I sit here reading from yet another verbose history textbook. In these books, there are many differences. Just as well, there are many similarities. But one overriding theme I’ve noticed throughout the whole of them is this: they are all superior.
There is an elitism, a superiority complex in a tenacious weave pervading every chapter. The authors are very unaware, I’m sure, else they would make an attempt at removing it. But it is not so easily done, you see, because it is not merely the tone of the writing, as if the author were looking down his nose at you. An author will take special care to point out the apex of contemporary thinking for a particular time-period in that distant past, with the next line smashing that ideology to pieces. Can this author not see it? Does he not understand that he himself is writing from his own contemporary way of thinking? That those from the past whom he is quoting with such indignation were doing the very same as he, using their wealth of knowledge to the best of their ability? They obviously did not understand the mysteries which we have heretofore uncovered, so don’t judge them anachronistically; don’t assume they thought about things in the same way that we do now. The whole thing is just a bad case of Monday morning Quarterbacking on a monumental scale.
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