T. David Gordon explains in Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns:
Contemporaneity is a value, or a value system, that prefers what is new to what is old.
Contemporaneity views the past as passé, and tends to regard it wither with benign disinterest or with outright contempt.
Gordon further observes:
Contemporaneity is a rarely used word, I believe this is because our culture is so contemporaneous that we don’t even notice it. Similarly, when Ken Myers describes pop culture as banal, he employs a word rarely used today. Our culture is so banal that we don’t even notice it. Paedocentric is rarely employed in our culture because the entire culture is paedocentric. The reason is the same in each case: when a given value is all but universal in a culture, we come not to notice it as a choice or option (just as trout probably don’t know they are wet). If this pattern persists, one could study cultures by the terms in their language that they do not use, These terms would tell us about values so omnipresent that the culture does not even notice them.
Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns – T. David Gordon; P & R Publishing, 2010, pg. 103.
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