What is the characteristic blindness of our age?

When we read the writings coming from previous centuries, we say "Typical Victorian. Typical Medieval. Typical eighteenth-century." But then we have to start wondering what the characteristic blindness of our age is. We can see the problems with other ages because we aren't in them and we haven't absorbed the typical prejudices of that time. We have, however, absorbed the typical prejudices of our time, and those are hard to see. How much of what we say is going to be read by people in the future as "sooo early twenty-first century?" That's what C. S. Lewis talks about in his introduction to a fourth-century theological treatise:

Is C. S. Lewis out of date?

An argument to that effect was discussed here. To make that case, you'd have to commit the fallacy of chronological snobbery.

HT: Bob Prokop.

Bultmann's blatant chronological snobbery

A redated post, prompted by Bob Prokop's charge of chronological snobbery against Doctor Logic. I am linking to the Wikipedia entry on the fallacy of Chronological snobbery.

It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless [radio] and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of demons and spirits.

Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth

Apparently Bultmann never visited a charismatic church. Those churches are not only filled with people who believe in demons and spirits, they consider them part of daily experience.

It reminds me of Al Plantinga's joke:

Pastor 1: Do you believe in infant baptism?
Pastor 2: Believe in it? I've seen it done.

This (1/22/10) is Lewis's critique of chronological snobbery, from Surprised by Joy.

Barfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counterattacks destroyed forever two elements in my ow thought. In the first place he made short work of what I have called my "chronological snobbery," the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date has is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also a "period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.

chronological snobbery

This is a wikipedia entry for Chronological Snobbery, a logical fallacy noted by C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield.

Armstrong and Kress on chronological snobbery

Please take note, especially, of the ad hominem attacks on William Lane Craig mentioned here.

Are we smarter than our forbears? Emerson on Chronological Snobbery (before C. S. Lewis called it that)

Bob Prokop writes:

I found a good quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson who anticipates Lewis' condemnation of "chronological snobbery". This is from his essay "Self Reliance" (1841):

No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive.