文章批判了一种常见的历史叙事，即“过去比现在更糟”，认为这种观点带有价值判断，缺乏充分信息。作者指出，这种叙事往往受到未经训练的“大众历史学家”的推崇，如斯蒂芬·平克等。作者提倡一种更审慎的历史观，认为我们对自身的认知存在高估，历史叙事更像是一种自负。文章呼吁进行数据丰富的历史研究，避免预设的“胜利者”或“反派”，从而更客观地认识人类历史。

🧐 历史叙事中的“进步”观往往是一种价值判断，而非基于充分信息的事实陈述。作者认为这种观点容易导致对历史的误读。

⚠️ 这种“进步”叙事在“大众历史学家”中很受欢迎，但这种叙事方法在专业历史学家中早已过时。

💡 作者提倡一种更审慎的历史观，认为我们对自身的认知存在高估，历史叙事更像是一种自负。

📚 作者呼吁进行数据丰富的历史研究，避免预设的“胜利者”或“反派”，从而更客观地认识人类历史，这对于理解人类历史至关重要。

Published on May 23, 2025 4:31 PM GMT

There is a default historic grand narrative that goes something like "humanity in the past was worse than the humanity of the present," and typically this great improvement is directly caused by the adoption of the virtues of the enlightenment. There is an extreme myopia that helps to reinforce this view, as if two or three generations of localized peace and prosperity have the quality of absolute finality.

This grand narrative is, in the end, only a value judgment which most people take up and defend without much actual questioning, looking to confirm it only and disposing of any evidence to the contrary. Notably, untrained popular historians are perpetually attracted to this narrative. Stephen Pinker and his Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, or the Hardcore History podcast with Dan Carlin perpetuate this kind of history, often called Whig^[1] history, which has been drastically out of style among experts since Frederic William Maitland's innovative data-rich work with English Law handily showed that foolish presentism^[2] made narrative-based history unreliable and misleading.

This topic is one which invites disagreement and outrage, and to be clear, no I am not trying to weave some reverse value judgement where the past was better and the present is worse. Far from it. The point is that such value judgments have very limited information, and it's not what you think! The "dark ages" and "renaissance" frame over default history tells us more about the viewpoints of those who buy into it^[3] than informing us at all about the vast arc of human vicissitudes and developments. 

I have undergone a slow awakening from some slumbering, over-optimistic Pollyanna default view of history, where we are always so so thankful and happy to be living in the present, to a more circumspect view where such narratives and value judgments are basically a massive conceit overrating our capability, a distorted mirror in which we always look better than we really are.

The implications of the anti-narrative conclusion are purposefully profound, and will indeed contrast the pointless "dark enlightenment" in which we are just inverting a few enlightenment values in order to achieve progress more quickly. The pissant contradiction of the enlightenment indeed shows an increased purchase of the teleological belief rather than a new direction. A data-rich accounting of history, distilled into narrative without any final victor or villain is one that is severely humiliating to our species as a whole, and especially to the enlightenment project. I would rather that we were still clambering out of the dark ages with Petrarch than pretending we are at the very pinnacle of progress.

1. ^{^}

   Whig history is used here as coined by Herbert Butterfield. It is a pervasive and default mode of history which judges the past harshly and the present lightly.

2. ^{^}

   Presentism is an archaism in which concepts from the present are applied to events and peoples of the past.

3. ^{^}

   Petrarch developed the framework for the ancient, medieval, and modern schema after seeing a half to two thirds of Europeans die in waves of plague that continued through many years of his life.

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