I was watching an episode of Blue Bloods the other day, that long-running police show starring Tom Selleck as Police Commissioner Frank Reagan. In that episode, Frank was talking to his friend, the archbishop of New York. He informed the archbishop that the Catholic Church had “fallen behind the times” on the topic of homosexual conduct.
In a very similar but real incident, an angry name-caller on x.com informed me that I am a “homophobe” because I didn’t approve of Sam Altman’s surrogacy arrangement to acquire a child. When I told him I objected to surrogacy for heterosexual couples as well, he told me I was “out of touch” and blocked me.
Another phrase expressing this same idea is that one’s opponents ideas are on “the wrong side of history.” For instance, Google’s recent changes to its AI principles are on the wrong side of history, and President Trump is deliberately on the wrong side of history. Germany is on the wrong side of history for its support of Israel, and, in his second appearance in this essay, Sam Altman has declared that OpenAI has been on the wrong side of history regarding open source software.
Yet another common version of this genre of argument simply states the current year or century, as though that alone should make obvious which side is right in an ethical debate. For example, Katha Pollit of The Nation entitled a talk she gave “What?! It’s the 21st Century and We’re Still Fighting for Reproductive Rights?” (I wonder if someone gave a talk in 1240 entitled, “What?! It’s the 13th Century and We’re Still Fighting About Whether Trial by Ordeal Works?”) You can even buy gay-pride t-shirts for toddlers emblazoned with a pride rainbow and the words “Hello, It’s the 21st Century”, as though just mentioning the current century could determine sexual ethics. It is noteworthy that this was recognized as a fallacious argument over 2000 years ago, as the argumentum ad annum, or “argument from the year.”
All of these arguments share the same premise: if what Alfred North Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World, called “the climate of opinion” favors some practice, but you are against it, you are obviously wrong. There is no need to even address any substantive argument you might make suggesting that the climate of opinion looks like bad weather.
Aside from the silliness of such a method of evaluating moral arguments, it also displays a profound ignorance of how the winds in the climate of opinion have sometimes blown this way, and sometimes that.
For example, the climate of opinion over the course of the Middle Ages increasingly rejected slavery as a valid human institution. But with the onset of the age of discovery and the profits offered by the slave trade, the climate of opinion became much more accepting of slavery. We can easily imagine a southern plantation owner in 1820 answering an abolitionist by pointing out how “out of touch” the abolitionist position was.
Similarly, Christianity had promoted the idea that all people are equally God’s children, and thus equally deserving of the same respect and rights. (And Buddhism and Islam promoted similar views.) But the rise of social Darwinism and eugenics in the late 19th century saw such views as antiquated, and not in keeping with “the times,” since “modern biology” had refuted them. Numerous “progressives” in the early 20th century, such as Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Sanger, thought that it was important to stop “inferior races” from breeding and weakening the genetic stock of the human race.
In the 17th century, the absolute monarchies of Spain, and France appeared to be the “modern” model of how a state should be organized. Charles I of England believed that he was keeping up with “the times” by trying to establish such a regime in England.
In Germany, as Wikipedia tells us, “From the time of Moses Mendelssohn until the 20th century, the [Jewish] community gradually achieved emancipation, and then prospered.” But by 1935, if you wanted to keep up with “the times,” you had to believe that that was all a big mistake, and that Jews were alien parasites who had to be ejected from the body politic. Millions of Germans, who probably personally bore no animosity towards their Jewish neighbors, went along with this, because they did not want to be “out of touch.”
The great German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel thought that Napoleon’s conquests in Europe represented the “world spirit” advancing in time, but “the times” defeated Napoleon and sent him into exile. In the Soviet Union, private property was understood to be a “phase” that the U.S.S.R. was advancing beyond. And in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, “the times” demanded the mass killing of intellectuals, ethnic minorities, Cambodian Christians, and Buddhist monks.
So how do people maintain the illusion that “the times” are on their side, and people who disagree with them are “out of touch,” when history offers so many counterexamples to the times always being correct?
Often, they do so by embracing an error in historical thinking that Michael Oakeshott pointed out many years ago, that of splitting history into “the course of events,” and “interventions (or interruptions) in the course of events.”
For instance, for someone who sees liberal capitalism as what “the times” tell us is the “right side of history” (e.g., Francis Fukuyama), then the fall of the Soviet Union was part of “the course of events.” But the Iranian Revolution, or the current rise of populist parties, are “interventions in the course of events.”
Meanwhile, a committed Marxist would view the rise of the Soviet Union as part of “the course of events,” but its fall as an interruption in that course.
As Oakeshott pointed out, this is historical nonsense. As he put it (in his essay on “The Activity of Being an Historian”), “The Pope’s intervention did not change the course of events, it was the course of events.”
The Iranian revolution or the current rise of populist parties are the course of events. These things are simply turns in the course of events that the person declaring them “interventions” does not like.
If we place all movements towards a state of affairs we prefer in a category called “course of events,” and place any counter movement (no matter how large) into a category called “interruptions in the course of events,” then we can always conclude that history is moving towards our preferred state of affairs, despite the fact that history seemingly gets interrupted as frequently as President Trump addressing Democratic congressmen. You just assume that your side’s victories are the road that history is traveling, while your defeats are just bumps in that road.
To be fair, there are times when the argument from the year actually works. For instance, in a subject such as chemistry, one that makes steady technical progress, it can be quite reasonable to say something like “come on, it’s 2024, we can’t explain forest fires using phlogiston theory.” No one today should be declaring that flies spontaneously generate in rotting meat, even though that was a reasonable hypothesis 200 years ago.
This is where the use of this argument in condemning moral or policy choices gets its spurious plausibility: it is a faulty analogy with a field like physics or chemistry, in which is clear when progress is being made, since the explanations of the field encompass more and more phenomena.
But as John Gray has argued, we simply have no reason to conclude that humanity’s moral or political life has a similarly progressive character. In fact, the idea it does is an example of the error that political philosopher Eric Voegelin termed “immanentizing the eschaton,” or trying to bring the kingdom of heaven down to earth. So if someone tells you that you’re “behind the times” on some issue,” the right response is to point out that the times have repeatedly been wrong in the past, and they’re probably wrong now.
