Every age will be an aberration to the ages that follow. I’ve been testing this claim—trying to break it, and finding I can’t.
The obvious reading is comfortable enough: future generations look back and find us strange, wrong, morally incomplete. We look at the medieval period and see superstition and brutality. We look at the nineteenth century and see casual racism running through respectable thought. We assume we are doing better, seeing more clearly, that history is a long correction toward something.
But the claim doesn’t say past ages were aberrations. It says every age will be, which includes this one. We are not observers of a corrective process—we are inside it, and future observers will find us as bewildering as we find our predecessors. The certainty with which we identify the errors of the past is precisely the certainty that blinds us to our own.
This is a genuine bind. If the claim holds, moral and intellectual confidence within any era is unreliable by design. The very coherence of a worldview—the way its assumptions feel self-evident rather than assumed—is what exposes it to later scrutiny. Aberrations don’t feel like aberrations from the inside. They feel like common sense.
None of this recommends relativism. The claim doesn’t say all ages are equally wrong or that no progress occurs. It says something harder: that progress is real but perpetually incomplete, and that incompleteness is invisible to those living through it. Each era inherits the corrections of the last and introduces distortions of its own, confident the errors are behind it.
History only becomes legible once it becomes past. Every present moment is, in that sense, pre-legible—its meaning not yet available to those making it. What future generations will find aberrant in us is almost certainly not what we are currently debating most loudly, because those debates are our attempts at self-correction. The real aberration will be something we haven’t yet thought to question.