Examples
C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy (Chapter 13, p. 206) recounts his story:
| “ | First Harwood (still without changing his expression), and then Barfield, embraced the doctrines of Steiner and became anthroposophists. I was hideously shocked. Everything I had labored so hard to expel from my own life seemed to have flared up and met me in my best friends. Not only my best friends but those whom I would have thought safest; the one so immovable, the other brought up in a free-thinking family and so immune from all "superstition" that he had hardly heard of Christianity itself until he went to school. (The gospel first broke on Barfield in the form of a dictated list of Parables Peculiar to St. Matthew.) Not only in my seeming-safest friends but at a moment when we all had most need to stand together. And as I came to learn (so far as I ever have learned) what Steiner thought, my horror turned into disgust and resentment. For here, apparently, were all the abominations; none more abominable than those which had once attracted me. Here were gods, spirits, afterlife and pre-existence, initiates, occult knowledge, meditation. "Why–damn it–it's medieval," I exclaimed; for I still had all the chronological snobbery of my period and used the names of the earlier periods as terms of abuse. | ” |
The usage in general of the word "medieval" to mean "backwards" is also an example -- as is the use of the term "backwards" to mean "unsophisticated."
G. B. Tennyson in his book Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning offers the following firsthand account:
| “ | I was attending a lecture with a varied but exclusively university-oriented audience of some five hundred when the lecturer, a Ph.D. in physics, said, almost in passing, "Remember that only three hundred years ago men actually believed the world was flat!" Considerable knowing laughter greeted this astonishing misrepresentation (or, should I say, falsehood?), and the assembled all murmured a kind of self-congratulatory hum of satisfaction with their own superior knowledge. At another point the lecturer dropped a reference to the onetime belief that the sun revolved around the earth. More laughter. The physicist, it was apparent, was merely offering burnt incense at the altar of some of our twentieth-century idols. | ” |
Read more about this topic: Chronological Snobbery
Famous quotes containing the word examples:
“In the examples that I here bring in of what I have [read], heard, done or said, I have refrained from daring to alter even the smallest and most indifferent circumstances. My conscience falsifies not an iota; for my knowledge I cannot answer.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.”
—André Breton (1896–1966)