As discussed by Matt Walsh earlier this week, chronological snobbery, a term first used by C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield, is an argument which posits that the ideology, science or culture of an earlier time is inferior to that of the present, supported entirely by temporal priority or the view that advancement itself indicates that those of the past were less intelligent or less able.
The term was first mentioned by C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy, his 1955 autobiographical work. Barfield explained chronological snobbery to be the belief that “intellectually, humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last century,” while Lewis described it 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“the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”
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