Compounding the problem is what I call “perceptual presentism,” where reality is filtered to us in fleeting fragments of what’s happening now, rather than through the filter of time and generational wisdom.
But this approach to time is not only narcissistic; it’s dangerous. It disconnects us from the wisdom of history and places undue mental emphasis on (and blind trust in) that which is least likely to produce wisdom: the untested now.
In a sobering 2019 Atlantic article, Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell note the problematic way that ideas and conflicts of the present moment “dominate and displace older ideas and the lessons of the past.” One paradox of the information age, they observe, is that even as younger generations grow up with unprecedented access to everything that has ever been written and digitized, the new generations nevertheless “find themselves less familiar with the accumulated wisdom of humanity than any recent generation, and therefore [are] more prone to embrace ideas that bring social prestige within their immediate network [and] yet are ultimately misguided.”
Today’s technological landscape hasn’t invented this sort of problematic presentism, but it has amplified it. Our existing human inclinations toward the latest and the trendiest are accelerated by the breakneck speed with which things come and go. This presentist orientation is particularly toxic (and all too common) in evangelical faith communities, where obsessions with “relevance,” an uncritical embrace of technology, and a disconnection from history leave many churches vulnerable to being molded more by the ephemeral spirit of the age than by the solid, time-tested wisdom of ages past.
Presentism is toxic not only because it rejects the resources of the past, but also because it has little discipline to stay on course for the future. Orientation around the new is by definition unstable, because the “new” quickly becomes “old” and passé. The presentist world burns through fads and ideas at an alarming pace. Among other things, this undermines the sorts of qualities—grit, perseverance, long-haul commitment—that are essential to actually solving complex problems. Presentism leads us to be “all in” for some cause for a few months, only to lose interest when another cause grabs our attention. It turns us into fickle consumer “slacktivists” whose short bursts of passion—for a new weight loss scheme, a buzzy Netflix show, a hashtag campaign against some injustice—move the needle on nothing except the profit margin for the platforms that benefit from our now-ness.
But this approach to time is not only narcissistic; it’s dangerous. It disconnects us from the wisdom of history and places undue mental emphasis on (and blind trust in) that which is least likely to produce wisdom: the untested now.
In a sobering 2019 Atlantic article, Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell note the problematic way that ideas and conflicts of the present moment “dominate and displace older ideas and the lessons of the past.” One paradox of the information age, they observe, is that even as younger generations grow up with unprecedented access to everything that has ever been written and digitized, the new generations nevertheless “find themselves less familiar with the accumulated wisdom of humanity than any recent generation, and therefore [are] more prone to embrace ideas that bring social prestige within their immediate network [and] yet are ultimately misguided.”
Today’s technological landscape hasn’t invented this sort of problematic presentism, but it has amplified it. Our existing human inclinations toward the latest and the trendiest are accelerated by the breakneck speed with which things come and go. This presentist orientation is particularly toxic (and all too common) in evangelical faith communities, where obsessions with “relevance,” an uncritical embrace of technology, and a disconnection from history leave many churches vulnerable to being molded more by the ephemeral spirit of the age than by the solid, time-tested wisdom of ages past.
Presentism is toxic not only because it rejects the resources of the past, but also because it has little discipline to stay on course for the future. Orientation around the new is by definition unstable, because the “new” quickly becomes “old” and passé. The presentist world burns through fads and ideas at an alarming pace. Among other things, this undermines the sorts of qualities—grit, perseverance, long-haul commitment—that are essential to actually solving complex problems. Presentism leads us to be “all in” for some cause for a few months, only to lose interest when another cause grabs our attention. It turns us into fickle consumer “slacktivists” whose short bursts of passion—for a new weight loss scheme, a buzzy Netflix show, a hashtag campaign against some injustice—move the needle on nothing except the profit margin for the platforms that benefit from our now-ness.
- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021
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