Creativity as an Antidote to Chronological Snobbery

“People think because the bread is fresh, it must be better than yesterday’s. But sometimes, yesterday’s bread is just what you need for a good ribollita.”* - Fioravante

(*Ribollita is a Tuscan soup made with leftover bread and vegetables.)

Why do we fall so easily under the spell of the new? Why are we so quick to dismiss the old as obsolete and yesterday’s ideas as leftovers best thrown out? C.S. Lewis called this inclination “chronological snobbery”. He described it in Surprised by Joy (1955) as a tendency of ours to judge ourselves as intellectually superior to whatever has gone out of date and discredited (Lewis 254). 

Before we discard an old idea, however, Lewis suggests we ask: Why did it fall out of fashion?:

“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 realisation 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” (Lewis 254). 

What are our hidden assumptions that quietly distort how we see the world? How might we notice and question them? If we saw the world from unexpected angles, could this bring us closer to what is true?

Perhaps creativity is the antidote to chronological snobbery: it invites us to look at the world sideways – to peer through the kaleidoscope with curiosity and wonder.

Seeing the World Askew: A Few Experiments

One way to view the world askew is to reverse the usual direction of causality by flipping the subject with the object. Instead of “How did Vatican II influence Italian culture?”, we could ask “How did Italian culture influence Vatican II?”. This kind of reversal can help us notice what has long been there, but seldom seen.

Or perhaps we might treat what is rare as the natural order, and what is normal as an oddity. For example:

• instead of assuming remote work is a lesser alternative to office work, we might consider whether remote work is actually the original mode of human collaboration (e.g., medieval scholars exchanging letters across Europe), or
• instead of assuming the reverence towards humanities and the arts in Renaissance Florence was a unique anomaly, it might actually be the default model of human creativity, and industrialized society is the anomaly, or
• instead of treating success as the expected way of being as individuals, we might study whether failure is the norm and success is just the rare case that we pay attention to.

Italo Calvino was a master at challenging implicit assumptions in his literary works, especially in his Marcovaldo’s stories where what is considered normal is always a little absurd. For example, Marcovaldo never fits into the world of fluorescent lights and supermarkets, and instead sees the modern structures of the city as puzzling and illogical. And in Mr. Palomar, ordinary things – a wave at the sea, the moon, a blade of grass, a slipper – somehow seem to become the subjects gazing back at him and inviting his attention, rather than being passive objects.

To look at things askew is not to avoid facing them directly, but to search for subtler truths. 

If we looked at the world with a tilted gaze instead of head-on, we might discover a whole new world at the back of the wardrobe – the odd, the rare, the quiet and the unusual. Approaching things with creativity allows us to see life from a different viewpoint, and perhaps more clearly. It seems to me worth trying if we want to see what we’ve been missing all along. 

Are there any other creative methods we could use to see the world, perhaps in a more true light?

Works Cited

Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. HarperOne, 1955.