Time & Perspective Quote by Emily Greene Balch

Balch is warning against the most seductive kind of arrogance: the belief that we can stand outside our own moment and grade it like a finished essay. The sentence does its work through a double bind. We are "too close" to appraise our time, but also "too much formed by it" to even know what closeness means. Proximity isn’t just a problem of distance; it’s a problem of manufacture. The era doesn’t merely surround us, it makes us, then hands us the tools of judgment and asks us to call them neutral.

Her phrasing is quietly claustrophobic. "Enclosed within it" turns history into architecture, not a timeline but a room. That matters because it shifts the task from prediction-as-certainty to humility-as-method. She’s not saying judgment is impossible; she’s saying any judgment that pretends to be clean is already contaminated by the assumptions of its age. The subtext is a critique of confident futurism and moral scorekeeping: when people proclaim "We’re living through unprecedented decline" or "We’re finally enlightened", they’re often just ventriloquizing their period’s anxieties and self-flatteries.

Context sharpens the point. Balch lived through industrial upheaval, World War I, the interwar churn, and World War II; she also worked in internationalist circles that had to balance hope for new institutions with the repeated humiliation of that hope. For an educator and peace advocate, this is a disciplined reminder: teach and act as if the future is open, but think as if your own categories are provisional. The quote’s intent is less to paralyze judgment than to make it accountable to its blind spots.