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JoshuaZ comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Apparently when the adherents of an ideological movement seize political power, they put a lot of effort into rewriting the story of the nation state's recent past which casts the previous order of affairs in a bad light compared to the allegedly improved way the new rulers say they'll run things. That explains why, for example, American historical accounts of the Revolutionary War usually don't explore whether the revolutionists had reasonable grievances, or whether King George III had a defensible case for maintaining and asserting his authority over the American Colonies. Americans have come to a collective decision to cut off inquiry into those questions, at least as far as indoctrinating the young goes, because certain kinds of answers throw into doubt the legitimacy of the way things actually happened.
I wonder how much of that has happened on a larger scale to Western civilization because of the political success of adherents to the Enlightenment. Since I discovered Neoreaction and it has poked at the splinter in my mind, I have engaged in crimethink about whether we have an impoverished understanding of social alternatives because the Enlightenment's intellectuals and their heirs have worked very hard, and very successfully, at making sure that we get a heavily biased view of how things worked in the before-times which makes it look terrible compared to its replacement. Yet the splinter in our minds remains. Just ask questions about whether we really benefit from democracy, equality or feminism, and the emotional reactions from some people (David Brin, for example) show genuine anxiety on their part. These excessively emotional responses resemble how reminders of death, called "mortality salience" in Terror Management Theory, activate people's anxiety buffers to try to suppress distressing thoughts.
Did our ancestors in the West invent the Enlightenment, with its emotionally soothing message about human nature, to manage some kind of terror we should confront directly instead of trying to hide from it?
There are a lot of problems with what you've wrote here, and I think that gjm's comment is a pretty good response. However, there is a glimmer of truth in your comment. There were definite attempts to portray pre-1600s cultures as more stagnant and backwards than they were. There are two clear-cut examples. The first is the invention of the Iron Maiden) which was not an actual medieval torture device. (It is worth noting here that actual medieval tortures were still pretty bad. See Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" for some discussion of the better documented horrors.) The second is the claim that medievals by and large believed that the world was flat. While, some did so, and even some church fathers did so, they were by and large a minority. The belief became more common as a Protestant slur against Catholics and gradually became a more general belief.
More generally, there have been issues of narrative. There's a standard narrative, often taught in high-school physics classes that portrays no major development in physics between Aristotle and Galileo. This is deeply wrong. Galileo and others of his time-period would not have made the advances they did were it not for people like Oresme, Buridan, and al-Bitruji. Among other important results, they developed the idea of "impetus" which was a precursor to the idea of momentum. It is unlikely that the thinkers in the late 1500s and early 1600s would have made the progress they did without these ideas. But it is also important to note that this may to some extent not be an issue of motivated falsification of history or anything like that. It may simply be a combination of that simple narratives are easy and that it would have been difficult in past times to actually have access to many historical sources. In many ways, one has more access today to many medieval texts than someone in the 1800s would have had.
Also, it really, really doesn't help to use overblown terms like "crimethink" and it is especially dangerous to fall into the thought-process that what one is thinking is somehow persectuced. Once one falls into that trap it makes the cognitive dissonance much more difficult to deal with when one finds data that might cause one to adjust one's beliefs. The fact that all the examples above are well known to historians and widely discussed shows how far any of this is from anything resembling throughtcrime.