Chronology and Confidence

“The concept of Progress is the concept of man’s increasing command, and eventually perfect command, over the forces of nature; a concept which enhances too readily our conceit, and brutalizes our life. I believe their is possible no deep sense of beauty, no heroism of conduct, and no sublimity of religion, which is not informed by the humble sense of man’s precarious position in the universe.”

-John Crowe Ransom, I’ll Take My Stand, Chapter I: Reconstructed But Unregenerate, page 10

I am not above employing, from time to time, most of the many delightfully various fallacies available to human rhetoric and reason; carefully postured, an occasional straw man or ad baculum can provide a flimsy but elegant cover for compositional sins. There is one fallacy among that pantheon, however, which I cannot abide, the one which C. S. Lewis cleverly termed “chronological snobbery.”

The presumption that, being old, some thing or idea therefore has no use or relevance, is anathema to my sense of right and wrong, of history and future. The assumption is nearly ubiquitous, and it creeps into every field of study. It rears its head in sophomoric trains of near-thought: “We postmoderns, possessing indoor plumbing and medical advancement and the apostolic succession of Andy Warhol, must be, if not more intelligent, at least further up the mountain of human advancement than those who came before.”

Huck Finn put it more eloquently: “After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn’t care no more about him, because I don’t take no stock in dead people.”

Perhaps most of the indignation such statements stir in me is due to my particular proclivities for old books, old cars, and old habits. But what lies behind such fallacious snobbery is something more sinister: a confidence in some forwardly infinite process of human improvement toward some terrestrial paradise. Such confidence seems to have put us under the pall of certain demagogues and anesthetized both our art and our science, robbing it of imitation and, therefore, truth. As Russell Kirk warned, “Men not being angels, a terrestrial paradise cannot be contrived by metaphysical enthusiasts; yet an earthly hell can be arranged readily enough by ideologues of one stamp or another.”