The Whig Interpretation of History

Now here's a phrase that's been in my consciousness for quite a while (can't recall when I frst encountered it, or even in what context), and it turns up in Staudenmaier's Technology's Storytellers, which is among other things an analysis of the content of many years of the Society for the History of Technology's journal Technology and Culture.

Looking over the selves at home, I tried Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought and found this:

Defined by Herbert Butterfield, who coined this somewhat ethnocentric term in 1931, as the tendency of historians to see the past as the story of the conflict between PROGRESSIVES and REACTIONARIES, in which the progressives, or Whigs, win and so bring about the modern world. He suggested that this was to overestimate the likenesses between present and past and to assume, fallaciously, that men always intend the consequences of their actions, whereas no one in the past actually willed the present.
So the essence of Whiggery is that Progress is good, that Progress is directional, that Progress is inevitable, and that (in the words of Robert Heilbroner) "technical conquest of nature ...follows one and only one grand avenue of advance" (quoted in Staudenmaier 1985:164). This Myth of Progress is alive and well, tacitly and explicitly, in all sorts of guises. Staudenmaier argues that the work of historians of technology must be contextual:
Genuine contextualism is rooted in the proposition that technical designs cannot be meaningfully interpreted in abstraction from their human context. The human fabric is not simply an envelope around a culturally neutral artifact. the values and world views, the intelligence and stupidity, the biases and vested interests of those who design, accept, and maintain a technology are embedded in the technology itself. Contrary to Heilbroner's "one and only grand avenue of advance," contextual history of technology affirms as a central insight that the specific designs chosen by individuals and institutions embody specific values. In summary, contextualism and the myth of autonomous progress are at odds because the progress myth assumes a value-free method divorced from every context and because it assumes one inevitable line of advance hindered only by those who violate the purity of the method and attempt to stop progress through value-laden subjective critique. (pp165-166)
To illustrate that this near-cartoon version of Whig mentality actually exists, Staudenmaier quotes the text of a 1983 United Technologies advertisement:
Ethically, technology is neutral. There is nothing inherently good or bad about it. It is simply a tool, a servant, to be refined, directed, and deployed by people for whatever purposes they want fulfilled... So fast do times change, because of technology, that some people, disoriented by the pace, express yearning for simpler times. They'd like to turn back the technological clock. But longing for the primitive is utter folly. (note, pg 245)