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Are ‘Dark Ages’ Inevitable?
- aswanson 4y agoThe Bronze Age collapse is fascinating, especially with the mysterious Sea People involved.
- schaefer 4y agoCitation needed.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago> Dark ages themselves may not even exist. Perhaps they're just a "Under new management" sign.
- drewcoo 4y ago<BLINK>Under construction!!!</BLINK>
- calvinmorrison 4y agoProbably most people have read the Foundation series by Asimov, but if the title of this post caught your attention... go read it. "Psychohistory is a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe that makes general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people"
- vagrantJin 4y agoFoundation is really good.
- bentley 4y agoA Canticle for Leibowitz is another very relevant book of the same genre.
- JetAlone 4y agoI can't unsee Dark Ages' inevitability as that of people, in aggregate, suffering some combination of poor social relationships and exploitative societal relationships during difficult times, and then succumbing to laziness out of indifference as a response.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lo_zamoyski 4y agoMan's vices and his concupiscence (that is, in the strict sense, the desire of lower appetites in a manner that is contrary to reason) and Man's tendency to choose against reason in favor of indulging the irrational all but ensure the seesaw of civilization.
- scifibestfi 4y agoAre we in a Dark Age right now?
- 1123581321 4y agoIt’s quite possible. Depending on how our civilization collapses, and how our immediate replacements view us, most of our records and art may be lost to civilizations a millennia from now. A dark age is more an inability to communicate with the future than a lack of activity or culture.
- midoridensha 4y agoExactly: the Dark Ages were called that because there just wasn't that much written history that survived from that time, compared to times before and after. These days, for some reason, some certain groups of people are trying to rename the Dark Ages and whitewash them, but I think it's pretty clear that there was a lot more learning and recording of knowledge after the Enlightenment than before.
- bdcrazy 4y agoDepending on how much of your life involved the early web, it could be considered the dark ages for the past 30 years. For instance, 90s to early 2000s had so many different things online that are basically gone today. Is that a good thing or a bad thing is highly debatable. Likewise, online pay services in the more recent era, MMOs and the like, fade away and are shut down, or they are continually changed, so as they say, you can't go back again. The world as a whole is producing too much 'data' to fathom. So I don't think Dark Ages moniker quite applies, more like finding the right haystack in a field of haystacks. Loss of data, but not quite in the same way.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoDepends. How do you define "dark age"? Failure to transmit the culture's foundations to the next generation? Given the contempt for "dead white European males", arguably we're in a dark age by this standard. Loss of technical progress (and even technical regress)? No. Few records or little information about that age available to future ages? No. Even if you worry about loss of digital information, our garbage dumps contain insane amounts of printed matter, most of it buried quickly enough and deep enough that it's in anaerobic storage. There will be plenty for future societies to read about our current age.
- rdtwo 4y agoWas there really a dark age ? Or was it a an artifact of a Eurocentric view of the world? Different regions of the world went dark at different times in history. I don’t see a global dark age on the horizon (at least from a technological perspective)
- msla 4y ago> Was there really a dark age ? Or was it a an artifact of a Eurocentric view of the world? A Dark Age is always, or at least has always been so far, bound to a specific region. You might as well ask if there really was a Ming Dynasty when the Aztecs never heard of any such empire. These days, the term "Dark Age" is usually used to mean the dislocation and disruption caused by the Roman Empire abandoning its western regions and retrenching in the east, around Constantinople. We can't answer how Dark that age was in that region by focusing somewhere else.
- throwaway2202 4y agoWhat something is used to mean differs from whether it makes sense objectively. Ming existed independently of observer obviously, and sciences are objective by definition. Objectively one also considers if people move, and flow of money. I can’t tell what is there that make a region a key factor in determining light or dark ages of physical sciences.
- msla 4y ago> I can’t tell what is there that make a region a key factor in determining light or dark ages of physical sciences. My point is that regions have dark ages, if dark ages exist at all, and trying to disprove the existence of a regional dark age by pointing out that other regions weren't in a dark age is a non sequitur. For example, I think it's widely recognized that the Islamic Golden Age occurred during at least part of the time usually regarded as Western Europe's Dark Age.
- smga 4y agoThe historical relation between the descent of Rome into the Western dark ages, the subsequent rise of the non-Western Islamic world, and the rise again of High Medieval Western Europe is something I learned only in recent years. [0] The fall of Rome in Western Europe was followed, after a lag of some centuries, by the rise of Islamic civilization and its peak in the Islamic Golden Age (c. the Umayyad and early Abbasid Caliphates). During this golden age, the Islamic world became a center of trade routes, agriculture, population, wealth, and knowledge-- a center of civilization. But the later Abbasid Caliphate declined as well, marked by the dispersal of trade routes, agriculture, population, wealth, and knowledge. Then, some of that knowledge, wealth, and control of trade routes migrated West during its High Middle Ages, bootstrapping the Western millennium. The rest, is History. [0] Bas van Bavel, _The Invisible Hand_
- drewcoo 4y ago> A ‘Dark Age’ implies the existence of a contrasting ‘Bright Age’ which preceded the darkness Not true. A "dark age" only implies some contrasting age, not necessarily a predecessor. The European "dark ages" were named that by people who claimed to be "the enlightenment." I would guess elsewhere it's also always a slur used by elites to distance themselves from whatever they see as lesser.
- ggm 4y agoThey are dark in the sense of "through a glass, darkly" -they were not pits of despair, they moved from Roman(esque) architecture to a more detailed sense of ornamentation and painting, which was not understood or appreciated by later cultures. The specific use of "dark ages" was not meant to imply somehow lesser or worse: just unknown, because undocumented.
- Nomentatus 4y agoBut also tremendous losses of both knowledge and technology; Christianity eventually rejected almost the whole of known medicine seeing it as a competitor to God's mercy, for example.
- ggm 4y agoYes but it was kept alive in Islam, as was most of the historical deep-time knowledge (and developed) And while I don't disagree some things were lost, some other things were made. Industrial processes have their roots in the 'dark ages' experimentation in dye, and new modes of production, in the new social structures which replaced the Roman systems, in the consequences of the black death (which came later) on economics of labour and labour migration. It has aspects of "let a hundred flowers blossom" which is of course destructive of some things, but gives birth to others (I know this is a contentious analogy) It was during this time the Rus (vikings basically) went down the rivers from northern europe to the byzantine empire. It was during this time Visigothic culture exploded in Spain and southern France, and new laws and social constructs emerged. Rome tended to aggregate capital into the center. When there was no center, capital distributed. A flood of enterprise emerged, because there was no longer a central taxing authority stuck on an old model. That said, a lot of it was wasted, and lost. The existence of "hoardes" implies people strategising burying value in a field and running away was a better bet than admitting it existed. Transmigration was happening. The Silk road, spices, all kinds of things flowed. The portugese were on the brink of discovering the grand banks. Iceland was meshed with Orkey and Denmark in trade and religion. Monks went from Ireland into the north of Britain (and beyond) and swept down, meeting Monks coming up by more orthodox routes from the south.
- imwillofficial 4y agoWell considering what is called a “dark age” was one of the most profound ages of scientific discovery, perhaps the question itself is invalid.
- yakubin 4y agoIf you mean the European Dark Ages, then I’m curious what mathematical theorems you know from that period. Several centuries of nothing. Quite an anti-achievement.
- imwillofficial 4y agoI said nothing about any mathematics.
- stephc_int13 4y agoCollapsed civilizations are not all the same. The Roman empire collapsed, but it had a few children, the link wasn't entirely broken. Latin and Greek were still taught in school in large parts of Europe until recently. Spain, the Netherlands, the British Empire and now the United States can be considered as a continuation of Rome.
- vagrantJin 4y agoInteresting. Why those specific states and not say...Germany or Austria or Hungary?
- stephc_int13 4y agoI'd include France, Germany and most of Europe. But they have not been as historically dominant, even if it was a close call.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoIn fact, both "kaiser" and "czar" came from "caesar". Imperial Russia and Imperial Germany both thought of themselves as descending from Rome.
- tsimionescu 4y agoKaiser was also used by the Habsburgs as rulers of the Holy Roman Empire and later Imperial Austria.
- WastingMyTime89 4y agoThat’s a very English-speaking country point of view.
- mcv 4y agoA weird claim. Not only have France and Germany been incredibly dominant throughout history, the Holy Roman Empire was pretty explicitly claimed to be a successor. France is the successor to Charlemagne's empire, who was crowned Emperor of the Romans. I'm curious what claim you think Spain, Great Britain, not to mention Netherlands or the US have to be considered successors of Rome.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoI think the chances of a new dark age are locally still non zero but globally very close to zero. The modern age, for lack of a better term, is cross cultural and includes science, engineering, cultural expression, and of course the internet in it's many forms and shapes. So, there are billions of people that are part of it and are sharing knowledge and teaching their offspring to be part of it. That's not going to stop happening even if some people and countries are desperately trying to do stop that from happening. Of course those people might be locally very successful in keeping their people illiterate, poor, miserable, and suppressed for some time. You can find examples of that on most continents. But mostly, that tends to be a highly unstable situation because people don't tolerate being miserable and poor very long and inevitably come into contact with people that can teach them how to fix that. The more miserable they are, the bigger the incentive. That's how revolutions start. That's how the dark ages ended in Europe. There were still people that knew how to read and write. The Roman empire fizzled out and moved east but it continued to exist. Constantinople was a cultured place for many centuries before it became Istanbul. And that eventually spread west again. What is now Austria and Germany actually used to be called the holy roman empire. Which was a thing that emerged out of the ruins of former actual roman empire after a few centuries of various tribes of Europe rebelling, converting to Christianity, and regaining literacy. And that's just Europe. The Chinese, Indians, Persians, Arabs, etc. might have a few things to say about their long and interesting history. Europe was a bit of a back water for most of that.
- mathieuh 4y agoI think it will be interesting to see what happens in Ukraine in the medium to long term. Obviously it’s politically expedient for the US and the countries under its hegemony to provide aid to Ukraine and I don’t imagine that will change, but I wonder whether “bomb them back to the Stone Age” will prove true. The collective trauma and destruction of infrastructure must surely have a devastating effect on the entire population, especially the younger generations who are the ones fighting. I can easily imagine a dark age of sorts in Ukraine.
- somewhereoutth 4y agoMuch of Europe was laid to absolute waste after the second world war, yet now is arguably the richest 'light age' area on the planet. Ukraine will do just fine, particularly as EU will throw its full economic might into fixing everything (much as the US did with the Marshall Plan).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- TheCapeGreek 4y agoI believe at the least the current "dark age" would be more lack of knowledge of the current times due to the fragility of digital media. Most physical forms of history are destroyed, eroded or buried over time, but can last hundreds or thousands of years sometimes. Digital media perhaps can last the same hopefully, but its shelf life while still in use is much lower. A book from 100 years ago can still be in good condition and perfectly legible. Early era CDs that are now 20y old are starting to fail. The average spinning disk hard drive in use lasts roughly 6 years. Our longest form of digital storage, tape, only lasts up to 30 years. If we want our knowledge to be available to future generations and not just for our own backups, we need faster and longer lived storage. But we won't see everything ported onto it either, so history will probably have a gap of data from the 1990s to the 20XX.
- blowski 4y agoI think this is too pessimistic. There are always archivists and tinkerers who keep legacy technologies alive. Look at people today making C64 emulators, dot matrix printers. Then there are websites like archive.org. I believe the bigger problem will be dealing with so much information, it will be hard to catalogue. And the problem of nuance, where future archivists won’t know whether something was AÍ generated, a shitpost, or otherwise false.
- retrac 4y agoThe European Dark Ages needs a stronger economic and material understanding. The trade system which maintained large cities broke down for reasons that will be forever debated re: the decline of the Western Roman Empire. But that is the key, and why it probably deserves to be called a Dark Age. Without trade, it all fell apart. Or perhaps trade was the thing holding it together and disruptions fractured it. Either way, no regular shipping means no large urban populations supported by imported grain. No cities means no large concentrations of scholars. Even the main durable writing material of the Romans was imported at industrial scale from Egypt. It's hard to overstate the decline of Mediterranean shipping associated with the end of the Roman Empire; the transport of bulk commodities at such scale would not resume until the 19th century. The infrastructure that supported the literate society fell apart, and so literacy declined. Life reverted to a much smaller, local nature for both elites and the common folk. It is more responsible to understand it as a transformation than a regression; every people are equally modern to their time and adapting to the needs of their context. Still, if you valued imported olives or being able to build bridges it was probably unfortunate.
- ReptileMan 4y agoIf you lack the knowledge and resources to build the infrastructure you need to get yourself out of the shithole, is pretty dark. Olives are nice, but bridges are essential.
- retrac 4y agoIt's not even knowledge or resources, but organisational scale and capacity. The ability to coordinate the labours of many people for long periods of time with enough stability to do things at large scale, gaining efficiency. If that stutters, neither the knowledge or resources may suffice.
- vanviegen 4y agoWhen stated like that, it becomes quite clear to me that we're currently living through software development dark ages. :-)
- hnbear 4y agoBright Ages (The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe https://a.co/d/0axSFSi https://a.co/d/0axSFSi) is a fantastic book on this. It highlights the growing, current historical view of continued European growth and development and not the post-Roman ruin. Basically it’s an anti-dark-age view that talks through specific examples or art, culture, science, etc through the period that’s typically called the dark ages (~400-1300AD) It was recommended by the always excellent ACOUP (https://acoup.blog https://acoup.blog) who’s often linked on HN too. This was the specific post covering Rome’s decline and fall and discussing the contrasting positions in academia on bright vs dark vs just continuing ages: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/ https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
- Animats 4y agoSo, the article says the Bronze Age collapsed across a wide area, but not how or why. What went wrong? What could go wrong across such a wide area in a period with poor communication and little long-distance trade? Plague? Climate change? Wars of that era were not big enough.
- Veen 4y agoThe cause of the Bronze Age collapse isn't known, although there are plenty of theories: plagues, Sea People invading, etc.
- bell-cot 4y agoMany of the comments seems like variations on the article's subtitle: "We know less about some periods than others, but the meaning of ‘Dark Age’ is multifarious and often loaded."
- Nomentatus 4y agoOne can see "Dark Ages" as part of a global wave of innovation that slowly passes across the surface of the globe travelling from the ancient east to the west and now back to the East. Disatisfaction and inferiority lead to experimentation and progress, but success leads to complacent abusive elites for whom progress is more of a problem than a solution.