On Anachronism in Art

The writer Jacob Bacharach has a funny running bit about how none of the defenders of Western civilization has never encountered it, which he gets to reliably trot out every so often. This has come to my mind repeatedly over the past few months seeing legions of Very Online types getting worked up over whether Christopher Nolan’s new cinematic adaptation of the Odyssey was unreliably modern and progressive in its casting, its moral outlook, its overall anachronism, etc.