> The perspective you've adopted is exactly the one that needs to respond to intellectual competition, because this nonsense about "oh, there was just a change

> The perspective you've adopted is exactly the one that needs to respond to intellectual competition, because this nonsense about "oh, there was just a change in civilization style and we don't know which is better so don't judge" is infuriating and gaslights the public. I absolutely can and will make moral value judgements about civilizational statuses. Lower literacy rates is bad! Public healthcare is good! The problem is that the world is far more complicated than the term "dark ages" accurately reflects. There sure was a reduction in some types of trade and some literacy rates in some specific areas at some specific times. Constantinople was having a fine old time in 450c.e. for example and their literacy rates hadn't changed meaningfully. > By the fifth century, what we'd call serfdom was common Yes? It was also common in the 4th century, 3rd century, 2nd century, 1st century... you get the idea. I looked up the "bound to parent professions" and the first reference I can find is to emperor Diocletian around 280c.e., I admit I'm not sure if that counts as part of your dark ages. > Oh, and almost the entire corpus of classical literature was lost. The "corpus of literature" was constantly being lost before the invention of the printing press. Look, talking about history (and in general) requires some degree of generalization and vagueness. We literally don't have time to cover every single detail, so we use commonly understood if slightly inaccurate terms like "roman empire" to refer to complicated subjects. "Dark Ages" is similar. It doesn't help that the term "Dark Ages" was invented specifically to make Rome/Greece and the Renaissance ages look better. It's hardly an unbiased term. But the overall point is that if you actually look at history, 900 c.e. is really truly not that much different from 500 c.e. or 1200 c.e.