Chronological snobbery
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Chronological snobbery is the logical fallacy that the thinking, art, or science of an earlier time is inherently inferior when compared to that of the present. It occurs when someone makes the presumption that since civilization has advanced in certain (usually scientific) areas, people of earlier time periods must have been on the whole less intelligent in all areas. "If they used to think the sun revolved around the Earth, why should we even listen to what they have to say about the problem of evil?"
[edit] An example
G. B. Tennyson offers the following firsthand account of chronological snobbery in action:
- I was attending a lecture with a varied but exclusively university-oriented audience of some five hundred when the lecturer, a Ph.D. in physics, said, almost in passing, "Remember that only three hundred years ago men actually believed the world was flat!" Considerable knowing laughter greeted this astonishing misrepresentation (or, should I say, falsehood?), and the assembled all murmured a kind of self-congratulatory hum of satisfaction with their own superior knowledge. At another point the lecturer dropped a reference to the onetime belief that the sun revolved around the earth. More laughter. The physicist, it was apparent, was merely offering burnt incense at the altar of some of our twentieth-century idols.
[edit] God, lightning bolts, and similar applications
A further step is to assume that ancient people made up fanciful theories in lieu of scientific explanations, such as, "Men used to think that God (or Thor) threw lightning bolts when He was angry, but now we know that lightning is just a massive build-up of static electricity." The actual evidence of ancient people having this belief is hardly different from a count of present day people with the same belief. Confucius, Socrates, Buddha, Cicero, Archimedes and other sages, old as they are, left no suggestion of this.
To the contrary, there are many examples of similarity between ancient cultures and our own. Students of Plato's Academy argued against the soothsayers who were telling people that they could predict the future by reading goat entrails, much as Carl Sagan spoke his contempt for modern horoscopes. To compare a modern Sagan against an ancient soothsayer is as false as to compare an ancient Aristotle with a modern astrologer.
[edit] Usage of the term
Owen Barfield alludes to this presumption in his books Speaker's Meaning, History in English Words, and Worlds Apart. Fellow Inkling, C. S. Lewis, also uses the term in his partial autobiography, Surprised by Joy.
[edit] Notes
- ↑ Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning
- ↑ http://www.owenbarfield.com/Encyclopedia_Barfieldiana/Lexicon/Chronological.html
