I do think our age--in the West--is superior in many (and probably most) respects. I'm one of those people who think that we've been making improvements in our government since the Magna Carta. The improvements have been more-or-less steady, though we have been known to take big steps backward before moving forward again.
Perhaps what you're not seeing is that it's possible to criticize aspects of another era without disparaging the whole era and all the people in it. (The same way it's possible to criticize our own era without disparging it or the people who inhabit it.)
Look, I think it's better to live in an age of religious freedom rather than an age wherein Jews were subject to expulsions, pogroms and Inquisisitions--and ages when Catholics and Protestants took turns burning and beheading each other. So yeah--I think there have been improvements.
And as much as I love studying the Plantagenets--and even though I have a soft spot for them--I'd rather live now. I couldn't have lived under most of them anyway; England expelled the Jews in 1290. We didn't come back (well, not openly) till Cromwell. (And God knows he was no saint!)
Would you want to live in an era wherein the best your Jewish neighbors could hope for was to be forced into a ghetto and the worst was to be expelled from their country or murdered? Would you want to live in an era wherein Elizabeth would behead any Catholic with the slightest connexion to politics and burn any radical Protestant?
I'll admit that our era has a long way to go. But we've come a long way too. Religious liberty, as far as I'm concerned, is an improvement. So are our rights under our criminal justice system. But that doesn't mean that the people who lived in an age without religious liberty or such rights were morons. On the contrary, we stand on their shoulders. We've just learned from some of their mistakes and taken advantage of some of their advances. The United States, after all, wouldn't be possible without the Roman Republic, the Magna Carta, various Parliaments throughout Medieval and Renaissance England that expanded the rights of individuals under criminal justice, etc.
(One of my proudest accomplishments came when I had to teach history to fifth graders for a few days. At the end of it, one of my students came up to me, excited at what she had learned about the stretch of time from Elizabeth's day till our own. "Oh my God!," she said. "This is all connected!" No history teacher could ask for more
)
And of course we make mistakes too--sometimes more than our share of them. Hopefully the next generation will learn from our mistakes and take advantage of our advances. And hopefully they'll improve on what we've accomplished.
As for historians--most of the history books I read don't disparage other eras. Very few historians, after all, write about eras they hate. Most people who write about the Plantagenets, for example, do so sympathetically. If they're bothering to write the book, it's because they're attracted to that era. (Who would write about Agincourt if they didn't deeply appreciate medieval tactics?)
Now I have seen authors who write with prejudices. If you are reading a history of the War of the Roses, you'll usually be able to tell if the author likes her roses white or red. But that's a different matter.
(I packed it away someplace safe...but I don't remember where...)
