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What is Chronocentricity? By Frank Rodriquez

Charles Kimball, in his book When Religion Becomes Evil, identifies five warning

signs of imminent evil in the name of religion. One of those signs is when a group of

believers wants to establish, or re-establish, an “ideal time” here on earth. Growing

impatient with God’s pace of change and His long-overdue judgment of “sinners,”

religious believers throughout history have tried to hurry along the apocalypse. Kimball

cites recent Jewish, Christian and Islamic examples of this behavior.

The impulse to establish an “ideal time” is very closely related to what I call “end-

time thinking.” End-time thinkers are those who exist in a constant state of tension with

culture and the rest of the world, and who anticipate at any moment some cataclysmic

event that will usher in the end of time. Most of us raised in a Southern, Christian,

Protestant, Holiness or Baptist faith tradition can think immediately of the rapture as this

end-time moment.

In order to believe that the world is about to end, a person has to maintain a

paradoxical mindset. One has to believe that the world is evil and worthy of being

harshly judged by God, and yet at the same time believe that the world has people who

are worthy of God’s blessings and special dispensations, and who will be saved by God

on the final day of judgment. In my own studies, I have discovered a term that

incorporates the impulse toward establishing the “ideal time,” the belief that the end of

the age is at hand, and this paradoxical viewpoint that the world is both worthy and

unworthy. That term is chronocentricity.

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Most people are familiar with the term ethnocentricity. Ethnocentric thinking

presumes that one’s own ethnic group is superior to all other groups. Generally,

however, this presumption is invisible to the person who is making that judgment. That

is to say, they don’t realize that they have an unconscious bias about the superiority of

their own ethnic group when they encounter people from other cultures. This invisible

assumption becomes evident when the person incorrectly interprets the “other” as

somehow “lesser than” – less civilized, less advanced, less enlightened, etc.

The term ethnocentrism was originated by sociologists and anthropologists who

spent a great deal of time studying other cultures. They realized (after a long time) that

they were often misinterpreting and misunderstanding the nuances of other cultural

practices due to this unconscious bias that their own culture was the superior culture.

They named this bias ethnocentrism.

Like ethnocenricity, the word chronocentricity is meant to convey an unconscious

bias. The bias, however, is related to time (chronos) and not ethnicity. Chronocentricity

is a neo-logism (new word) that you won’t find in the dictionary. The closest comparable

terms I've come across are "temporal chauvinism" and "generational chauvinism." The

underlying idea is that we mistakenly think of our own generation as better than any other

generation. We think that we represent the highest point of world civilization. We look

back to earlier times and cluck our tongues at how benighted, “quaint,” and misinformed

earlier generations tended to be. We uncritically assume that our quality of life is better,

and that people “back then” just didn’t know enough, or have the right kind of

technology, to live properly and adequately.

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In my own opinion, however, there is a paradoxical quality to chronocentrism. At

the same time we think of ourselves as better, and more advanced, than previous

generations, we also view ourselves as lesser than and worse off than previous

generations. We think of ourselves as more stressed, more time deprived, more

information saturated than any other generation. We paradoxically think of ourselves as

the pinnacle of all human civilization, the best that has ever been; and yet at the same, we

view ourselves as the most wicked and decadent generation that has yet existed. We look

back wistfully to the “good old days,” and to “simpler times,” when “men were men and

women were women,” and yearn for the “old time religion” and the “faith of our

forefathers.” At the same time, we still manage to cluck our tongues at the foolishness of

prior generations on any number of beliefs and practices (bleeding patients, for instance,

or “dunking” women to determine if they are a witch).

Chronocentristic thinking, like ethnocentristic thinking, introduces an unconscious

bias in the way we perceive the past, and in the way we project the future. In short, we

have a temporally skewed perception of what has come before us in time, and therefore

cannot clearly understand what may come after us. We operate in a temporal paradigm

where we are the “advanced” ones, and earlier cultures are “primitive.” The very words

“modern” and “post-modern” are rooted in a chronocentric paradigm.

“End-time thinking” – in religious scholarship, it is called millenarianism – has

been a part of Christianity from the very beginning. Groups of believers have

consistently, throughout Christian history, proclaimed that “the end is near,” and have

constructed belief systems and lifestyles that supported that proclamation. But a more

thorough study of eschatology reveals that the “end-time” impulse is also very closely

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connected to the desire to help God establish the “ideal time” here on earth. Groups

throughout history – and not just Christian groups – have looked forward with

anticipation to the “end of time,” and the final judgment. And just as frequently,

millenarian groups have grown impatient with God’s pace, and have tried to hurry up

apocalypse by their actions here on earth.

Terrorists like Usama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh are able to rationalize their

actions chronocentristically. They believe that they live at the pinnacle of history, and

that history has taken a wrong turn away from God’s intended direction. They view

themselves as warriors in a holy war, players in a cosmic drama. Their actions and

intentions, in their view, are somehow blessed by God, and will help to hurry along

God’s plan. They believe and hope that their actions will plant the seeds of apocalypse,

start the final war, expose the hypocrites and apostate believers in their own religion (or

political movement), and put the universe back on the path to righteousness.

In my opinion, most people who perpetrate evil acts for a religious reason are

chronocentristically biased. They are misremembering or over-idealizing the past, and

are misunderstanding or misperceiving the possible pathways of the future. The question

that is begged, however, by the concept of chronocentrism is the same one that is often

asked in relation to ethnocentrism. Is it possible to make meaning of anything without

introducing some personal element of bias and misunderstanding? In other words, can

we as humans ever hope to view different times and different cultures through a truly

unbiased and subjective perspective?