Two good reads on the dangers of whiggishness

One of my special historiographical bugbears is whiggishness in all its forms: whether Whig history proper, with its tidy story of freedom and individual rights and the ebbing tide of tyranny; modern Progressive visions of the onward and upward march of Progress (or the arc of the universe, or whatever); or the generalized assumption, the attitude, that Things are always Advancing. Long ago CS Lewis and GK Chesterton, in their similar but distinct ways, had alerted me to the threat of chronological snobbery—the generalized attitude. But it was Herbert Butterfield who gave me, historian to historian, master to student, an understanding of Whig history as a vision of the past and warned of this vision’s dangers.

By a happy coincidence, I ran across two good pieces on whiggishness on the same day last week. At The Critic, Jack Nicholson (no, really) argues that Butterfield’s Whig Interpretation of History, the 1931 study that rubbished the unchallenged assumptions behind more than a century of biased scholarship, is overdue a revival, especially as an answer to the vexed question “What went wrong with liberalism?”

Butterfield warned against consigning historical characters on the wrong side of history to the historical trash; he encouraged the historian to engage with them and present their views fairly.

Why “whig”, anyway? The white, male, Protestant Whigs—the political party—were on the winning side of history from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to 1689, in England and beyond. The triumphant Whigs swept aside the royalist Tories and the further marginalised British Catholics.

However, Butterfield saw more than a 18th century political movement—he drew a connection between the Whigs and the modern culture of perpetual and inevitable progress. Blending enlightenment rationalism with Protestant triumphalism, they demonised the “mediaeval” past and fetishised the supposed sophistication of their own era.

Today that attitude lives on amongst academic progressives. Chasing the next orthodoxy, whiggish scholars infiltrate established fields, ultimately draining them of originality. Too many people will say the same things, over and over again, whether they are Whigs or “whigs” in the sense that they commit the same historical sin: present-mindedness on an industrial scale.

Present-minded history narrows and warps, and ultimately renders the study of the past pointless. Butterfield saw the purpose of history as “precisely to rediscover history as a challenge to our present assumptions, thus broadening our political and conceptual horizons.” Present approaches to the past are the exact inverse of this healthier—and humbler—one.

Second, in a short essay for First Things my old acquaintance Miles Smith, a careful and thoughtful historian, warns against the dangers of whiggishness in the specific context of American religion—namely, the much-maligned evangelical community, which has “drunk deeply from the well of Whig history.”

The result in the late 18th century—the period that birthed the Whig disposition and, not coincidentally, the United States—was counterintuitive sympathies: the hyper-religious post-Great Awakening Christians of America taking the side of the Jacobins. This was despite “attacks on French Catholics and Protestants . . . occurring regularly” and the revolutionary regime’s eventual enshrinement of atheism as the new republic’s official religion. Whiggish prejudices were responsible for this odd misalignment: “because American evangelicals believed traditional France was benighted, and that a cleansing of French society was necessary, the fate of French Christians was of secondary importance to them.”

But these prejudices and Americans’ whiggish belief in Progress are still bearing fruit:

In the twenty-first century, some evangelicals still draw upon the same Whiggish reading of history as their eighteenth-century forebears. In the early 2000s, the cause of democracy and regime-change in Iraq trumped the historic stability of Iraqi Christians—much as the cause of progress and revolution in 1780s France trumped the stability of French Christians. Whiggish optimism typified the views of George W. Bush’s evangelical speechwriter Michael Gerson, who proposed unambiguously that “the unity of our country depends on idealism at home.” Attacks on America and American values, he argued, should be countered with “restless reform, idealism, and moral conviction.” Evangelical Whigs confidently know history ends in their eschatological victory through cycles of constant socio-ecclesiastic re-creation.

Gerson echoed Linn’s image of the French Revolution as an uncontrollable blaze of liberty. Only this time, the source of the revolutionary blaze was not Revolutionary France, but George W. Bush’s United States. Gerson helped write Bush’s second inaugural address, which justified the Iraq War in idealistic terms. Because the United States invaded Iraq “in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom. And as hope kindles hope, millions more will find it.” The United States, according to Gerson, “lit a fire as well—a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.” Revolutionary France and Bush’s United States both, with evangelical support, marched the fires of liberty to Earth’s supposedly darkest corners at the cost of the lives of many French and Arab Christians.

And what is more, allying faith with a false picture of how history works has left American Christianity supine before the forces of change, and especially Change™. Christians should, Smith argues, “know that freedom is not inevitable, social change is not always good, and civilization is fragile.”

How we think about the past matters.

You can read all of Nicholson’s essay, “Herbert Butterfield: A prophet for our age?” at The Critic here. You can read Smith’s essay “Evangelicals and Whig History” is at First Things here.

I’ve previously written about Butterfield, present-mindedness, and his admonition not to put faith in humanity here, here, and here. For more from Chesterton on chronological snobbery, see here, and for Lewis against “the judgement of History,” see here.