Every generation knows it will be judged by future standards it cannot foresee

Evidence

‘We feel that we are being judged by the masked men who will succeed us’, wrote Sartre in 1952, adding, ‘our age will be an object for those future eyes whose gaze haunts us’. Beauvoir wrote in her last volume of memoirs that she had once felt superior to earlier writers because, by definition, she knew more history than they did. Then the obvious truth dawned: her generation too would one day be judged by future criteria. She saw that her contemporaries would suffer what historian E. P. Thompson later called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 816

Categorization

• SEED: A thought-piece angle: which current confident positions will posterity treat with ‘enormous condescension’?
• XREF: connects to: Every age’s art and science will itself as absolute, not as preparation — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 124; Present cultural forms carry disengageable seeds of the future — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 190

Broader Connections

• Every age’s art and science will itself as absolute, not as preparation #complicates (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 124
• Present cultural forms carry disengageable seeds of the future #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 190