enormous condescension of posterity' that is encoded into the modern religion of liberal progress is unbelievably conceited. People who would never judge a foreign culture in the present for not living up to their values think nothing of doing it to an historical culture

Amazing that this continues with such zeal. One would have thought that the past decade might have given worshippers at the altar of secular progress a kick in the gonads sufficient to make them reconsider their basic worldview.

One would be wrong.