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 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.