The narrative of colonial progress toward eliminating suffering is a self-serving story.

Evidence

But moral and social progress in those countries has been uneven. Although Europeans tried to suppress cruel practices and forms of suffering that were previously taken for granted in the non-European world by making the practitioners legally culpable, the suppression was not always completely successful. Today the struggle to eliminate social suffering is taken up by the United Nations. Or so the story goes. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 534

Categorization

• SEED: The phrase ‘Or so the story goes.’ is a compressed argumentative move — an article on how humanitarian progress narratives erase the colonial violence that produced them.