Time & Perspective Quote by Barbara Amiel

Amiel’s line is a neat piece of journalistic scalpel work: it cuts at a Western reflex so common it’s almost invisible - the belief that “new” automatically means “better,” and that history is a one-way escalator. The phrase “peculiar confusion” does double duty. It sounds mildly amused, even charitable, but it’s also a diagnosis: a cultural misreading disguised as common sense. She’s not attacking innovation; she’s attacking the lazy shortcut that treats novelty as a moral argument.

The real target is chronology as a proxy for judgment. By framing progress as something “equated” with recency, Amiel hints at how institutions sell change. If you can brand a policy, aesthetic, or ideology as “modern,” you can smuggle it past scrutiny; to oppose it is to risk being filed under “backward.” That’s the subtext: timelines get weaponized. “Progress” becomes less a standard to meet than a label to claim.

Contextually, this fits a late-20th-century conservative critique of Western liberal culture: the sense that traditional constraints were being discarded not because they’d been disproven, but because they were old. Yet the line is sharper than a partisan slogan because it also warns against the opposite error - romanticizing the past. The sentence insists on evaluation over fashion. An idea’s age is irrelevant; its consequences aren’t. In an era of upgrade culture and politics-as-trending-topic, she’s arguing for a tougher metric: not what’s next, but what works, what lasts, and what people quietly pay for when the newness wears off.