This point of view has had a huge boost, over the last two centuries, by the latent Whig view of history, according to which things are moving inexorably toward a more “open,” freedom-loving, Western, democratic kind of society. People even talk of being “on the wrong side of history,” as though they knew not only what the last twenty years had produced, but what the next twenty years were going to produce as well. The idolization of “progress,” of “moving with the times,” is part of the same movement. “Now that we live in the twenty-first century . . .” people begin, as though it were obvious
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