#reverse chronological snobbery

[iscringe]

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[azspot]

From the Christian standpoint, though, none of this is quite as new as it sounds. Human beings enslaved to their appetites, their reasons dulled by the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes as they chase fresh novelties, their hearts forever restless and unable to rest in the One for whom they were destined? That is, after all, what it means to live after the Fall. The digital revolution of the last few decades has simply distilled this reality into a more potent form, rendered this image of the futility of fallen humanity into vivid 4K. Any Christian engagement with the perils of modern technology, then, must avoid the fallacy of a reverse chronological snobbery, valorizing life before Twitter as a time before temptation. And yet it must equally avoid a naive Gnosticism that pretends that since the human heart is the seat of all evil, changes in our embodied experience of the world cannot present profoundly changed spiritual challenges.

Rest for Restless Hearts

[santo-antonio]

n some circumstances, a person may argue that the fact that Y people believe X to be true implies that X is false. This line of thought is closely related to the appeal to spite fallacy given that it invokes a person's contempt for the general populace or something about the general populace to persuade them that most are wrong about X. This ad populum reversal commits the same logical flaw as the original fallacy given that the idea "X is true" is inherently separate from the idea that "Y people believe X": "Y people believe in X as true, purely because Y people believe in it, and not because of any further considerations. Therefore X must be false." While Y people can believe X to be true for fallacious reasons, X might still be true. Their motivations for believing X do not affect whether X is true or false.

Y=most people, a given quantity of people, people of a particular demographic.

X=a statement that can be true or false.

Examples:

"Are you going to be a mindless conformist drone drinking milk and water like everyone else, or will you wake up and drink my product?"[a]

"Everyone likes The Beatles and that probably means that they didn't have nearly as much talent as <Y band>, which didn't sell out."[b]

"The German people today consists of the Auschwitz generation, with every person in power being guilty in some way. How on earth can we buy the generally held propaganda that the Soviet Union is imperialistic and totalitarian? Clearly, it must not be."[c]

"Everyone loves <A actor>. <A actor> must be nowhere near as talented as the devoted and serious method actors that aren't so popular like <B actor>."

In general, the reversal usually goes: Most people believe A and B are both true. B is false. Thus, A is false. The similar fallacy of chronological snobbery is not to be confused with the ad populum reversal. Chronological snobbery is the claim that if belief in both X and Y was popularly held in the past and if Y was recently proved to be untrue then X must also be untrue. That line of argument is based on a belief in historical progress and not—like the ad populum reversal is—on whether or not X and/or Y is currently popular.

[joannrochaus]

Why I’m Optimistic Amidst a Cultural Crisis

Hope never emerges from easy answers to the questions of a broken world. Hope comes from a Person.

We are prone to naivety in regard to reading our current cultural moment. You’ve likely heard someone recently—either in person or online—decry the fact that “society has never been in worse shape,” or that “things are spiraling out of control like never before.” Such clichés ignore the reality of our history that includes centuries of wretched conditions that we have devised while following our depraved hearts. While some things may indeed be bad, in terms of historical perspective, we have often seen much, much worse.

This reality, in reverse, is what C. S. Lewis had in mind when he lamented the “chronological snobbery” of his day. Lewis noted that those alive in his day often spoke and acted in ways that suggested their culture epitomized the high-water mark of human development. Lewis challenged the hubris of this notion by pointing out that human progress will never equate to a utopic movement. Nor is the opposite trend defensible. The modern age, though rife with brokenness and moral deconstruction at every level, does not mark a new low in the devolution of human society.

We have been here before.

No Simple Answers

Missionary disciples paving the way into the future must embrace the tension between these two realities. We must avoid overlaying a blissful airbrushed caricature of this present moment, nor suggest a romanticized, excessively glib sense of what might come in the future. Such proposals will always leave the next generation discouraged when the difficult reality of mission in North America fails to live up to our rose-colored proposals. If the path to missional effectiveness was easy, more churches would risk the status quo of perpetual reinvestment ...

Continue reading...

from The Christian http://feeds.christianitytoday.com/~r/christianitytoday/ctmag/~3/326xUck1Vt8/optimistic-amidst-cultural-crisis-jeff-christopherson.html

[simondcox87]

Why I’m Optimistic Amidst a Cultural Crisis

Hope never emerges from easy answers to the questions of a broken world. Hope comes from a Person.

We are prone to naivety in regard to reading our current cultural moment. You’ve likely heard someone recently—either in person or online—decry the fact that “society has never been in worse shape,” or that “things are spiraling out of control like never before.” Such clichés ignore the reality of our history that includes centuries of wretched conditions that we have devised while following our depraved hearts. While some things may indeed be bad, in terms of historical perspective, we have often seen much, much worse.

This reality, in reverse, is what C. S. Lewis had in mind when he lamented the “chronological snobbery” of his day. Lewis noted that those alive in his day often spoke and acted in ways that suggested their culture epitomized the high-water mark of human development. Lewis challenged the hubris of this notion by pointing out that human progress will never equate to a utopic movement. Nor is the opposite trend defensible. The modern age, though rife with brokenness and moral deconstruction at every level, does not mark a new low in the devolution of human society.

We have been here before.

No Simple Answers

Missionary disciples paving the way into the future must embrace the tension between these two realities. We must avoid overlaying a blissful airbrushed caricature of this present moment, nor suggest a romanticized, excessively glib sense of what might come in the future. Such proposals will always leave the next generation discouraged when the difficult reality of mission in North America fails to live up to our rose-colored proposals. If the path to missional effectiveness was easy, more churches would risk the status quo of perpetual reinvestment ...

Continue reading...

from http://feeds.christianitytoday.com/~r/christianitytoday/ctmag/~3/326xUck1Vt8/optimistic-amidst-cultural-crisis-jeff-christopherson.html