Bad Whig

I've talked before about whig history before, but one of the things I have never gotten into is the key thing any amount of research on a subject should teach ANYone, if they read enough.  It doesn't matter the subject, nor even the depth - if you get enough breadth, the thing you should notice from using multiple sources:  is that your sources are, fortunately and not, for good or ill - human.

People have a tendency to think of history texts as having a fairly hard-stop sense of authority, but it's like the Bible - read more than a little bit, and the multiple tracks, the contradictions.  You notice the many voices, and you learn, if you're wise, how spongy "learning" really is.  Historians may be lazy, they may be head-bobbing celebrities, they may have passion ... but passion, necessary as it it to pursuing anything, can lend itself to bias and selectiveness.

And, really ... all of us are lent to storytelling.  We read it - and we tell it - history - as a progression of events.  Progression.  And frequently, we expect progress to be evolution - to be a process of constant improvement.  This gives us an unconscious presumption of superiority over, say, The "Dark" Ages (leavened only by liberal scholarship's bias to tout Arab learning of the time, in one of those Noble Savage tropes we depend upon to make ourselves feel better), or a certain fear of The Enlightenment (ask any social conservative:  Humanism sucks!).  It also gives us Star Trek - that future in which we've gotten it ALL right.  Instead of just having *most* of it right, which history reassures so many that we have now.

This maybe why I like DS9.  It looks at the future and sees sentient life as being just as messy, just as conflicted as ever.  It may be the most diverse show in the canon; and it questions the supposed perfection of The Federation - that entity so often presented as utterly enlightened, perfectly advanced; all that humanity (ahem) is headed toward.  The birthright; history's inheritance.  DS9 was that Trek story people balked at for its darkness - at its heard, a giant war.  And on its periphery, not at all rarely:  explicit commentary about the vulnerabilities, the inherent arrogance of The Federation's presumptions of superiority ...

It's been a long time since I believed evolution was a story with the happy ending of perfection.  The fact is, I don't believe in perfection.  This is why, in those times I have told Mr. X he is perfect for me, when he resists being called perfect, I explain he isn't - but that those flaws he has are suited to mine.  Belief in perfection is a kind of belief in bigotry.  If there can be perfection:  there is always a way to look down on anything else.  There's prejudice against whatever isn't perfect.

The Dark Ages, of course, is hugely reassuring to your whig-storian.  We get to peer down our noses from the inclined path of or position, toward the descent which is the past - assured that it's all ascent from here.  And, of course, that we are so high up now.  No more slavery (untrue).  No more dying of smallpox (and those people who die of minor things aren't in *our* lives).  No more feudal system (ever peek at some of those governments we like to peer down our noses at today?).  We are Better, now.  And on our way even somewhere better still.

The fact that institutionalized exploitation isn't designed to survive, and despots fall, doesn't remove the urge to exploitation from the human equation.  Exploitation ... is what we do.  It starts at small scale - and exists there in all time periods - and always, someone shares enough of its rewards (while gripping hard to their own outsized portion) to make it worthwhile to enough someone else's to make it grow.

Greed is what we do.  Shutting out those unlike ourselves is what we do.  Hatred is a seasoning deeply mixed in humanity stew.  We don't improve on that.  Some of us believe in *attempting* perfection.  Some believe in perfection itself (and maybe they are right after all.  Maybe I am wrong).  Some believe in perfection - but that it is beyond us.

Some believe in hatred.  There's an abundance of these successfully delivering racism, sexism, and homophobia, running for president these days.

Prejudice against time is no more enlightened than prejudice against race, or gender, or sexual preference.

And believing that we are "advanced" is a danger which excuses us from working for advancement.  We aren't "done" with anything.  There *is* no done.  And, for now, we aren't perfect.