“Chronological Snobbery” and America

“Chronological Snobbery” and America
Copyright 2013 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The great Christian writer and apologist of the last century, C.S. Lewis, spoke of a flawed view of the present and the past which he termed “Chronological Snobbery.” By this Lewis meant a societal assumption that everything new in human thought and custom was automatically better than most, if not all, of the human thought and custom that preceded it. The Oxford don was one of the last of the true classical scholars of the Western tradition (he half-kiddingly referred to himself as a “dinosaur.”) As such Lewis was able to see the Modernist rejection of tradition and natural law that, even then, was going on all around him for what it was; an unreflective rejection of any kind of time-tested way of living. One has to wonder what this man who passed away in the early 1960’s would have thought of America in 2013.

There seems to have been a proliferation of Chronological Snobbery here during the past few years. Our nation is ever more rapidly giving itself over to an attitude that enthusiastically rejects the time-honored worldview of many earlier generations in the name of “progress.” This is reflected in the recent development of laws designed to overturn what is increasingly thought of as the, at best, misguided and, at worst, intentionally oppressive moral imperatives of an earlier time in the country’s history.

Inherent in many of these legislated changes to previously accepted norms is an apparent lack of forethought as to what the new norms might lead to over time. Such a lack is one of the cardinal qualities of Chronological Snobbery. If a people decide that everything their forebears believed in was fatally flawed, based on an evolutionary notion of human progress, then they tend to assume that they are more enlightened beings. Pride is the obvious conscious or unconscious result of this way of thinking, and pride and snobbery are to a large degree synonymous.

Lewis himself was self-admittedly such a snob when he was a young Atheist. With the onset of a greater maturity in thought that immediately preceded and followed his religious conversion he came to realize the flaws of a pat faith in human progress. As an older man with a wide-ranging understanding and appreciation of the history of Western civilization he came to realize that his young pride had blinded him to its more enduring virtues. Would that more of us could come to share Lewis’s mature worldview today.

The reason we do not seems to be rooted in the fact that the last few generations in this nation are inheritors of what might be described as “The Tyranny of the Young and Distrusting.” Since at least the 1960’s there has been an aggressive rejection of both the wisdom of past ages and the older individuals who are perceived as repressively carrying on the convictions of those past ages. Advanced age is no longer seen as producing wisdom as much as in producing a supposed ignorance. This historically novel phenomenon is perhaps most strikingly seen in the now very public rejection of the Judeo-Christian heritage of the United States by many, a rejection that has become profoundly more prevalent in the last several years.

It appears to be a fact of history that those societies who give up on the idea of an unchanging, transcendent moral order eventually descend into moral anarchy. If this is true then America, after 237 years, seems to be descending at a rate greater than any other society previous to it. This is because our recent widespread embrace of Chronological Snobbery, in the rapid rejection of what was considered an unchanging moral code not many years ago, is possibly unprecedented by any culture in the history of mankind. What is sure to those of us who have decidedly rejected embracing it is that we do not look forward to the future it heralds in the country of our birth.