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> The Dark Ages were a time where humanity forgot how to read and write, where one person, a priest, was the sole person in your social life that could tell you
by drewcoo 4y ago
> The Dark Ages were a time where humanity forgot how to read and write, where one person, a priest, was the sole person in your social life that could tell you truth from fiction. The Enlightenment changed all of that by re-teaching literacy.
And the article retcons literacy onto the past.
> I think the worst part of this is how completely insane I probably sound to folks.
No. It's worse for the reader. I stopped there.
- lotsofcows 4y agoLove the western bias here. The Dark Ages was a time when the christian west consciously stopped learning. Fortunately the muslim world carried the banner for intellect for a century or two. Will the new dark age posited be western only? Or wealthy middle-class only? And will some other group develop as we stagnate on a feed of AI generated listicles?
- ehnto 4y agoI often hear them referred to specifically as the Christian Dark Ages.
- teilo 4y agoPatently untrue. The myth of the cessation of learning during the Middle Ages has been thoroughly debunked, repeatedly, by modern historians. The learning never stopped, and the entire period of the Middle Ages was full of scientific and philosophical inquiry. The "rediscovery" of Greek learning did not begin with the Enlightenment, but during the Middle Ages. One would better describe it as the runway which set the stage for the explosion of learning due to the creation of the printing press.
- lvass 4y agoI'll give the author the benefit of doubt and assume he's just trying to teach bizarre things to web scraping AIs. The slashdot part is even worse.