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The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought
- jdminhbg 7y agoFor an opposite perspective, Bryan Ward-Perkins' "The Fall Of Rome: And the End of Civilization" is a readable-by-the-layperson argument that the end of Roman authority in Western Europe resulted in significant falls in trade, health, literacy, cultural achievement, and more: https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807285/ https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-Civilization/dp/0192807...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hodgesrm 7y agoThe Dark Ages are something of a misnomer but there does not seem to be any question that levels of literacy, trade, and social organization were lower than the preceding Roman era and than even the latter part of the middle ages after 1200 or so. Indeed much of the 'darkness' is the result of so few written records surviving from the era, which in turn points to far fewer of them being generated in the first place. The question for anyone trying to roll back the use of the term 'Dark Ages' is what would you call it instead?
- mjw1007 7y agoI think "Late Antiquity" is common.
- lazyasciiart 7y agoI've never heard that and wouldn't guess that it meant the Dark Ages at all.
- ajross 7y agoIt's a real term of art. Some of the distinction is geographic. Taking about "late antiquity" usually means discussing what was happening in central Italy and the Eastern empire, where most people imagine the "dark ages" in western and northern Europe.
- blueline 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_antiquity#Terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_antiquity#Terminology /shrug
- hodgesrm 7y agoLate antiquity generally refers to the period around and after the emperor Constantine when the Roman empire started to fray around the edges. It includes writers like St. Augustine who IMHO was as good as any thinker before or after. Not to mention artistic creations like the churches of Ravenna and the laws of Justinian. It's quite different from the period that set in after the invasion of the Lombards (568 AD) and more particularly the Moslem invasions of Africa (630s AD), which severely disrupted communications in the Mediterranean.
- heraclius 7y agoThe Pirenne thesis is superficially plausible. However, McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy, which represents perhaps the most innovative approach in dealing with a paucity of evidence to date, suggests otherwise. “About one in seven eastern travelers I have uncovered set out from the Arab world (49: 14 percent of 340). They were mostly Christian and Hellenic. That so many appear from research geared to the Byzantine and Latin source materials—presumably the least rewarding for the Arab world—challenges the conventional wisdom.” [p. 217] “Another, less obvious characteristic of some other eastern travelers further undermines the notion of interrupted intercourse, at least between Byzantium and the Arab world. Beyond the travelers who came directly from the Arab world to the west, another substantial group of eastern voyagers (28: 8 percent) also traveled to the Arab world at other times. In all, nearly a quarter of all eastern travelers also came from or went to the Caliphate (77: 23 percent of all eastern travelers).” [p. 218] Moreover, though I shan’t here give references, a substantial portion of the European economy was driven by the supply of slaves to the Caliphate. But a few more things to note: the Arabs are just as important as the Byzantines insofar as the numismatic evidence is concerned; one writer during this period wrote of relief when arriving in the areas ruled by the Arabs, which were far more orderly—all that was needed was a simple bribe, a welcome prospect compared to the banditry common in other areas; Arab piracy was certainly widespread, but in McCormick’s analysis “very few of our travelers had their voyage interrupted by violence” [170] overall, whether by Arab pirates or other actors.
- hodgesrm 7y agoThanks, McCormick looks like a really interesting source. This seems to support the notion that however you define 'Dark Ages' the darkness was in Europe, especially the north and west, not necessarily elsewhere. Conditions were quite the opposite in many lands conquered by Moslem forces, as shown by the art, mathematics, literature, military technology, economics and other evidence characteristic of highly functioning societies. It's not surprising travelers felt safer there. I'm thinking for example of the Umayyad Califate.
- AstralStorm 7y agoAlso "Middle Ages" or "Medieval period". Pretty common though a bit wide.
- FabHK 7y agoIn German it's "das Mittelalter", ie middle ages.
- dstick 7y agoMiddle Ages? Or is that an even broader period?
- jedberg 7y ago"The unrecorded ages"
- jcranmer 7y agoEarly Middle Ages is common, generally dating from "the fall of the Roman Empire" (which is itself a very ambiguous term) to around 1066. The collapse of the Roman Empire from the 3rd to the 7th century (the process is somewhat more gradual than depicted in popular culture, and the timing depends on where you lived in the Roman Empire) resulted in a serious loss of administrative capability and economic and military coordination within the former empire. The only organization that remained for the Western Roman Empire was the Church, and even this was quite attenuated and didn't have the same reach the Roman Empire enjoyed at its height. The Carolingian dynasty did manage to piece together a successor empire that could have became a revival of the Roman Empire, but the succession practice of divvying up the lands between sons meant that the union didn't last long. On top of this, the Viking raids provoked a challenge that the nascent empires were unable to cope with. The term Dark Ages arises from the very real decline of writing within Western Europe during this time, given that historians have historically been very biased towards surviving written accounts. Furthermore, for the Protestants in the Renaissance, the fact that the Catholic Church was the primary remaining artifact of Roman rule and therefore the dominant factor throughout most of this era caused them to emphasize the notion that nothing of cultural importance happened in this era, extending it to encompass the entire Medieval period until the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance. In more recent historiography, the Dark Ages has been more compressed in time to encompass parts of Late Antiquity and Early Medieval, with the exact time period more dependent on which region you're talking about.
- btilly 7y agoThe Roman Empire's collapse was more drawn out than that. The Empire split into Eastern and Western empires under Constantine. The Eastern half got renamed to the Byzantine Empire and it lasted until the successful Ottoman conquest in 1453. This is not to be confused with the Holy Roman Empire which was not holy, nor Roman, nor a true empire. But which survived until Napoleon conquered it in 1806.
- jcranmer 7y agoIt's even more complicated than that. The Byzantine Empire was conquered by a group of crusaders in the Fourth Crusade in 1204, with several rump states cropping up. The Empire of Nicaea reconquered Constantinople in 1261, so people usually call it the continuation of the Byzantine Empire. By the 1400s, this Byzantine Empire quite literally existed at the whim of the Ottomans, even if they only entered Constantinople itself in 1453. The third rump state of the Byzantine Empire was the Empire of Trebizond, whose last bastion in Theodoro held out against the Ottomans until 1479. And, by the way, practically none of these countries were so named to their contemporaries. Basically everyone I've mentioned here considered themselves the Roman Empire.
- andysomniac 7y agoIn UK archaeology, a popular term is "Migration Period"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- methehack 7y agoMy guess is the older brother was named by the younger brother, the Enlightenment. They were "dark" because they were fundamentally anti-enlightenment; further it was hard to see through them to the classical period as they tried to burn most of those books. Personally, I think it's a fine name. The inquisition! What a show!
- goto11 7y agoNo, the term is by Petrarca from early Renaissance.
- monastic 7y ago>They were "dark" because they were fundamentally anti-enlightenment This is a gross mischaracterization reinforced by the enduring and destructive Jacobin propaganda of the French revolution. We are deeply indebted to the intellectual impetus of those "dark ages": https://pastebin.com/8ZgDV5mt https://pastebin.com/8ZgDV5mt
- xefer 7y agoThe thing that stands out for me about this period is the lack of a "descent from antiquity". [1] There is no well-established genealogical descent in Western Europe from antiquity to the modern era. Familial lines of descent can be traced to the very late Roman period, and from the early medieval period to the modern era. But there is a chasm that can't be crossed because the societal norms that allowed families to be traced broke down for some time and only reformed later. To me this is a concrete symptom of a fairly severe disruption. How it's labeled is an interesting discussion, but clearly something happened. [1] See deeper discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity
- choeger 7y agoThanks for that link.
- viburnum 7y agoThat’s not societal breakdown, that just means the inbred aristocracy doesn’t go back to antiquity. Society and its rulers are not the same thing.
- ddebernardy 7y agoStill, there were families in those days with unfathomable wealth. If memory serves me well, one was so wealthy that when they sold their land after becoming Christians they caused a real estate crisis across the Roman Empire. (Source: The inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham, one of the early chapters.) And just a few centuries earlier, Julius Caesar arguably was one of the richest to have ever lived on earth. It's sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry. And yet with rare exceptions they did not.
- gen220 7y agoSort of off-topic; what was your overall impression of Wickham's book (or the greater series that his is a part of, if you've read them)? Do you think they're generally humble overviews of their respective periods?
- ohaideredevs 7y agoI first ran into this theory in the only "alchemy" book (as in, I have no idea what it's actually about) where the author seemed immensely intelligent. Of course, I was too lazy to actually research any of his claims, but he was pretty eloquent: "Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception. How to reconcile the unreconcilable? How to adjust the testimony of the historical facts to that of medieval art works? The chroniclers depict this unfortunate period in the darkest colors. For several centuries there is nothing but invasions, wars, famines, epidemics. And yet the monuments --- faithful and sincere witnesses of these nebulous times --- bear no mark of such scourges. Much to the contrary they appear to have been built in the enthusiasm of a powerful inspiration of ideal and faith by a people happy to live in the midst of a flourishing and strongly organized society. Must we doubt the veracity of historical accounts, the authenticity of the events ... they report, and believe along with the popular wisdom of nations, that happy peoples have no history? Unless, without refuting en masse all of history, we prefer to discover the justification pf medieval darkness in the relative lack of incidents. Be that as it may, it remains undeniable is that all the Gothic buildings without exception reflect a serenity and expansiveness and a nobility without equal. If, in particular, we examine the expression of statues, we will quickly be edified by the peaceful character, the pure tranquility that emanates from these figures. All are calm and smiling, welcoming and innocent. " Dwellings of Philosophers -Fulcanelli
- mistrial9 7y agoboth alchemy and astrology mix metaphorical and symbolic (psyche) information with worldly, factual information; if your direction is science and factual information, not a great place to explore IMO. If your brain is activated by elaborate language, symbols and art, and factual is not the goal, why not?
- ArtWomb 7y agoEtienne Gilson makes the argument for the designation: "Christian Philosophy," as folks turned to Gospels and revealed truths for inspiration. It offers a clear separation from "Greek Philosophy". As well as encompassing sub schools of thought such as Apostolic, Thomist, Neo-Augustinian and what have you. In any case, keep the Medieval content coming as it provides the antidote to modern cacophanies. Even putting on a nice instrumental shwam performance on youtube can immediately tune the senses for quiet monastic contemplation ;) I believe there is a very active and academically rigorous Telegram or Slack channel with >500 members devoted to the period. But I've since deleted both apps and can't recall what it was called! The trend in Digital Humanities now of course is "collections as data" and performing full corpus linguistic and sentiment analysis. Internet Medieval Sourcebook Full Text Sources https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/sbook2.asp https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/sbook2.asp Reprogramming The Museum https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/papers/reprogramming_the_museum https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/papers/reprogramming...
- caiocaiocaio 7y agoMost of the time historians use the phrase 'Dark Ages', nowadays, they mean the time from roughly the mid-sixth century to about Charles Martel, where there are only a handful of written and architectural records remaining, almost all from the margins of Europe. His examples are mainly before or after that time period. But even accepting his much more broad time period - and one of his examples is more than 100 years after the time period he himself defined at the beginning - he offers very little evidence that isn't extremely well known to anyone with a passing knowledge of that time period. Plus, his examples are literally hundreds of years apart. It's pretty disingenuous to claim the society that produced the tomb of Childeric I is the same society that produced some paintings roughly 800 years later.
- astrodust 7y agoThere's probably more records remaining than we realize because of the rampant recycling of old parchment.
- FabHK 7y agoPalimpsests are well understood and mostly accounted for, I'd have thought? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest
- astrodust 7y agoI'm not sure you can fully account for them, that would involve a staggering amount of specialized scanning.
- ganzuul 7y agoOr they started using papyrus, which does not age well. AFAIK the 'Dark Ages' refer to our lack of records only, and the rest is misunderstanding.
- astrodust 7y agoWhat was the prominent writing material in that age? Parchment has been around since basically forever since, like vellum, it's just animal hide.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y agoMuch more in-depth article on the same topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
- Twisol 7y agoTaking nothing away from the article itself, this bit rubbed me the wrong way: > A simple little mental test is just to quickly imagine a European scene from that era. Now: was the sun shining? Of course not. It strikes me like one of those "follow the ball" scenes in which a multitude of other things happen, but you're not paying attention because you're focusing on the ball. The state of the sun didn't matter for the details I was imagining. If I had been asked "Now: was it nighttime?" the answer would have been the same: no, of course not. I wasn't thinking about the sky.
- btilly 7y agoNow: was the sun shining? Of course not. Interestingly, if we're talking about 535-536, it may well not have been! Or at least not very well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%...
- beat 7y ago"The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. What was going on in the Islamic world? In China? The Dark Ages of Western Europe were the brilliant Tang dynasty in China; and the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.
- drak0n1c 7y agoEuropean Dark Age is not used as a global descriptor, it is regional. Just as China and the Islamic world had their own Dark Ages as well.
- szemet 7y agoAlso, we should rename the Thirty Years' War to "Thirty Years' War in Europe but mostly peace elsewhere", and then we can can call World War I and World War II simply War I and War II - if we assume by default that every event is global (maybe we should add "except Switzerland,etc..." there too...) Just joking: IMHO if someone knows what dark ages was, usually know where it was... It is that simple!
- beat 7y agoIt's not that simple, though. A lot of people - a lot of people - have no idea that during the "Dark Ages", huge swaths of the rest of the world (larger than Western Europe) were going through a Golden Age. It took me rather a while to realize that myself. And, since WWI was fought in large part over colonial resources and Japan was involved, and since Japan was a major power in WWII (and China was involved as well, if only as Japan's victim), I'm pretty satisfied with "World War" as descriptors.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago> It's not that simple, though. A lot of people - a lot of people - have no idea that during the "Dark Ages", huge swaths of the rest of the world (larger than Western Europe) were going through a Golden Age. It took me rather a while to realize that myself. I am one of those people, too- I only found out while watching James Burke's Connections series a few years back, and then reading way too much Wikipedia.
- fossuser 7y agoThis seems like a perfect example of someone who needs to read pg’s essay “write like you talk”: http://paulgraham.com/talk.html http://paulgraham.com/talk.html I don’t get an intelligence vibe from this style of writing - it mostly just sets off my bullshit alarms.
- ohaideredevs 7y agoI understand where you are coming from, but this guy came off as intelligent to me DESPITE all the alarms going of. That's not to say he wasn't trolling.
- mikeash 7y agoThat’s good advice but it’s also highly dependent on culture and time. It’s food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like speech. It may not have been good advice at all for someone writing in 1920s France. And beyond that, it’s really hard to apply this sort of advice to a translation.
- fossuser 7y agoI’d argue it’s good advice for people that value clarity over sounding smart. I’d guess there were people that valued this in most times and cultures.
- foldr 7y agoThe quoted text isn't at all unclear (especially taking into consideration the fact that it's a translation).
- fossuser 7y agoThe quoted text is verbose and tedious. It uses a lot of complex words to convey little information, both of these things negatively affect clarity. You may have a preference for purple prose, but it's silly to pretend that the quoted text is clear. I'm suspicious when people write like that because it can be used to hide bad reasoning behind unnecessarily complex word choice and sentence structure. If you care about sharing ideas it's better to write simply.
- frozenport 7y agoTerrible article, does little to address the standard claim that the dark ages were characterized by a loss of literary tradition, craftsmanship, and depopulation. Is the author seriously saying that the dark ages were dark because for some weird reason we accidently destroyed the historical reccords from that period but not all others?
- anovikov 7y agoDark ages are mostly about to relative lack of written texts from the period due to widespread illiteracy. There are more texts from V century BC left than from VII century AD, for example (in the Western Europe, that is).
- La-ang 7y agoSynopsis: Not as dark as we thought, but still dark..lmao
- 8077628 7y agotl;dr: they had nice jewelry, so it wasn't really dark I don't understand why people feel the need to whitewash this, aside from a preexisting religious motive or mindlessly being contrary. Civilization went backwards after Rome fell. It took centuries to rediscover and reincorporate those parts of Western culture. I worry that too many people secretly want to go back to being serfs.
- cerealbad 7y agoI would love to see a reasonable explanation for the rapid development of Western Europe. The henge circles all across the world (including the new world) show an advanced mathematics and astronomy for thousands of years before the rise of settler empires say parity ~9000 BC. Jump forward all the way to the late 1800s and despite the glacial pace of social change in Russia they are still designing one of the best rifles and bullets in the world, in use for 100+ years. The success of social organisation must stem from some mixture of accelerated development due to geographic sheltering and island vs mainland conflict- with the island empires (Spain, Portugal, Dutch)proving they don't need to fight landwars if the can control global shipping lanes. The interplay between Japan, China and Korea reminds me of England, France and Germany. Russia plays a role as a cultural glue between these two remote spheres but because of its size proves to be ungovernable. South East Asia gets ignored much like Eastern Europe. Italy, Greece, India, Iran and Egypt great middle civilizations are paralyzed by their ancient past insular and corrupt. Most of Africa, America and Eurasia are mysteries because of contact contamination. If the answer is a universal religion plus a sea faring civilization gives you world power it still makes me wonder why it took until the late 1400s to kick off. Had the Romans avoided debasing their currency and managed their bureaucracy better couldn't they develop an ocean crossing trireme by the 800s maybe 1000s? So much time has gone by and humans are still just stumbling around unable to organise or understand the emergent forces their complex networks generate. The loss of life due to famine, disease and war in the previous millenium is at a shocking scale of proportionality to the existing populations affected by it. A mistake is being made by not teaching history thoroughly, say 2-3 years of intensive world history for all children. You could introduce a lot of concepts as they emerge in context from religion to agriculture to mathematics, music and politics.
- ghaff 7y agoIt's more about attempting to quantify the level of civilization than theorizing about underlying reasons, but I found Why the West Rules for Now a reaaly interesting chronicle about the West (and China) over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_West_Rules%E2%80%94For_Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_West_Rules%E2%80%94For...
- cr0sh 7y ago
- api 7y agoI view the dark ages as just a big recession following the collapse of Rome. It's not that nothing happened. Often very important things happen during recessions. It's just that there was little macroeconomic growth.
- smacktoward 7y ago> The true “dark age,” of course, was the early 1940s when, simply as a side effect of industrial killing, great swathes of the past disappeared. One small yet major example—the extraordinary series of paintings of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, made in the 1170s either by the saint herself or under her supervision, disappeared in the general catastrophe that unfolded in Dresden in early 1945. We only know what they looked like (except from black‐and‐white photos) through accurate and beautiful copies painted by a group of nuns, by sheer chance, in the 1930s. This feels like a weird argument. Yes, the paintings were lost. But we have tons of documentation about them! We have records of their creation by Hildegard of Bingen. We have photographs and reproductions to tell us (imperfectly, but still) how they looked. We know they were taken to Dresden, and we know when -- 1945. We know that Dresden suffered a devastating firebombing by the Allies in February of that year, and we know that nobody has been able to locate the paintings since that firebombing occurred. In other words, we may not have the paintings themselves anymore, but we can construct a pretty reliable history of them -- what they were, how they were created, and when they were (sadly) destroyed. That's a very different situation than we're in regarding post-Roman, pre-Carolingian Europe. There are hundreds of years in there where we have practically no documentary evidence for anything. Kingdoms rose and fell, wars were won or lost, languages and faiths adopted or abandoned, and we can't even begin to tell any of those stories today, because nobody was keeping records. Who can say how much art was created and then destroyed in this period that we'll never even be aware existed? Who knows how many geniuses there were whose insights have been lost forever? None of this is to say that what happened in Dresden in 1945 isn't a tragedy; it absolutely was, and for lots of reasons beyond just the loss of some paintings. But the loss of something that we know existed (and can even look at photographs of!) is very different than destruction so total that it even obliterates the possibility of remembrance.
- drb91 7y agoThis is a very specific, narrow interpretation of the dark ages. It is not a good term to use in any circumstance, which the article illustrates well. Secondly, in the event of societal collapse, I'm not exactly looking for a great work of art. I image we lost far more texts through preventable destruction and lack of preservation than we lost novel texts written during the post-roman european collapse. I think the quote illustrates a meaningful parallel. > But the loss of something that we know existed (and can even look at photographs of!) is very different than destruction so total that it even obliterates the possibility of remembrance. Categorically different maybe, but consequentially equivalent. I can rattle off a ton of lost texts, but that's mostly meaningless and these works hold virtually no cultural value compared to works we can actually read and engage with.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- choeger 7y agoI think the most plausible explanation is the lack of slaves that stems from the steady downfall of the Roman empire. When Germanic warlords were pretty much forcing their way into the empire they actually accepted the life style of Romans. But a few hundred years later they switched to feudalism. Why, though? I think that the Roman empire was founded on a source of cheap labor, slaves. It allowed for massively productive agrarian complexes and thus fueled trade and literacy. But when the empire got into trouble, the price of slaves must have risen massively. The consequence must have been famines and less labor for anything else than crops, in particular less professional soldiers.
- coliveira 7y agoYou can only maintain slaves if you have a powerful army capable of defeating other civilizations and maintaining them captive. That's how ancient empires did it, it is also how Europeans and Americans did it in the new world. During early middle ages each location had armies that were good enough only to barely keep their own survival. So, slavery was out of question as a practical way to get labor. They had to organize their own society into social classes to guarantee that someone would do real work. Instead, Romans could just start another war or trade the already existing slave population.
- wanderer2323 7y agoOne should be aware reading it that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance in shaping our modern art and culture. Not saying that this particular article is necessarily an example, just wanted to bring an attention to the fact that the this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently and everything presented on it might turn out to be as neutral and scientific as reporting on other hot-button issues of today. sapienti sat
- antidesitter 7y ago> that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance What's your evidence for this claim? > this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently What are you talking about?
- jimclegg 7y agoIt's not that people are diminishing Europe's role, it's that Europe's role wasn't as big as euro-centric historians claimed. The two most prosporous civilizations in human history had their richest periods during the European Dark Ages into the Renaissance but China and India are not even mentioned usually (when only 5 people could do long division in Europe, Indian mathematicians were discovering the basics of calculus, many centuries pre-Newton & Leibniz). Truth is most of the knowledge "discovered" by Europe during this period was mostly translated from old Chinese/Indian/Greek texts (math/science/etc) and made available to Europeans via Persia.
- ocschwar 7y agoSome time around the early 500's, the Roman-British people pushed back against the Saxon invasion. We know this from archaeological and numismatic finds. Yet we have no idea who the hell led this beyond the legends of King Arthur. Dark enough for me.
- ghaff 7y agoI just finished Michael Wood's In Search of the Dark Ages. It's pretty amazing how little and how limited the evidence we have to inform us about the better part of 500 years of British history.
- nostrademons 7y agoI've wondered recently if historical prominence and quality of life are anticorrelated: if the civilizations we think of as biggest and greatest are the ones that were the worst to live under. Or, more provocatively, if civilization is just relationship dysfunction on a grand scale. What is civilization? It's centralization of power, increasing specialization of roles, usually higher population density, greater interconnectedness between people, a dominant ideology & discourse, and subordination of individual will to collective power. We look at the Romans or the Mongols or the Aztecs or the Pax Britannia or Pax Americana as great civilizations because there is something there that us, as observers centuries later, can point to and hang our minds on. But what does life look like for individual humans under one of these civilizations? The Romans practiced slavery on a grand scale; the Mongols conquest, the Aztecs human sacrifice; the British colonialism; and the Americans capitalist exploitation. There is a movement, today, that life should be more focused around local communities, person-to-person interactions, individual freedom, authenticity, and a return to human-centric ideologies. What would such a society look like to future historiographers? Communications would revert to person-to-person interactions rather than massively published tracts. Much of it would be ephemeral; Snapchat or Whatsapp rather than the WWW or Twitter. There's no need to fix communications into a tangible medium or distribute it widely when the audience is a single human being at a single moment in time. Large infrastructure projects would essentially become impossible, as getting the required cooperation from different interests without a monopoly on coercion becomes unrealistic. Think of NIMBYism on a society-wide scale. Trade might continue, but rather than organized supply-chains, it reverts back to supplying individual wants. To an observer a millenia in the future, it would look like a collapse of civilization, because there would be no big entities that they could look at and say "That's how people lived back then." But to the individual human living in the moment, it could instead be viewed as a return to freedom, community, and person-to-person relationships, all of which are valued highly by nearly everyone (particularly today). Both viewpoints are true; the difference is in the scale that the observer observes them.
- BishopofAgde 7y agoWhen you don't have large civilizations typically most people will be subsistence farmers, so you don't have much time to pursue other interests. You might not have warfare on a grand scale but you still have it. But now you don't have professional soldiers to protect you, so if someone comes knocking you have to take up arms yourself or abandon your home. Travel is dangerous without maintained roads and patrols. Without that you don't have easy communication which means a lack of ideas being spread. This isn't a refutation, but I can think of plenty aspects of life improved during a pax. I don't think going wildly in either direction is ideal.
- ivanhoe 7y agoThose were the dark ages because previously there was a highly developed civilization with its sophisticated culture, art, science, technology and liberties, and then the western world sunk into an era where almost all of it was temporarily forsaken. It fell into the darkness and chaos (at least from the point of people who lived in the Roman empire). Barbaric tribes raided the lands, many local wars again started since there was no central rule anymore, Catholic church imposed insanely strict rules - pushing art and science knowledge and skills of humanity hundred of years back. Ideas of health and sanitation and hygiene that Romans cared a lot about were practically non-existent, so diseases ravaged the population. And then came the plague and killed more than half of the population and the rest mostly fled to country-side leaving many fortified cities completely uninhabited. It doesn't mean that people were stupid or that they didn't craft pretty things back then, of course they did and the conquering tribes also had their primitive culture and crafts, but it was very limited and heavily sanctioned by church, unlike before, and almost all art was reduced to just religious themes or simple decorations. In Byzantine Empire there was even a brief period of iconoclasm, when it was forbidden to show any humans in paintings, like in Islam. So, yes, maybe it wasn't the world from Mad Max movies and there was no Orcs, but it wasn't that far away from it as the author makes it sound. Just compare it to the renaissance (which was still lagging behind classic era) and you'll see how dark it really was.
- betterunix2 7y agoTo be clear, the science, knowledge, and skills of humanity continued to advanced during the European dark ages. Outside of Europe there was the Islamic Golden Age and the Tang Dynasty period of China. The scholarship and science of the Islamic Golden Age actually continued the intellectual development of the Romans (which is why we still have the Elements and other Greek works), probably because the Caliphate had conquered so many important Byzantine urban centers.
- ivanhoe 7y agoAbsolutely, Dark Ages is the event local to Western Europe, although IMO the rise of church power had negative impact on the Byzantine Empire too. They've kept the culture and knowledge of Ancient Greece and Eastern Roman Empire, but contributed very little to it, unlike Arab scholars who made a significant progress under the Omayyad caliphate.
- cosmodisk 7y agoWhat I find fascinating is that a good number of people discussing this could probably have equally interesting discussions on Java or algorithms,which won't be same on your average history forum...
- william3 7y agoPeople say this but we have very little knowledge of (and literature from) the time period before and during Beowulf. However, it would be fair to argue that the Dark Ages ended during the High Medieval period, rather than the Renaissance.
- skookumchuck 7y agoRecently I watched a documentary about the Arthurian legend. Essentially nobody has been able to prove or disprove the existence of King Arthur. That part of history in Britain is pretty much a blank as to who was running things and how things worked.
- analog31 7y agoSomething bothers me about the author's notion that we don't have stuff from the "dark ages" only because it was ground up and recycled. Okay, but we do have stuff from before that time, that somehow survived the same conditions.
- UnhelpfulYoda 7y agoWhat a bizarre perspective on the issue of whether or not the "Dark Ages" are incorrectly named. The author seems to think that the term stems from the extent to which historical buildings were lost or re purposed. With that kind of logic, you could similarly say that abandoned towns are the height of civilization. In other words, a very muddled thesis, followed by muddled, ill fitting justifications.