Another Disorienting "Ism"

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