It's not that this is actually something everyone does, but that those people also foist their views of history on us, and include this narrative to naturalize and justify their behavior.
That being said, I think you're ascribing to intent what is attributable to worldview: people of that sort see history in terms of the advancement of the Gospel, the ongoing Communist revolution, or the progress of industrialization, and they communicate it as such.
I misspoke, what I meant was, this isn't the inevitable course of history; the past is prologue and not destiny. I believe one of the reasons this pattern repeats is the idea that it is "natural" and inevitable, and while it is literally true that it is natural - everything is - that doesn't mean it is "human nature" in the sense that it is inescapable. Cancer is natural, that doesn't mean we have to accept it.
> That being said, I think you're ascribing to intent what is attributable to worldview: people of that sort see history in terms of the advancement of the Gospel, the ongoing Communist revolution, or the progress of industrialization, and they communicate it as such.
I agree, I was personifying larger-than-human phenomena, so while I find intent to be a useful metaphor it it isn't literally true. The thing I want to communicate with this metaphor is that there are choices and an agenda involved, motivated reasoning.
Your examples are good, I think a particularly illustrative one is "the white man's burden"; the idea that white people must bear the "burden" of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism more broadly is patently absurd, very clearly working backwards from the premises that colonialism is good, actually, and good for the colonized at that, to find an intellectual justification for behavior that was obviously deeply immoral and incompatible with their stated beliefs. This is just going so far out on a limb that it's really easy to see the game they're playing, but in all of these examples we've cited, it's a repackaging of political realism to match the aesthetics of that society and time in history.
Someplace I see this in our time is in the rhetoric of Jordan Peterson, an obvious chauvinist who's created an intellectual framework for why the patriarchy is good, actually. If you peer past his showmanship and undeniable charisma, you see the that same kernel of political realism; "the strong do what they may, and the weak suffer what they must." So for him in particular it's like, oh isn't it so terrible that the lower class is destitute, but what's much more important than their conditions are that we need steep hierarchies, and wouldn't you know it, I've got some misrepresentations of lobster biology to justify this as natural and inevitable. Peterson is far more artful than Kipling, and he does a better job of keeping the quiet part quiet, but it's a repackaging of the same ideas.
