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. 

Why? 

To be continued... 

The Problem of Chronocentrism: Part II, Old Games

Utopias often insist 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. 

Why? Because--

Awfulness must exist to justify the utopia builders.  

People can honestly believe that something is wrong with a government or educational institution or town or family or themselves. They can honestly wish to fix what is wrong. 

However, utopias, to a great extent, rest not on grunt work (making something better one difficult task at a time) but on revamping the system based on a bunch of ideas. And those ideas often directly correspond to the self-perception of the utopia builders. 

They don't want to acknowledge the awfulness--or fix the awfulness--as much as they want to be congratulated for calling attention to the awfulness. Their egos (sometimes their reputations) are on the line.   

In my fan fiction, I often 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. Back then, her sophisticated and dispassionate worldview made her special: she was enough like the people in her clique to speak their language but enough unlike 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. So she is increasingly unhappy, waiting endlessly to be admired once again. 

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. And people mustn't get bored with the canceling and go do something else (if they do, they are traitors). 

In sum, utopias and utopian thinkers depend to a degree on having something to correct or criticize or dislike or triumph over. Achieving tasks is less important than putting someone or something in that someone or something's place (the world has been temporarily well-ordered: ahhhh--and I do believe there is a kind of accompanying endorphin rush).

Again, utopias, especially in nineteenth-century America, were often honest reactions to troubling and unfair conditions. The problem, of course, is that the initial upwelling of fellow feeling so often descended into monolithic pictures of awfulness followed by attacks on the "other side" followed by an insistence that everyone follow the current rules...and the utopia became a dystopia (see the French Revolution). 

The descent from utopia to dystopia doesn't appear to come about due to a desire for change or due to that fellow-feeling upwelling. It appears to come about because the utopia builders--like my fan fiction character--can't stop thinking about their status and reputations. They can't stop setting up hoops for others to jump through to prove how far the utopia builders have risen: "I'm more saved than you" social posturing.  

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, despite his lack of actual experience and direct knowledge, Van tells the mentors--leaders of an elite group--what they want to hear; he determines that most children are bored by old games; one child always has to initiate play to get the duller children moving; in addition, "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

The Problem of Chronocentrism: Part III, Labels versus Thought

"[T]he public, the populace, the citizenry,

must be provided with the correct

feelings! Sentiments...are insisted upon

in all public utterances."

In Chapter 15, Terry convinces Alim to leave Herland or Troas. He also determines to get himself chucked out by breaking taboos.

As Alim states, 

Terry was convinced that he needed to...force the leaders to deal with him as a malefactor or transgressor.

In retrospect, the plan was unbelievably risky. Any culture—no matter how polite and so-called civilized on the surface—can descend into anarchy and witch trials.

Not that I knew that then. To a coddled teen, Troas appeared entirely predictable. Boring. To Terry, it appeared merely restrictive. Both of us were tempting fate, Terry especially. He was hoping for exile. He could have gotten worse.

And as Terry states,

Bureaucracies are the same the world over. The leaders were discussing us—or, maybe, just me. Jeff wanted to stay in Troas. Van would stay or go to be near Ellador. In the meantime, there was no indication the leaders would encourage or allow or permit (whatever terms dictators use to convince themselves of their compassion) such a dangerous, unworthy, harmful course of action as Ellador or Alim leaving Troas.

The tension here is between the reality of the utopia and what it pretends about itself.

Chronocentrism, Part III

 The ego-centered belief that we suffer more than our ancestors is irritating.

The ego-centered belief that we have progressed far beyond our ancestors is more understandable. It is still incredibly self-centered. 

Progress does exist. Medicine. Education. "Givens" regarding rights. The early years of the Common Era produced fresh ideas about the individual and God, ideas which filtered across many cultures and greatly improved conditions for individuals everywhere. As Rodney Stark points out, the Dark Ages are only dark because of how little we know. In general, life got better when the Common Era hit.

The arrogance comes into play not so much with the material goods and opportunities that we've gained. Those should entail a humble response: I'm so glad to be alive now! The arrogance comes into play when people in the past are treated with smug contempt. 

The smug contempt sounds something like this: 

"Those primitive ancestors of ours didn't know any better when it comes to science and religion and the social order. We do. We are moving forward, beyond their silly thoughts and clearly shallow thinking based on our advanced theories and our talent for maintaining those advanced theories! We don't even have to refute those idiots of the past. We just have to roll our eyes over them like high schoolers at the prom. Har har har. Let us contemplate our magnificence!" 

Herland rests on the above thinking--to an extent. Gilman's perspective is rooted in nineteenth-century Progressivism; the mindset--we have progressed beyond our backwards ancestors--shows up in Victorianism even before Darwin. (Evolution as progression wasn't his precise argument, but what people thought he was saying fit well with the ethos of the time.) It continued until two World Wars turned it into a nonsense. It is now back in a slightly different guise. 

The problem is not that the world isn't materially better (despite all the bad stuff) than it was thirty to fifty to a hundred years ago. The problem is the adoption of a label or attitude: "Because I'm not as backwards as they, I'm automatically better and don't have to consider anything other than congratulating my bubble existence and echoing what my group/clique/mob says." 

This we're-so-much-more-thoughtful-and-cultured-and-insightful insistence shows up in every area of life (not just politically-focused social media, though it flourishes there). A few years ago, I encountered an article by a woman proclaiming how far she has risen above the backwards theological assumptions of her church: In this day and age, sin and guilt are such déclassé concepts! So tacky! I'm beyond all that!

Okay, was my thought. What do you have to offer?

What she had to offer were ponderings from her naval; big thoughts about the nature of the universe based on..."MYSELF" (I'm not kidding).

Not exactly Thomas Aquinas.

Gilman goes down the road of the aforementioned me-myself-and-I writer. In fairness, Gilman argues that just as the current generation of Herland's citizens is building on the ancestresses' achievements, so shall the next generation build on the current leaders' achievements. She acknowledges that their ideas (Gilman's ideas) might prove to be lacking--which is good, cause they were.

And she argues against infant damnation, which is a positive.

The problem, as my Celis character points out, is that Gilman doesn't argue against infant damnation using logic, faith, or, simply, a better idea--as plenty of people did, including Joseph Smith. She argues against it by having Ellador break down in tears (again, I'm not kidding). In His in Herland, Alim and Celis have this exchange: 

I [Alim] never paid much attention to Ellador and Van’s philosophical discussions. I shrugged. 

Celis said, “Van, bless him, tried to explain to Ellador about infant damnation. It’s a belief from the other world’s history. A belief that unbaptized children—children who are not inoculated against the sins of their ancestors—are doomed to hell.” 

“That’s unpleasant,” I said. 

“Of course it is. But it’s part of a bigger theology. Religions are complex. People are complex. Understand the idea, understand how people think. Then, you can challenge the religion or the philosophy directly. Yet Ellador ran off in hysterics to a Temple Mother.” 

Celis’s tone was fondly exasperated. 

“And of course, the Temple Mother told her, No, no, that sort of thing can’t be true. Only ignorant people ever believed it. Ellador’s no fool. She realized immediately that dismissing the idea wasn’t going to make it easier to grasp that big picture she’s always pursuing. She should have known better than to run to someone who wouldn’t talk to her as honestly as Van. But she did. That’s why mentors like Tyra put up with her. Because Ellador is appalled by the right—or, rather, wrong—things. She’s offended when appropriate. Appreciative when appropriate. She’s a ‘good’ girl.”

In other words, Herland's religion has nothing to offer in the place of Presbyterianism, not even anything as witty as Twain's quote. It offers a kind of generalized "we're better" self-label, a kind of "in" group culture filled with rules, cultural appropriateness, and "good thoughts." It's entirely substanceless, in part because it rests on the premise that it doesn't have to justify itself. The quality of being advanced is supposedly enough.

The end result of such smug self-satisfaction (I'm upset about the right things! I curse the right things! I hate the right people! I cry at the right times! I embrace appropriately worthy people and ideas!) is a remarkable lack of critical thought. That is, the pretense or performance or presentation--Look at our wonderfulness!--is more important than thinking about...anything, really. 

My personal theory is that Utopians are actually hunting for safety.  In truth, I'm not sure they are even aware that under all of the boasts of advanced thinking and edgy ideas, they are in fact...

Intensely reactionary, the kind of reactionary that belongs in countries run by dictators and religious oligarchs. It is less about holding the course (conservatism) or respecting the individual (classical liberalism) and more about retreating to something almost entirely imaginary based on an almost entirely constructed imaginary past.

Take the current so-called "revolution" on gender. The end result is not a broadening of gender or understanding of human self-perception and sexuality but, rather, "girls must like pink stuff and dolls" while "boys must like trucks and sports." In the meantime, schools that push pronouns on little kids create psychological havoc. Kids are fully capable of liking multiple things at once. Being forced to parse dinosaurs, sports, and unicorns is, to them, weird. 

They are right. It is weird.

My generation asked questions like, "Is it okay for men to cry?" and "Hey, what about women astronauts?!" Simplistic maybe, but we were headed in the right direction. Expand, not retract.

The categories being fed these kids are more reminiscent of Victorianism than anything in the last fifty years. 

Gilman does the same. To be honest, I've never fully understood her take here, since she suffered post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter and wasn't really an Earth Mother type. Yet Herland is entirely devoted to a gender imperative. The purpose of women is Motherhood, and yes, the "m" is capitalized in the book. 

Perhaps Gilman felt guilty about her own lack of motherliness. She may have embraced the idea of Utah polygamy whereby a woman could go to college while other women watched her kids. Or perhaps Gilman wanted to make her utopia palatable to her audience. Or perhaps she truly embraced the idea of improving future generations: bringing up children should be done right. (Her daughter and she had a strained relationship, which isn't made more understandable by recent scholars wanting the daughter to have had a different attitude towards her "great" parent than she actually did or cared to have or thought about.)

To Gilman's credit, she pairs Motherhood with Fatherhood. 

And Terry objects. 

Interestingly enough, although his objections in the book are portrayed as somewhat sexist, they resonate with a modern audience. When he proclaims, "What a man wants from women is more than all this Motherhood," he sounds like a feminist!

His objections to Fatherhood are equally strident. 

Terry is arguing for the individual. 

So many utopias falter on the need to tell citizens what roles they must adopt. Like dictatorships and American Ivory Towers, utopias really like the idea that people have been properly pigeonholed.  

In reality, revolutions are often far less "new" than they like to pretend. 

Chapter 15

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding

The Problem of the So-Called Right Side of History

A great many problems with the utopia come down to the idea that there IS a right side of history. 

It's an idiotic concept.

I am not suggesting that right and wrong don't exist. I am suggesting that the phrase is loathsome and mindless (no matter how the phrase is interpreted: the "right" side of history is the side that will win, become popular, be obviously correct to future generation or the side that should win).

The phrase is loathsome and mindless for the following reasons:

1. Babies and bathwater 

Good events and values and outcomes rarely come un-entwined with other stuff. 

There's a great Black Adder episode in which an election takes place. It is the Regency Era and one of the candidates wants "the ending of slavery and the compulsory eating of asparagus."

The reporter says, "I understand your point about asparagus but what's up with your stance on slavery?"

The (entirely historically accurate) point being made is that many people (Abolitionists, Millennialists, and Reformers) in the same era had what we moderns would deem rational and valid ethical points about the treatment of others. Unfortunately, they tended to combine those rational and ethical points with ideas that strike many modern folks as...nuts--such as the compulsory eating of asparagus.  

Likewise, advancements that strike people as utterly rational will get paired with ideas that MIGHT seem valid at the time but in the end turn out very much not to be--such as the pairing of birth control with eugenics in the early twentieth century.

2. Chronocentrism

How much is the "right side" based on perception?

I mention elsewhere that Ancient Athenians in 590 B.C.E. could be excused for believing that democracy as an experiment had entirely failed; Jews and Christians in 70 C.E. could be excused for believing that their belief systems would remain small and constantly under literal fire. And for those people in that time, that was the reality. 

But democracy is now with us as is Judaism and Christianity. 

Wouldn't Ramsesses II from 1200 BCE be surprised?!

As for Henry VIII...actually, I don't think Henry VIII would be surprised to see his line replaced: he was that paranoid. 

But Shelley's poem (above) is entirely appropriate. What people thought would die didn't. What people thought would persist didn't. There can be no "right" side if the sides completely change personality or no longer exist.

3. More chronocentrism

Likewise, saying, "The winners write history" depends ENTIRELY on when one stops and looks back. 

In my posts on the Protestant Reformation, I point out that at different points along the line from Henry VIII to William of Orange (who was more interesting than I realized), any particular group could be excused for thinking, "That's it! My side is over and done with!" or "That's it! My side won! Ha ha ha!"

For that matter, the Calvinists or Congregationalist in late eighteenth-century America could be excused for blithely assuming (as they did) that Congregationalism would always be the most influential Christian sect coming out of New England. 

Yet between 1750 to 1850, they were almost entirely replaced by Baptists and Methodists with the Catholics remaining steady. 

As the late great PJ O'Rourke points out, attitude also contributes to that "when"--see quote above and #4.

4. Arrogance

Are you in the right? Really? 

Really?

The supporters of eugenics believed that they were absolutely on the advanced "here is what the future will look like" side of history. And the philosophy/cause spread across political parties. Political libertarians and Catholics were treated like America's nutty, delusional, cat-mad aunts for standing out against what appeared so good and righteous and inevitable.

Going back further, the Salem Witch Trials were criticized by one Mather and supported--at least the legal aspect--by another.

My posts about the Protestant Reformation involve a queen who was threatened for not going far enough, another queen who thought she was restoring the true religion to the country, a bunch of fanatics who felt entirely justified in killing a king, and so on and so forth. 

I am not arguing against taking a position on a topic. Waffling also has its problems. As Mike Baxter points out, "naming public institutions after the most boring people we know" may have its advantages but can backfire. The "safe" name or position now may not be "safe" tomorrow. 

A position that can't see the flaws, the problems, the possible arguments against itself...

...is not the "right side of history." 

It's just a side with blinders on. 

5. Imperfection makes an event memorable--not someone being lucky.

Like many causes/events that have run out of control, the Salem Witch Trials at their height were almost impossible to criticize. People who dared could end up in jail and then hung. 

And yet people did criticize it. And many of those critics--Puritan ministers from all over New England--believed in things we moderns would deem wrong and bizarre. But they also raised points about what constitutes evidence that we would comprehend and even support. The second trial never went forward due to a combination of political events, scandal (the young women were accusing more and more people unknown to themselves), and growing criticism. 

Within a decade of the trials, some people who had taken part made public formal apologies. 

Is the event memorable because it was so awful? Or memorable because people at the time actually regretted it? The event stands out in colonial memory as being an aberration rather than what it likely would have been a few decades earlier, just another day in court. 

When we are in the moment, the time, the years, we behave like the satire (I believe) by Dickens in the opening to A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times..." We think the entire universe circles around us and our emotions and our experiences.

Professor Aldrete

In truth, whatever we may imagine or wish or dread, life doesn't stop to dole out chastisements or congratulations; it keeps moving forward. In a few years, what seems of great importance fades or, possibly, becomes terribly important and...people still move on to something else. The biggest fault with social media is the fundamental lie that we are the center of other people's worlds. (I suggest that most mental issues surrounding social media come down to our animal natures being forced into a contrived spotlight, a condition that simply doesn't match reality.) 

Truth: most people--most ordinary people within history--have done the best they could at the time the best way they could based on what they could best discern. They weren't the center of anything. Their deeds, in the long run, meant a great deal to the people around them but little to history books. 

In other words, non-wealthy, non-writing, non-powerful, non-remembered people, which is nearly everybody, those people who had families and farms and jobs, who went to festivals and underwent ceremonial rites, who taught things to others and discussed stuff and told stories...those people were muddling along, just like the people before them. Just like us. They deserve respect rather than theoretical labels, name-calling, and "wrong side" disdain.

"The right side of history" isn't just stupid. 

It lacks compassion.