A little while back I gave you a little taste of Disorientation; How to go to College Without Losing Your Mind, and now you can read one of the books essays in it’s entirety, over at Patheos.com: Peter Kreeft’s Progressivism ; The Snobbery of Chronology.
An excerpt:
The fallacy of Progressivism is peculiarly modern. In fact, as we have just seen, the typically modern use of that very word “modern” to carry a (positive) value judgment is part of the fallacy. But the fallacy goes back to the Book of Job, who detected it in his three “friends” and repelled it with the famous bit of sarcasm: “No doubt you are the people and wisdom began with you!” It has also been called “the Whig theory of history,” “The Idea of Automatic Progress,” “Americanism” (by a papal encyclical, no less — see Ch. 12), and “Presentism.” The term “chronological snobbery” comes from C.S. Lewis (to my mind the clearest and most useful Christian writer since Thomas Aquinas) in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, where he gives his friend Owen Barfield credit for inventing it.
You’ll want to read it all.
While over there, also check out Robert R. Reilly’s Fearless; How John Paul II Changed the Political World and Jeffrey Tucker’s Why Catholics Don’t Understand Economics
And of course, don’t forget to check out the Word of the Day
And of course, you can order the book here
I have worked in the field of history (Early America, specifically) for many years, and I notice this attitude all the time. I call it “Chronocentrism”, and I believe it is the prevailing view of the American past.
It is caused by the same emotions one feels as the sibling of an exceptional child. One feels love, but also resentment and bitterness. That is our view of the past, and so we seek to make ourselves feel better by looking for flaws in our forebears and “improvements” in ourselves.
A perfect example is our view of the Founding Fathers. We know we should revere them, as they were a unique (and I believe God-gifted) group of intellectual titans who bequeathed us an extraordinary legacy. Still, Americans have to find something–anything–that allows them to look down on these figures, and so they fixate on things like personal hygiene and physical height. “Sure, they wrote the Declaration and the Constitution and set America up as a beacon of liberty across the centuries…but they were short and pissed in pots!”
This is no exaggeration. I worked at Washington’s headquarters at Valley Forge National Park for several years, and people were absolutely crushed to learn that he wasn’t short. It was like some kind of personal rebuke. You could almost hear them mentally recalibrating, trying to think of what new flaw they could espy. Most of them fixed on slavery, and went away happy.
We are very strange people.
I pre-ordered from Ascension Press at the end of July after reading your previous post and promptly forgot about it. Since you just reminded me here – I went back to their site (instead of the Amazon link) to see – and it’s still listed as a pre-order. Do you happen to know when they will ship?
Was it Chesterton, before Barfield or Lewis, who gave definition to the idea of chronoligical snobbery? I’m also wondering if it was actually Chesterton who coined the term. I’ll have to go back and look…
T.S. Eliot wrote on this topic as well.