The Problem of Chronocentrism: Part I, The Past is Entirely Awful

Chronocentrism has two aspects. Nobody captured both aspects better than Charles Dickens:

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. 

Utopias tend to present this classic reflection as follows:

It was the worst of times but it produced us, the best of times, to fix everything. 

In sum, utopian chronocentrism determines that thousands and thousands of years of human experience have culminated in a bunch of people who define the universe as being entirely about themselves.

Trickle-down CRT is enormously distasteful precisely for this reason. If you are confused why any group of people would voluntarily agree to be absolute enemies in someone else's narrative (rather like acquiescing to an emotionally abusive relationship), the explanation here is ready-made: 

It puts that villainous group at the center of everything.

And since the bad behavior on the table is entirely theoretical (and uncontrollable), it places the real pain and horror--as well as any real responsibility--at a distance. People actually believe that adopting the right terminology is the equivalent of "doing something."

It isn't.

Chronocentrism is one reason my church lost its cultural hold on me fairly early. I couldn't buy into the idea that I was a member of a "special" generation. I didn't want to be. And the more I learned about history, the less I thought I was. Moreover, there are few things as distasteful as sitting in an air-conditioned (if slightly smelly) or heated (slightly smelly) church building with scores of paid-for cars outside in the parking lot while well-fed people who live in houses and apartment buildings, some on assistance, some not, complain about the evil world in which they live and how bad everything has gotten. We live in the end of times! Everything was waiting for US to come along and point it out!

The idea that all life has been leading up to "now" is a patent, egocentric falsehood. 

First, the Worst of Times

True, history is full of bad stuff. In pre-written-history, a single skirmish led to the elimination of an entire clan. The child mortality rate was incredibly high. For most of history, healthcare, for all people, was more or less a crapshoot--though people were trying. Medical conditions, ones that appall us now, like dying from rabies, dysentery, and blood poisoning, were commonplace. Plagues/pandemics didn't just shut down businesses for a year. They wiped out 2/3rds of the population and changed the economic and often the political landscape forever (such changes are, to an extent, still true: that is, disease and volcanoes do more than theory to alter social orders). 

Few people, men, women, minorities, non-minorities, had rights. Most people worked on farms/the land, which doesn't mean they didn't have individual problems and romances and ideas. But we don't know because most of them didn't write stuff down. They couldn't write. For most of history, most people couldn't write and most of them couldn't read, and that statement includes royalty. 

Children worked and the ones who didn't were treated like pawns to be moved around a chessboard. Conscription was a regular occurrence. Debtors' prisons were a reality. Slavery existed on every continent--and for most of history, it included most populations. It varied in practice. It was still a given.

The variety of food in our current culture simply didn't exist. People ate so they wouldn't die, not for the sake of a "balanced" diet. Many leaders deliberately starved members of their countries up to and beyond Stalin's Russia. Destroying a country's agriculture--salting the earth--in battle was considered a norm.

Death by hanging was commonplace and issued for multiple infractions, most of which we would consider minor. Death by guillotine was considered kinder. Torture was considered a legitimate investigatory device, not something to be debated or prevented.

There was no such thing as a free press. The left and right's use of "news" for political ends was commonplace. The world was Twitter--only slower on the dissemination end. Sex in office, fraud in office was business-as-usual.

And I could keep going... 

Despite all the negativity, in all time periods, people have...well, okay, yes, a lot of people thought they were living at the end of everything. But they weren't. And a lot of them simply kept going. Moreover, they defined the world about them in terms of THEIR standards, not in terms of ours (just as we do, as a matter of fact). 

And yet, many utopias maintain that nothing has gotten better and/or nothing has ever been as awful as it is now and/or nobody recognized the awfulness of the world until now.

In my fan fiction, I use the common trope of an after life where people can move between heavens. Yet one character insists on staying in a heaven that makes her unhappy. When she was alive, she associated with the same people. On Earth, in mortality, her sophisticated and dispassionate worldview made her like yet unlike them: enough like them to speak their language but enough unlike to rise above them, to be "cool" (though she would never describe herself in that way). 

She could transfer to a heaven that actually agrees with her worldview, but if she did, she would no longer have the cache, the zing, of being more worldly-wise and clever and say-it-like-it-is than others.

She is only unique and unusual and above-it-all if she can stick around the people she used to stick around. Except they care less, now that they have other heavens they can run off to.

In her book, Morning After the Revolution, Nellie Bowles makes a similar observation about cancel culture--that the mutual act of canceling creates warm and fuzzy feelings among the cancelers. But then, one has to have someone to cancel in order to be achieve those warm and fuzzy feelings.

I've formed the opinion that many people who claim to be helpful are actually more invested in achieving the type of personal satisfaction that comes with either shoring up an identity or performing a rite (magical thinking). The satisfaction doesn't come from addressing/dealing with reality. Reality is complicated and messy and doesn't deliver instant happy feelings. Consequently, the so-called help often bypasses direct requests and the collection of actual information (see note about Van below).

In sum, utopias and utopian thinkers depend to a degree on having something to correct or criticize or dislike or triumph over. Working results are less important than putting someone or something in that someone or something;s place (the world has been temporarily well-ordered: ahhhh).

I won't argue that many times, especially in nineteenth-century America, utopias were a reaction to actually troubling and unfair conditions. My analysis here is general, not specific. The problem, of course, is that the initial upwelling of fellow feeling so often seems to descend, eventually, into monolithic pictures of awfulness followed by attacks on the "other side," which for utopias is often the past. 

In Herland, for instance, the mentors query Van if the old games in his culture "develop the faculties you wish to encourage."  Under the pressure of weighty expectations and passing observations (not actual experience or direct knowledge), Van determines that most children are bored by old games; they just hang around until one child initiates play; moreover, "unoccupied children" commit "foolish, destructive, sometimes evil things."

No Calvin & Hobbes in Herland! 

But then, Gilman was far less observant about children than the Opies.

In His in Herland, Terry remarks on the mentors' criticism of "old games": 

I grinned at the image of irrepressible Alim as a correct and deferential tour guide. And I’d already corrupted him. He knew I was teasing with the word “proper” and glared at me. 

“And she knows excellent games,” I added.
 

“Yes, well, Alima prefers the old games,” Tyra [a mentor] said. 
 

And that’s how I got the low-down on Tyra.
 

Maud, Somel, and Zava were more direct in their observations. Tyra is the type of bully, male or female, who insults through “code.” Troas citizens are supposed to prefer new games, the ones carefully crafted to help students discover their potential. No doubt the old games involve dirty limericks, scuffles in the dirt, and “unhealthy” competition alongside Calvin & Hobbes incomprehensible rules, the kind of rules that don’t improve anything or go anywhere. 

Alim played a game from the mountains of rushing a line of peers with linked hands. No doubt, like most playground games, he learned it from older peers who learned it when they were younger. At some point, the parents played it too. Wasn’t honoring parental role models a virtue? 

But Troas claimed not to practice “ancestor worship.”

Chapter 8

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding