IOP Thoughts (3)

Historians use the word presentism to describe the tendency to judge historical figures by contemporary standards. As much as we all despise racism and sexism, these isms have only recently been considered moral turpitudes, and thus condemning Thomas Jefferson for keeping slaves or Sigmund Freud for patronizing women is a bit like arresting someone today for having driven without a seat belt in 1923. An yet, the temptation to view the past through the lens of the present is nothing short of overwhelming. As the president of the American Historical Association noted, "Presentism admits of no ready solution; it turns out to be very difficult to exit from modernity." The good new is that most of us aren't historians and thus we don't have to worry about finding that particular exit. The bad news is that all of us are futurians, and presentism is an even bigger problem when people look forward rather than backward. Because predictions about the future are made in the present, they are inevitibly influenced by the present. The way we feel right now ("I'm so hungry") and the way we think right now ("The big speakers sound better than the little ones") exert an unusually strong influence on the way we think we'll think later. Because time is such a slippery concept, we tend to imagine the future as the present with a twist, thus our imagined tomorrows inevitably look like slightly twisted versions of today. The reality of the moment is so palpable and powerful that it holds imagination in a tight orbit from which it never fully escapes. Presentism occurs because we fail to recognize that our future selves won't see the world the way we see it now. As we are about to learn, this fundamental inability to take the perspective of the person to whom the rest of our lives will happen is the most insidious problem a futurian can face.

Meursault is stuck in a state of presentism and this keeps him in a state of seeking happiness somewhat inaccurately. He is on this search, though.