[rsynnott]

> Given these wildly varying (even contradictory) readings, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that personal and political views, rather than objective inquiry, are driving these critics’ outlooks.

That happens with everything. You'll often see people on the internet blaming the collapse of the Roman Empire on... well, anything the writer doesn't like, really. I've seen both 'capitalism' and 'socialism' blamed, which would be a good trick, as neither would meaningfully exist for many centuries afterwards. We're often quite good at seeing something unfamiliar which we don't understand, seeing some echo of familiarity in it, and projecting all sorts of things onto it based on that familiarity.