Dismissing past thought as irrational reduces to smug presentism

Evidence

In the Manual the past is judged as “irrational” and “monstrous” and the history of philosophy becomes a historical treatise on teratology; because the starting-point is metaphysical. (The [Communist ] Manifesto , by contrast, contains the highest praises for the world that is a-dying.) If this way of judging the past is a theoretical error, a deviation from the philosophy of praxis, can it have any educative value or inspire energetic activity? It would seem not, because the matter becomes reduced to the presumption of being someone by virtue of the simple fact of being born at the present time instead of in some past century. But in every age there has been a past and a present, and the title “contemporary” belongs strictly to the world of comic anecdote. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1596

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how presentism — the smugness of being born later — operates as an intellectual stance across fields, from philosophy to Islamophobia scholarship.
• XREF: connects to: Historical-evolutionary criticism reorders present perception by politicizing thought about the past — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 23; Denigrating past doctrines creates a verbal illusion of superiority

Related

• Denigrating past doctrines creates a verbal illusion of superiority (similarity 0.91)
• Past philosophical systems remain historically valid even after being superseded (similarity 0.81)