[note before you read this article: yes, I disagree with a lot of my teacher’s ideas and think her mindset toward the past is illogical, but I also love her. She’s, like, my favorite teacher. Please don’t get the wrong impression of her.]

“We’ll be studying authors from different time periods and places that line up with your world history class.” My literary studies teacher explained to us at the beginning of this year. “We’ll start with Victor Hugo, then move into Charles Dickens…we’ll talk about good authors and how to imitate their styles in our own writing, and make sure you know about important books that people tend to make references to.”

I nodded excitedly through her speech. This was my first year as a creative writing major at an arts high school, and I was looking forward to learning more about writing and the styles of historical authors. This class, I knew, would be more for writing than reading purposes—we were reading excerpts by the authors so we could learn to write like them.

“But,” my teacher continued, “You’ll notice…some of the authors we learn about weren’t the best people. They just weren’t as tolerant as we are nowadays. People back then were just more prejudiced than we are now, not as modern or informed.”

You can probably hear the tone with which she said this. Sweet, superior, quite a bit condescending. People in the past—which encompasses thousands of years—weren’t as enlightened as we are, and—as she went on to basically say—they don’t deserve to be heard out. Why listen to them or read their writing when we know how backwards they were?

This, my friends, is chronological snobbery. Listoffallacies.com describes it as a fallacy that, “considers modern ideas superior to those from earlier ages” simply by virtue of their modernness. It’s eating up our age, and it can be detrimental to many good discussions and arguments, including those that involve Christianity.

C.S. Lewis describes chronological snobbery as, “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited”. It’s the idea that new equals better, that we in the modern day are smarter than our predecessors simply by virtue of being younger. Perhaps it comes from the knowledge that our technology is more advanced—as if that means all our thought must be more sophisticated. 

This fallacy is sometimes pretty clear, but sometimes it’s a bit harder to point out. In the example with my teacher, it was pretty clear what she was doing. But, especially if you’re private or public schooled, like me, you’ve probably encountered it in the history classroom when talking about the Middle Ages. Yes, their technology was poor and they operated under an oppressive feudal system. But for some reason, we take that as evidence that they were nothing more than superstitious religious fanatics, when really, the Middle Ages had plenty of sophisticated thought and well-known scholars, including much that we learned about in those same history classes.

And when an idea is described as “outdated” as if that should disprove it, that’s chronological snobbery. When someone is told to, “get with the times” as if that’s the only argument necessary, it’s the same thing.

But none of it makes sense. Every age has its lies and deceptions, from now back to the very day of the Fall. Scientific discovery isn’t enough to prove a culture’s value. If we encountered a modern-day culture in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest and they had no idea any of our technology existed, would we devalue their thoughts? No, many people would probably be eager both to teach them and to learn from them, seeking to understand their culture and ideas before making a judgment—and yet, we don’t give this treatment to our predecessors (many of whom, it’s important to note, paved the way for more modern ideas). 

It could be argued that in the past, because their technology was less advanced, people didn’t have time to think deeply or consider anything beyond the next meal. And yes, when you’re struggling to survive, it’s harder to find time for scholarly pursuits. But that doesn’t mean people were unable to find important values as individuals, or that nobody was able to study or ponder important issues. Many people did, even in time periods like the Middle Ages, which are often thought of today as a complete intellectual and moral dead zone.

As Christians, we can see that people hold this snobbish view of us much of the time. They confine Christianity to the past, calling it superstitious or outdated. We argue with them—but when this technique is used on other views, we’re often unaware. It’s not just Biblical marriage or faith in the Christian God that gets attacked with this method, it’s belief in things like angels and demons, limiting kids’ exposure to devices and social media, and plenty of statements about objective truth that might be too “small” for us to notice.

That’s where this argument is often used. But what’s the problem with it, really? Just that it can be used against good ideas? So can lots of arguments. No, there’s another serious problem with chronological snobbery: It just doesn’t make sense. Being “behind the times” isn’t necessarily a bad thing—because the times themselves can be bad. Serious discrimination used to be the cool, modern thing. What followed Reconstruction in the US? New ideas—about segregation. Eugenics (defined as the “practice of controlled selective breeding of human populations” to increase some perceived superior features in the population)? That was “forward-thinking”, “up-to-date”. But these mindsets seem (and are) obviously wrong to us. It’s easier to think this way about them, because we live in a future when they have been rightfully turned against, confined—mostly—to the past. But so have other things, things that maybe shouldn’t have been. And we came up with new issues in their places. Each age has its own serious flaws—even ours. And each age also has its own brilliant traits, and is worth giving the benefit of the doubt and trying to understand—just like we should with people who disagree with us in modern times.

This argument can be easy to buy into because it comes with so much potential for social pleasure, for being part of the “in” group of people who are so much smarter than the “outsiders”. It can be easy to follow because not doing so makes us feel bad about ourselves—why would we continue to believe the uneducated ideas of the past when we’ve made so many more discoveries? 

But really, this argument is illogical, and the emotional appeal of feeling understood and listened to shouldn’t be enough to stop us from hearing the past out—if we choose to agree with it, or even if we don’t.

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