Laudator Temporis Acti

Donald Davidson, Still Rebels, Still Yankees and Other Essays (Baton Rogue: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 62:

"You cannot turn the clock back!" is the commonest taunt of our day. It always emerges as the clinching argument that any modernist offers any traditionalist when the question is: "What shall we do now?" But it is not really an argument. It is a taunt intended to discredit the traditionalist by stigmatizing him a traitor to an idea of progress that is assumed as utterly valid and generally accepted. The aim is, furthermore, to poison the traditionalist's own mind and disturb his self-confidence by the insinuation that he is a laggard in the world's great procession. His faith in an established good is made to seem nostalgic devotion to a mere phantom of the buried past. His opposition to the new—no matter how ill-advised, inartistic, destructive, or immoral that new may be—is defined as a quixotic defiance of the Inevitable. To use a term invented by Arnold J. Toynbee, he is an Archaist. By definition, he is therefore doomed.