Saturday, April 26, 2014

The Sad Waste of Time


C. S. Lewis popularized, among other things, both the term and the concept of "chronological snobbery," which is a pervasive modern prejudice that anything contemporary is better than anything from the past, whether technological, theological, philosophical, artistic, or social. Much of his work is based on the underlying, pervasive assumption that the past has something to tell us and that the modern world is not automatically superior just because it is modern. One does not need to be a Lewis aficionado to appreciate the implications of this attitude. 

Is there anything sadder than having been trapped within a fad that now looks ridiculous? This is easy enough to see in such things as '70's synthetic leisure suits or mullet haircuts, but the same thing applies to ideas. Being embarrassed by photos of oneself (or one's parents) in older photos is one thing. But when ideas, art forms, education practices, or theological hobby horses fall away as historical detritus, these things can leave behind some hurt lives and some damaged culture. 

Think of the 1960's "Death of God" movement for example. This putative updating of theological ideas in a civilization supposed coming of age now looks as ridiculous as the zoot suits of earlier years. 


Cab Calloway looks good in a zoot suit. You don't.


Reading this sort of thing used to make you look good. Now it doesn't.


Psychoanalysis reigned through a good portion of the 20th Century, and millions of people--many of them highly influential--idolized the Freudian mythology that erroneously taught a therapeutic technique that turned out to have as much real scientific basis as astrology. Yet the image of a person on a couch, telling of childhood memories and dreams to an analyst, has sunk so deeply into modern secular life that the scenario still has some cultural purchase. You can still see this now dead form of analysis in movies, television shows, and commercials, sometimes without any irony even though real psychoanalysis is dead in the actual profession. 


Medieval Science.


On a lesser level, transactional analysis burned brightly for a while, influencing pastors among others, as THE answer to the guilts and anxieties afflicting modern humans. Transactional analysis is also now more of an historical curiosity than the cutting edge of the mental healing arts. 

One final example: the literary critic Paul de Man helped usher in the movement labeled "deconstruction" which overwhelmed English departments in America in the 1980's and '90's. This movement was so pervasive that one could even attend regional Conferences on Christianity and Literature and hear professors apply De Man's ideas--just as the whole deconstruction movement was actually on the wane. Additionally, recent evidence indicates the de Mann was a liar, a plagiarist, a Nazi sympathizer, and a deadbeat husband, abandoning his family in Europe in order to reconstruct his life in America as an academic superstar. Imagine the embarrassment today of "scholars" who in the 1990's gleefully embraced the literary practices of de Man as the way of building a scholarly career.  


Literary icon and Nazi lover.


Which is worse--looking at a photo from the 1980's in which you sport really tall hair or a curriculum vitae in which you have several papers and articles based on the writings of a fascist who abandoned his wife in order to become an academic superstar? 

One purpose of the Institute is to help us learn to avoid fads, and thus avoid looking like idiots.