So much of Moldbug’s belief system, and even his constructed identity as an “enlightened reactionary”, ride on his complete rejection of whiggish historical narratives; however, he takes this to such an extent that he ends up falling into the very trap that Whig Interpretation’s original critic, Herbert Butterfield warned of in his seminal work on the subject:
Further, it cannot be said that all faults of bias may be balanced by work that is deliberately written with the opposite bias; for we do not gain true history by merely adding the speech of the prosecution to the speech for the defence; and though there have been Tory – as there have been many Catholic – partisan histories, it is still true that there is no corresponding tendency for the subject itself to lean in this direction; the dice cannot be secretly loaded by virtue of the same kind of original unconscious fallacy.
So much of Moldbug’s belief system, and even his constructed identity as an “enlightened reactionary”, ride on his complete rejection of whiggish historical narratives; however, he takes this to such an extent that he ends up falling into the very trap that Whig Interpretation’s original critic, Herbert Butterfield warned of in his seminal work on the subject: