“Chronological snobbery” is a term coined by Owen Barfield, a friend of C.S. Lewis. The Owen Barfield website defines it as follows:
Chronological snobbery is the presumption, fueled by the modern conception of progress, that all thinking, all art, and all science of an earlier time are inherently inferior, indeed childlike or even imbecilic, compared to that of the present. Under the rule of chronological snobbery, the West has convinced itself that “intellectually, humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last century” (Barfield, History in English Words, p. 164). It has become to believe that “anything more than a hundred years old is ancient” and “in the world of books, or opinions about books, the age at which senility sets in has now been reduced to about ten” (Barfield, Worlds Apart, p. 148).
The website also offers this excellent example, reported by UCLA Professor of English G.B. Tennyson:
A personal experience I had recently brought home to me how rare Barfield’s attitude [seeking to "enter imaginatively into other eras"] is in these enlightened times. 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.
This willful inability to understand and respect the wisdom of our forebears leaves us helpless in the grip of modern technology. Not only are we encouraged to belittle and ridicule earlier ways of life, we are taught to shrink in horror from the possibility of “turning back the clock.” We are encouraged in our ignorant belief that life in earlier times was not only childish and ridiculous, it was unendurable and full of misery.
Anyone who buys this story will be paralyzed in their efforts to live a simpler life. But for those who are skeptical, evidence that the story is just plain false lies all around. Anyone who thinks that life in the Southwest without air conditioning is intolerable needs to be reminded that air conditioning did not become widely available until the 1960s, and there are plenty of people around to tell you that they managed to live happy and healthy lives without it. Start looking into other indispensible technologies—electricity, refrigeration, assembly lines, indoor toilets, running water, internal combustion engines, long-distance transport—and you’ll find that these are all recent innovations, and people got along quite well without them before they were introduced.
It is vital to eradicate chronological snobbery from your thinking; you will only be able to look to the past for wisdom about how to live life when you believe that those people were able to live happy and satisfying lives in their circumstances. Not every technological innovation is a net loss—but chronological snobbery will lead us to make the mistake of thinking that every technological innovation is a net gain simply because it distances us from a life we simply can’t imagine living. To properly judge a technological innovation, we must be able to enter imaginatively into a life lived without it, and then decide if that life is better or worse than our own for lack of the innovation.
