The tyranny of the present…..

Although time can be used as an accusation (as in “you’re living in the past”), we appear to be suffering from a different problem at the moment. The Time’s columnist Jenni Russell picked up on this recently in a piece entitled “Ignorance of history feeds certainty in young”, with the subtitle: “The belief that everyone in the past was wicked and today’s digital generation is uniquely virtuous ignores the truth” (The Times 4/3/23 – but it’s behind a paywall). Part of her beef was with historical ignorance, and with the education policy of governments that have tended to encourage it. What had alerted her to this problem was younger friends who were surprised when they were told that idealism, sacrifice and good motives were neither invented or discovered recently, but could also be found in the past. Their view was that in the past everyone was wicked and everything cruel and exploitative. Virtue belonged to the present generation and to it alone, and so it fell to them uniquely to sort out all the mess they had been bequeathed. This is apparently a close relative of the view that we are on a progressive trajectory. The values of the past are in the past and therefore wrong; we have moved on to a better place, and there had better be no going back. If the first set of views depends on an ignorance of history, the second are peculiarly a-historical as though values come from nowhere in time.

C.S. Lewis called out this kind of thinking. He called it “chronological snobbery” which he defined as “..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uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” This happens for a whole heap of reasons, some sensible, some less so. It is true that in some ways we know more than previous generations. Thanks to the efforts of my former colleagues among others, we have been forging ahead discovering the intricacies of the inner workings of every cell in our bodies. Whole new fields of endeavour have opened up because of novel, and very often unanticipated findings. Now we not only know about genes, but almost by accident we have discovered how to “edit” them. This offers new ways to tackle disease and improve health as well as providing a powerful new tool for research. Only a century ago, arguments about the inner structure of the atom were yet to give way to the idea of nuclear fission as a  means of energy generation and, unfortunately, a new type of terrifying weapon. Now we have both. What is interesting about these examples is that they illustrate that while the accumulation of knowledge is progress, there are other ways in which we have not moved on. Because both in the case of gene editing and nuclear weapons knowing what can be done has not helped us know what should be done. Indeed, in important ways it may have left us worse off than we were before.

There is another dimension to the hold the present has on us and in the opposite direction. Life is not static because it never arrives at a perfect equilibrium position. Does anyone seriously contend that where we are now is where we want to remain? It may be that there is no clear consensus on where we want to go, but going we are. And yet the present has such a strong pull that is is difficult to imagine anything different let alone anything better. One reason Lewis had a problem with chronological snobbery was that “...our own age is also “a period” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.” The problem is that without careful thought we might assume that we don’t have such illusions, and we certainly wont know what they are. Funnily enough this may be something the past can help us with. For it may be able to illuminate our illusions given that they are different to those of the past.

If we really are on a journey or a trajectory, the present has the power to obscure the destination or target to which we are heading. This may suit some for whom the present may be an appropriate target. From their perspective after perhaps years or decades of struggle they may feel that they have somehow arrived. They have a position to defend. And yet such a defence must be mounted with regret. After all, who is going to claim that their present world is perfect? More worryingly, maybe for others it’s the fight rather than the victory, the journey rather that the arrival. In which case the present is presumably still their unhappy place. Either way, the present is exercising its pull, its tyranny, even at the cost of the future.

But what if the whole thing was illusory? I mean the idea of progress from a purely barbaric past, with the present as some sort of ideal? For there are ways in which we don’t appear to have improved much at all. Admittedly we no longer leave unwanted babies to die on hillsides (one feature of various periods in classical antiquity) and yet we do tolerate the unborn being chemically, biologically or even surgically destroyed on an almost industrial scale. And for all of our technological progress, we still can’t collectively do as we ought even when we can see what we should and even when we know how to do what we should. Perhaps the current best example is climate change. The science has been clear for decades. And the scientific consensus, notwithstanding the lobbying of various monied concerns, has stood for almost as long. What were predictions about the future are increasing our current disastrous present. Yet for the sake of the present, we have been prepared to continue to risk the future. So we’re stuck between the past (of which we are increasingly happy to be ignorant) and the future. It’s almost as though we can’t help ourselves.

In fact it’s exactly that we can’t help ourselves. Just as well rescue is available. A rescue, procured in the past, able to deal with our dilemmas in the present, and to secure the future. Rescue found in “..the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins so that He might rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father” (Galatians 1:3,4; NIV).