Chronological snobbery

“He wrote that 2,300 years ago”

Book club member: Aristotle’s chapters on friendship are surprisingly useful. He says that friendships based only on usefulness tend to end when the usefulness does.

Another member: He wrote that 2,300 years ago. We know so much more about people now.

The reply doesn’t touch the claim. Knowledge about people has grown in many ways since then, but that doesn’t show that this observation was tested and found wrong. Nobody has said what later discovery overturned it. The age of the book is doing all the work.

“Nobody does that anymore”

A student says she remembers lectures better when she takes notes by hand. Her roommate laughs: “Handwritten notes are so twentieth century. Everyone types now.”

Two substitutions are packed into one line. “Twentieth century” rejects the habit for its era, and “everyone types now” leans on an appeal to popularity. Neither addresses the student’s actual claim, which is about her own memory, and which she could check by trying both methods. Typing may well be better for some purposes; the roommate just hasn’t given a reason why.

The date filter

In a project meeting, someone cites a study on how people read product labels. A colleague objects: “That’s from 1974. We only use research from the last ten years.”

This one sounds rigorous, and a date cutoff can be a sensible practical filter: newer work often has better methods or reflects changed conditions. But as a reason to dismiss a particular finding, it skips the real questions. Was the study replicated or contradicted later? Have labels or shoppers changed in a way that matters here? If nobody knows, the finding is untested, not refuted.

An idea’s age is beside the point, but what happened to the idea since then often isn’t.

• It was refuted, and the argument says how. “People used to think that, but these later studies found otherwise” is an argument from evidence. The date is incidental.
• Newer methods or data really do supersede the old ones, and the argument says why. Better instruments, larger samples or corrected errors are reasons. “The 1974 study measured 40 people and couldn’t separate the two effects; the later ones could” is about quality, not age.
• The subject itself has changed. Prices, opening hours, maps, laws and software advice go out of date because the world they describe moves on. Here age really is evidence that the information may no longer be accurate.
• The claim is about the era. Whether a word sounds old-fashioned or a design looks dated is a question about time, so pointing to its age answers it.

The test is the one C. S. Lewis proposed: was it ever refuted, or did it merely go out of fashion? And if the world it describes has changed, has it changed in a way that matters?

The old guidebook

Planning a trip, someone reads from a guidebook: “The museum is free on Tuesdays.” Their partner checks the cover. “This edition is from 2012. Let’s look at the museum’s website before we plan around that.”

This discounts information for being old, but the reason is specific: museum hours and prices change, so a fourteen-year-old listing may simply describe a museum that no longer operates that way. The partner isn’t saying old ideas are wrong; they’re saying this fact may have expired. This is the subject has changed condition above.

The study that was overturned

“I wouldn’t rely on that 1974 study. It had 40 participants, and three later studies with several thousand each didn’t find the effect.”

The date is mentioned, but it isn’t the reason. The speaker points to what happened next: larger studies that looked for the same effect and didn’t find it. That answers Lewis’s question directly. The study wasn’t set aside for being old; it was set aside because later evidence weighed against it. This is the refuted, and the argument says how condition above.

The name comes from C. S. Lewis’s memoir Surprised by Joy (1955), where he describes what he calls his own “chronological snobbery”: “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” He credits his friend Owen Barfield’s arguments with curing him of it, and draws a lesson: one must find out why an idea went out of date, because if it “merely die[d] away as fashions do,” that “tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.”

The habit is persuasive because it generalizes something true. In many fields, knowledge really does accumulate, and newer tools, measurements and data are often better. “Newer is better” is a decent rule of thumb for phones; it doesn’t follow for every claim about friendship, craft or taste, or for any specific finding that was never tested again. Lewis also pointed out that the present feels like the plain truth rather than one period among others: our own age has its own “characteristic illusions,” most likely hidden in assumptions so widely shared that nobody thinks to defend them.

Chronological snobbery and the appeal to popularity make the same move. Each replaces evidence about an idea with a fact about its reception: how many people hold it, or when they held it. The appeal to tradition runs the chronological version the other way, treating age as a point in an idea’s favor (logic textbooks such as Patrick Hurley’s list it as a fallacy of relevance), and the appeal to novelty praises an idea simply for being new. Reversing the direction doesn’t fix the reasoning: in each case, a fact about how the idea has been received stands in for evidence about the idea.

• Ask what replaced it. If an idea is out of date, what showed it was wrong, and how conclusively?
• Ask whether the world changed or only opinion did. Out-of-date bus schedules are a different problem from out-of-fashion ideas.
• Turn the question on the present. Which of today’s assumptions would you be unable to defend if someone asked for the evidence rather than pointing to the fact that everyone now holds them?