If we pay no attention to words whatever, we may become like the isolated gentleman who invent a new perpetual motion machine on old lines in ignorance of all previous plans, and then is surprised that it doesn't work. If we confine our attention entirely to the slang of the day--that is to say, if we devote ourselves exclusively to modern literature--we get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself.... [I]t is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realizes how absolutely modern the best of the old things are.

Rudyard Kipling, "The Uses of Reading"

These words by T. S. Eliot remind me of C. S. Lewis's concept of chronological snobbery. Eliot would say we live in an age of chronological provincialism. We live in an age when the past is ignored or seen as inferior, an age of the Now, an age of live tweeting, an age when most people are chronological rednecks, people who can't imagine or even understand any time other than their own.

In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which served their turn and have been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares. The menace of this kind of provincialism is, that we can all, all the people on the globe, be provincials together; and those who are not content to be provincials, can only become hermits. If this kind of provincialism led to greater tolerance, in the sense of forbearance, there might be more to be said for it; but it seems more likely to lead to our becoming indifferent, in matters where we ought to maintain a distinctive dogma or standard, and to our becoming intolerant, in matters which might be left to local or personal preference.

T. S. Eliot, "What is a Classic?"

When C. S. Lewis was a teenager, he became an atheist. As an atheist, he was a man of his time, because atheism was the current intellectual fashion. But not long after Lewis came to Oxford, he met a man who was to change the direction of his thought for the rest of his life: Owen Barfield.

Barfield wasn't a Christian, but he believed in God and the spiritual world, and so Lewis disagreed with him over just about everything. In fact, Lewis describes their conversations over the next few years as "the Great War."

Barfield moved the atheistic Lewis towards faith by helping him realize that all people tend to accept the prevailing beliefs of their age without much thought. Lewis says,

[Barfield] made short work of what I have called my "chronological snobbery," the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find out why it went out of date. 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 realization 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.

This realization helped Lewis realize that just because almost everyone in the culture around us believes a certain idea, that doesn't mean that it's true. Eventually, when Lewis looked at the evidence for the truth of Christianity, he found its foundation to be strong, and he was compelled to believe.