The calendar is not an argument

Chronological flattery — the assumption that what came later is for that reason wiser — is a habit so common one rarely notices the move. The older tradition asked instead whether a thing is true. Time is a witness, but it is not a judge.

"We can't go back to that." The phrase, spoken in any number of social registers, sounds like an argument. It is not. It is a sentence about the speaker — about what the speaker finds, at this moment, congenial or uncongenial. The past is not refuted by the speaker's tastes. To refute it, one would have to show what was wrong with it; and that showing would have to be done by argument, which is to say, by reasons that do not depend for their force on the date they are uttered.

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"We can't go back to that" is a sentence about the speaker, not the past.

The asymmetry chronological flattery hides

The peculiar move of chronological flattery is to treat one direction of time as evidentiary and the other as merely temperamental. We assume our predecessors believed what they believed because of the limits of their age; we assume we believe what we believe because we have seen further. But the symmetry is exact. Our descendants will say the same of us. If chronological position is what makes a view contemptible, then every view is contemptible — including the present one — by the next generation's lights.

The escape from the regress is the realist one: judge claims by their content, not their date. Some old views were wrong; many were right; the same is true of new ones. The work of distinguishing requires arguments, evidence, and patient attention to what the older speakers actually said. The work cannot be skipped by the calendar.

Chesterton called tradition the democracy of the dead — the refusal to disenfranchise our ancestors merely because they happened to die. The realist habit is friendlier still: not deference, but conversation. The dead can be wrong, and one can say so. They can also be right, and one can learn. The calendar grants neither party the floor; it just records when each spoke.