> Historic revisionism has become very popular so as to make everyone feel better about their ancestors place in the annals of history. [...] To me it’s weird because it’s so unimportant. Who cares which groups of who were advanced or not and what they were doing back then.
The short answer is: a lack of humility. Humility, which is a readiness to accept the truth (forget the common misconception which construes it as a kind of theater of lowliness), is need to accept history as it was. It is needed to accept the causes of things as they are or were, without rashness. Pride, which is antithetical to humility, leads people toward delusion, toward either chauvinism or denial and therefore away from the truth and toward agendas and what they want rather than what is in a way that is divorced from reality. So you can have chauvinists who will use their civilization's successes as a pretext to dominate others, and you can have envious people who belong to generally unimpressive civilizations and cultures who cannot accept the inferiority of their historical record according to various measures. We all know this to be the case, but we are often conditioned to fear admitting the obvious (we may be wrong in the details, but I have in mind the general principle that cultures and civilizations may be superior or inferior to others according to various measures). There is nothing to be gained from this prideful status game. If some culture or civilizations can teach us something valuable that isn't found in our own, however small or large, what conceivable reason could there be to refuse to learn from them? The only reason is pride.
So, it is not insignificant that some cultures and civilizations thrived while others did not. The fruits of a civilizations are useful clues, though naturally clues that require wise interpretation. And there is no reason why one cannot be grateful for the accomplishments of his ancestors, but this is gratitude, not bragging or condescension. Charity motivates a desire to share these fruits with others. And indeed, the colonial era was a period when that did happen, even if lots of bad things also happened. We lack the ability to accept that societies are mixed, that there are bad actors and good actors. The current anti-colonial narrative is characterized by a kind of embarrassingly anti-intellectual, reductive, boorish simplemindedness. That colonialism benefited the colonized in certain ways does not contradict the valid criticisms of what occurred during that era. Pointing out the positives is not colonial apologetics. The world is not a comic book in which the world is neatly divided into good and bad people, into good and bad groups.