The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought(lithub.com) |
The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought(lithub.com) |
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.
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.
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.
It is even more specific. Eastern Roman Empire remained functional until it fell to the Ottomans in 1453 AD.
But in Britain there were not even coins between the years 410 and 600 AD:
http://www.numsoc.net/darkages.html
"History has proved time and time again that when money is in short supply – the people turn to a token or obsidional coinage, no matter how base, rather than do without money as a medium of exchange completely. This has been demonstrated by siege coinages, lead tokens, brass farthings and merchants’ tokens over the millennia."
But there was nothing for these two hundred years. Not even foreign coins, and not any kind of substitute.
That's why these years are considered completely dark there. And that's why it looks like a real collapse there. So whenever we speak about some dark ages we have to be aware also about which land area we talk about.
Interestingly, Ireland during the 400's to 600's was something of a bastion of Catholicism and 'western/classical' thought in their monasteries. Even though Britain was very pagan and 'dark', Ireland remained 'enlightened' at this time (though the populace was still very 'dark' and pagan in Ireland).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ireland_(400%E2%80%...
Under this regional definition of 'dark ages', even today they occur. Lost tribes in the Amazon, the populace of North Korea, very rural towns in Alaska, etc. all can be considered to be in 'dark' ages to some degree or another.
It really wasn't. As Roman imperial faded in, agents that were Roman auxiliaries filled the void with the support and help of local authorities, chiefly senatorial families and the Church (filled with members of senatorial families), which kept being a structuring force for society during lulls in civil government.
Stable government recovered relatively quietly and frankly certain areas were better off in terms of peace after the Western part of the empire « collapsed » than during the strife preceding it. Areas that were really worst off got ravaged by civil war, not tribal violence (such as is the case with Italy).
I recommend Karl Ferdinand Werner's books on the subject, the transition between Imperial Roman Gaul and Frankish(-Roman) Gaul. But his paper La "conquête franque" de la Gaule : itinéraires historiographiques d'une erreur (The "Frankish conquest" of Gaul : historiographical itineraries of an error) is enlightening and short, if you can read French.
The narrative of the Late Antiquity/Early Medieval "barbarian invasions" is known to be complete rubbish, don't fall for it.
Remember, Romans had a fairly advanced society, and buildings, architecture, and infrastructure. Roads crossing whole regions, (the highways of the time), aqua-ducts, ways to dispose sewage, etc...
This all slowly degraded and eventually disappeared with the fall of the empire.
Stone building were replaced by mud huts, and I don't know about you, but not having running water in your town, or paved roads to the next town or port seem like huge drawbacks to life quality.
The first Anglo-saxons that came in Britania, after the Roman left lived in what you would call downright primitive huts made by either mud or wooden planks with mud in them.
That and the constant warring, in many ways, it was a huge set-back for the people there.
It's pretty fascinating as a concept, though it hits many obvious pitfalls (what about all the stuff that's said to have happened during those years?!?!) and I'm not versed enough in the "theory" to give it justice.
It's certainly fun to think about, even if it's complete nonsense!
Then I found Anatoly Fomenko, Gunnar Heinsohn, Herbert Illig, etc had investigated this.
I'll add another link to the two already shared by sister responses: https://www.q-mag.org/the-1st-millennium-a-d-chronology-cont...
Definitely a fascinating topic. I emerged from that rabbit hole unconvinced but definitely with far more doubt about the reliability of the mainstream chronology.
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.
You've basically defined away the problem. If its lost then we can't read and engage with it and therefore has no cultural value.
I mean sure, things we don't have by definition can't contribute to culture today. But that is a useless tautology when talking about lost works.
Also, are you aware that you're implicitly saying that you would love it if San Francisco was bombed or suffered a big earthquake or some other horrible disaster like that just because you don't like its architecture? I doubt you intended that.
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
"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
The question for anyone trying to roll back the use of the term 'Dark Ages' is what would you call it instead?
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.
> 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.
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%...
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
What's your evidence for this claim?
> this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently
What are you talking about?
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.
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.
Yet we have no idea who the hell led this beyond the legends of King Arthur.
Dark enough for me.
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.
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.
However, it would be fair to argue that the Dark Ages ended during the High Medieval period, rather than the Renaissance.
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.
I don’t get an intelligence vibe from this style of writing - it mostly just sets off my bullshit alarms.
I wanted to make that point when I read this line:
>> But the Avars ruled Central Europe for over two centuries, and it is not a given that their civilization had no worth and did not represent a future we would have flourished in.
A civilizations worth is always measured by those who might seek to control it. You could have a bunch of people getting on just fine, living out perfectly normal lives. But if there isn't any way for them to produce excess - be that labor output or extraction of natural resources - then they are not seen as valuable and will not be written about.
Others have reported issues with archaeological and historical evidence from this same period, proposing that up to 700 years of mainstream chronology shouldn't be there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745763
Especially interesting from your link is that all the royal lines of Europe trace their origins to Charlemagne, who according to these alternative chronologies was probably a myth.
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
Reprogramming The Museum
https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/papers/reprogramming...
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.
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.
Perhaps it could be argued that the Roman Empire was simply ahead of their time, but we went from engineering marvels (of their time) such as the Roman aqueducts [1], the Pantheon [2], or the Colosseum [3], which held 50-80k spectators in 72AD, to very little of note for 100s of years following.
What I find intriguing is that the Roman Empire even 'discovered' steam power in the first century [4]. Unfortunately, they seemed to have only saw it as a toy, rather than realizing its full potential. It's fascinating to me to think about how far ahead we could be had the Roman Empire not fallen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
People get weirdly romantic about how easy these ideas would have been to implement; there's this weird conception that we should have been able to go from late antiquity Rome to early industrial revolution England in a matter of a couple centuries.
This ignores two things. First executing seemingly simple ideas can still require incredible expertise in a range of fields. Nuclear bombs are conceptually simple but building them still seems to require the economy of a nation state.
Second, Roman knowledge wasn't lost. It was all still there in the Byzantine Empire yet strangely they weren't sending rockets to the moon in the 1200's. The centres of knowledge simply migrated, and in every place knowledge grew and expanded. Whether work by Byzantine or Muslim scholars, science wasn't put on pause and without their contributions, we would not have advanced to where we are today.
I'd say that the cathedrals are something of note.
Health and sanitation degraded with the Renaissance more than anything (which WAS a regression in many aspects). Before that the general practices hadn't much changed since Roman times, save for infrastructure gradually getting worse.
And it's not like the Ancient world was immune to massive plagues, it's just not part of our collective imagery anymore.
Just joking: IMHO if someone knows what dark ages was, usually know where it was... It is that simple!
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.
This is a very misleading description of what happened. The early Muslim conquests caused major disruption in the Middle East, otherwise known as the Roman and Persian Empires, as cities which had been full of scholarship and prosperity for centuries were invaded and the population conquered, enslaved, and sometimes killed, with the concomitant destruction of libraries and learning. There is a major disruption of the written historical record during this time period comparable to what happened in the Dark Ages or even worse.
It wasn't until after the "explosion of Islam" that the Muslims gradually realized the value of the Greek texts that were preserved during their conquests and everything settled out such that scholars were able to return to their work.
That's like describing 'The Great Leap Forward' as a Sino-centric view of history.
"The Dark Ages" refers to a time as well as a place. Specifically, Western Europe.
Which is the problem.
Rapid and development in what sense? This topic is sort of contaminated by the fact that most askers of the question have a circular definition that refuses to countenance the concept that Western Europe might have been far from dominant (e.g., in areas such as quality of life or health).
In terms of how Western Europe came to politically dominate the world, this essentially boils down to them deciding to arm their trading fleets and have them act as a military force against competitors, and then snowballing the resulting profits into more powerful navies (and armies) that the other countries couldn't keep up with. The technological gap often wasn't near as wide as people usually assume it to be, and there are several instances of Western powers getting their asses kicked by natives, but the Western powers could afford to keep up the pressure for decades or even centuries if need be, whereas the native peoples had less ability to recover from attrition. At the same time, European powers were also able to achieve highly centralized states that prevented them from collapsing due to internal struggles mid-snowball, which is generally the historical case for large empires (see: Aztec, China, Inca, Rome).
Because Europe is geographically small, the probability of neighbour conflict is always very high especially when that small space contains such a high degree of variation in language and culture. If you add a particularly ambitious, capable and politically-placed individual to that mix like an Alexander the Great you tend to get empires forming.
I don't think this is specific to Europe at all; Asia has experienced similar rapid development throughout its history, many times being very technologically advanced from a global perspective, and the origin of smaller empires like the Aztecs, Iroquois and the Oyo in other parts of the world.
I'm not sure it would fit the idea, but:
https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
As for the particular author, he was born in another culture (not all cultures appreciate the matter-of-factness as-you-talk anglo-saxon style of writing, many prominent European writers have called it "barbaric" and "only good for business"). He was also born in a whole other era.
Snobs in general tend to look down on people who don’t place value on pomposity for its own sake.
For example, to use the English versions of French words...
To say "I'm sorry" in French you say "I am desolate"
Talking about a broken phone or a stomach ache you would say they are deranged.
Much of French vocabulary came into English but very often with some distance in meanings and usage. Often in translating you have the option to use exactly the same word with maybe a small spelling change, but you end up sounding ridiculous because of the shift in meaning or intensity.
Second, essentially what boils down to shaming people for not communicating the way you want is wrong. Not that I am saying you are directly or intentionally harassing someone, but (despite my distaste for how it is often used) things like this could be called microaggressions, making people uncomfortable using their language.
I experienced a lot of that growing up. In a place far from cities where people were generally less educated (and those that were left to find jobs) and I read a lot. I still struggle with the unconscious bias that people don't want to hear what I have to say or wouldn't understand or would respond with discouraging things.
Looking back, I'm not trying to say you are doing anything particularly negative, BUT be careful. Diversity can come in lots of ways, using language a little differently is one of them, and a little understanding (like how hundred year translations from French are going to sound a little … florid) helps with perspective.
No. It's not always wrong.
Which is exactly what the second half of your post is, but moreso than the person you are criticizing.
There is no point in having a discussion board if people are going to be criticized because something they said with sincerity might offend somebody. That is the nature of speech.
And lord forbid us for writing in a way or about subjects that don't please as much of the potential readers as possible. They might not click on our data-mined ads if we did. The fucks.
I’d guess there were people that valued this in most times and cultures.
As for the translation, I’m not clear when this was actually translated. The stuff I’ve found indicates a publishing date if 1999. If that’s accurate (and it well may not be) then I think it’s entirely reasonable to expect translators to write easy-to-read text in a modern style. I understand the desire to carry the “spirit” of the work through the translation, but I’m not sure that’s what’s at fault when translations read this way. I wonder if translators enamored with the work are trying to use difficult phrasing to make it seem more impressive or educated. I also wonder if sometimes native sentence structure is being replicated in English, where it comes off try-hard when it’s really just an awkward transliteration.
It's not meant to be a list of purely literal facts. It's entertaining and a pleasure to read.
As for Paul Graham's opinion piece; well, that's just silly. Something written is inherently different to something spoken; they have different strengths, different attributes, different purposes and, should they have the same goal, can best achieve that goal in different ways. Why choose to discard the strengths of the written?
As a writing exercise, let me re-write the piece:
"What happened during the Middle Ages is unclear and the evidence we use to understand it is contradictory. Reviews depict the period as one filled with conflict and struggle, but artistic works dated to this period - from the calm, serene looking statues to the expansive, aspirational Gothic architecture - instead hint that they were created by happy people in a flourishing society.
Perhaps the lack of recorded history in this period is the result of peace and a lack of notable incidents rather than war, famine and disease."
The idea is interesting but bite-sized when stripped of the pomp.
The Dwellings if Philosophers (as translated) starts out with “Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception.” This says so little with such absurd wording that it’s almost word soup.
It may not be ideal for other goals, including maximizing utility of your work (or persuasiveness z for persuasive writing) to people who do read it. Different forms of expression between writing and speech, which differences are also different by purposes and intended audience of the writing, have evolved for real reasons.
Also, it's funny to track the biographies of the most commonly known Occultists; Crowley, Dee, Parsons - all accomplished before they got into the occult, and declining after.
That is, if I can improve my writing significantly...
Do you happen to know something about the coinage in Ireland in that period? Also, searching for the survived original sources in that entry, they are either first half 400, written outside of Ireland, then some written later than 600 AD? Maybe I missed something?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paganism
"The notion of paganism, as it is generally understood today, was created by the early Christian Church. It was a label that Christians applied to others, one of the antitheses that were central to the process of Christian self-definition. As such, throughout history it was generally used in a derogatory sense. - Owen Davies, Paganism: A Very Short Introduction, 2011"
"The term pagan is not attested in the English language until the 17th century.[24] In addition to infidel and heretic, it was used as one of several pejorative Christian counterparts to gentile as used in Judaism and to kafir ('unbeliever') and mushrik ('idolater') as in Islam.[25]"
Just as far as anyone can tell, they never realized the 'toy' could have a real world use.
Had they thought of an application, they could work on making it possible. They thought it was just a parlor trick.
>Second, Roman knowledge wasn't lost. It was all still there in the Byzantine Empire yet strangely they weren't sending rockets to the moon in the 1200's.
Seriously, what the fuck, why are you attacking me.
To be fair, other regions of the world have never heard of "the Dark Ages". History is too big for the layman to avoid simplification.
(although, renaming it "the Lost Ages" seems like it would help clarify things)
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.
Yes, I believe so. I'm not even sure the Dark Ages are taught outside of countries with European heritage.
Nevertheless, anywhere the topic is discussed, it's usually mentioned in comparison to other periods of European history. That alone tells us that it's a term intended to describe regional rather than global events.
Er, even 20 years ago when I was in college it was taught as both largely a misnomer and a label applied to a (somewhat ambiguously bounded, especially as to the ending point) period of Western European history.
The main reason a lot of classical learning fell into disuse in the West was that the Germanic peoples migrating in didn’t care much, and there was a language barrier - most stuff was in Greek, and they only knew Latin, for the most part. With a very few exceptions, nobody was going around actively destroying stuff. Indeed, the Church is the main reason so much was preserved in the West, particularly some later popes that took a keen interest in the preservation of ancient texts. Easily the worst thing the West did was the burning of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, because again, the Byzantine Empire, even what remained of it by then, was a real center of learning and probably easily the biggest surviving repository of books on the planet at the time, so undoubtedly we lost some texts then.
This isn’t really a religion vs religion thing - the Christians came into an existence in a society and region already steeped in Greek learning, and slowly assumed political control over the region. The Muslims were in an entirely different situation: they were from an underdeveloped region and came into the Middle East via conquest. They simply didn’t know what they had, and the violence of the conquests was a major setback. In some ways, the region never really recovered - that and the Mongol invasions.
I suspect it will die a slow death, just like the 'The Civil War wasn't about slavery' schtick.
The dark ages I seem to have a more-clear picture of: derth of historical record, rise of Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, technological progress, and unfortunate disease, all each contributed, and amalgamated into the public conscious of defining the era as 'dark.'
The civil war thing is really confusing. I grew up on slavery as the reason, then in uni had a prof tell me it was really about states rights. I've talked to others who had the exact opposite experience. Anyways, it's a super political and emotionally sensitive topic to people... But I had the impression the states rights narrative was not a recent thing.
Remember that the back-and-forth over federalism and states' rights has been ongoing since forever, and the same people tend to be on opposite sides of that question depending on the matter in question. Thus it's reasonable to ask: states' rights to do what? In the context of that time, the answer was clear.
It does make for a nice fairy tale, though, for whitewashing the past, and it's one someone might believe because their parents told them, and their grandparents told their parents, etc., all the way back to the vanquished generation rationalizing their conduct post-hoc, much as many Nazis did after World War II.
I'm no historian, so take with 0.017 mol NaCl.
It is super clear, the states say it in their succession documents.
Claiming it is about abstract states rights and not slavery is Lost Cause revisionism.
However, people like Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson famously said northern aggression towards the south wasn't about slavery.
So the issue seems to be obviously oversimplified in these internet and media debates.
Not really, the oldest Scandinavian kings that historians are pretty certain were real people were Harald Fairhair who was king of Norway around 900CE, Gorm the Old who was king of Denmark around 930CE, and Eric the Victorious who was king of Sweden around 970CE.
And the sources we have for the ancient kings were usually continental scholars, monks, bishops, or missionaries, who most probably had an agenda, and an antagonistic view of the pagans up north. And likewise, when the Scandinavians told their history to the weird people from the south, they probably embellished their stories.
...unlike for example Charles Martel and early French dynasties, who were 200 years earlier than the known Scandianavians.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Scandinavia was a completely uncivilized backwater. :-)
? 'Pagan culture' is not some unified set of cultural norms. Rather, it's a broad category of possibly totally unrelated activities. Some of them codified via Rome (but those were adapted to Christianity) and then other, local ones.
The Christians in 300 CE were the most organized group on the continent, which was part of the reason the Emperor adopted Christianity.
An organized group of busy bodies might cause the decline of some thing (i.e. paganism) but certainly not the decline of the written word, education, governance etc. just the opposite.
One might argue that with the failure of Imperial Order, and the onset of tribal wars, it was the monks that carried most of the flame of civilization, which eventually led to the renewal of civil order and the reasonable ability to establish something approach civility.
Which is maybe close to the classical 'dark ages' narrative. Now of course maybe it was not as dark as we thought, but we certainly don't have a lot leftover from that time. Hence the historical narrative.
I also don't believe that Christianity had the power to destroy civilization. They were just the result of the decay of economic power of Rome, which lead the people to organize around something other than the traditional government structure. It also had to do with the idea that the old gods were failing to defend Romans, so why not joining this new cult that seems to protect the poor and dispossessed.
So at least on that end another reason for the break in history and lineage is that the people are completely different and in fact have no lineage back to Roman times.
Even though centuries later they converted to Christianity and started wondering why they don’t feel as Roman as they should.
As to your second point, that any speech at all might offend someone so there's no point in drawing attention to that fact, on the contrary, the commenter is actually making a very concrete point. He is talking about a very specific thing, that this prescriptivism about writing style alienates and turns away a lot of people that could otherwise make valuable contributions. It's not a general statement that any statement might offend somebody, but a highly targeted examination of the consequences of such speech policing.
From Mississippi's declaration of secession:
> Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.
* https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...
Doing a Ctrl-F and searching for "slavery" gives quite a few complaints (by most of the states) against the Federal government and the North on the subject.
Except for pronunciation! ;)
“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.
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.
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.
¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ak435w/did_t...
That's not correct, Byzantine Empire is the modern name we give to that empire during the Middle Ages. They called themselves just Roman Empire, in their minds they were just the same original Roman Empire but headquartered in Constantinople.
Mmm... use of the word "nightmare" to criticise something that's discussing the dark ages, where the critique is about just that kind of skill level, but then you go on to present a junior grade summary. Deep troll or accidental writing ability? Too close to call.
But that illuminates a fundmental part of the problem here. To many on both sides of the page, much writing is also a game, to be played by the reader and the author. It's meant to be fun, but if one doesn't realise it's a game to be played and that the game is itself another layer of meaning, one will simply end up getting annoyed, wondering why the author didn't just present a plain list of unadorned facts.
By all means, don't play the game if you don't want to, or critique the game as one plays - point out literary shots that didn't get over the line, or cross-language allusions that are playing a bit fast and loose with etymology.
But to see the game being played and tell people to stop playing it? That's not right.
The original paragraph was: "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?"
This paragraph is obfuscated at best, unintelligible at worst. This is a fairly common writing style in continental philosophy, and in that field the debate isn't whether or not the writing is bad. It's whether or not the writing is intentionally bad.
He may have taken a more moderate stance for his presidential campaign, but for most of his political career Lincoln was a hardcore, outspoken abolitionist. Nobody at the time seriously thought Lincoln was OK with slavery; that's why southern states immediately started seceding.
http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper....
This is the Dunning School:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning_School
It is Confederate apologia, not Union. It is the origin of the states' rights theory of the Civil War.
London in the "Dark Ages" didn't have aqueducts. But Londinium was part of the periphery of the empire, and it also never had aqueducts. There's not that much information to be gained by cherry picking the elements of the central core of the Roman Empire and asking why they weren't present in far flung areas in the post-Roman era.
Skeletons show that people were relatively healthier (at least in the periphery) after Rome had fallen than when Rome had dominated these regions.
After a quick search I would say the latter is more important here: what we observe from the bones are things like a quality of nutrition (e.g. vitamin deficiencies) or effects of some illnesses. Inadequate nutrition signals poor living condition and illnesses affect even the most "gifted" individuals (don't forget that hardship selects also for other traits than just a good immunity).
In Austria and Germany most people descripe the Nazi era also as “dark times”, despite there beeing roads built (although the Nazis were so in debt at the beginning of the war already that you can hardly call this a success).
So dark has multiple definitions. I thought the most.common one was about a time where rational thought and humanism didn’t really win, but tribal rivalry (on any scale) and radical beliefs did
The issue is that the Enlightenment wasn't a project to move human beings to some better plane, but to rationalize society and its members in a way that made it more amendable to control and planning. And so centralized power could use Enlightenment ideology to eliminate alternative power centers, centralizing power in the hands of a single state that could reorganize society for its own ends.
That itself had pros and cons, with the biggest con being the newfound ability for states to execute projects of mass violence more effectively.
I read somewhere that skeletal remains show people got taller after the end of the Roman empire. And then started getting shorter through the Renaissance right up till the agricultural revolution in the early 20th century.
The Early Middle Ages saw relatively little
population growth with urbanization well below
its Roman peak...Estimates of the total population
of Europe are speculative, but at the time of
Charlemagne it is thought to have been between 25
and 30 million
BULLSHIT. How on earth you can present blatantly false presumptions as information?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Romanesque_art_and_archite...
"In most of western Europe, the Roman architectural tradition survived the collapse of the empire. The Merovingians (Franks) continued to build large stone buildings like monastery churches and palaces."
BTW we still have Roman aqueducts, roads and bridges all over Europe.
Mentioning that there were plenty of building and construction happening in some part, doesn't negate that the rest (80%) was being ravaged and in continuous decline to the point of whole populations being displaced.
Only the Eastern Roman Empire (aka. Byzantine empire), had a unified government structure, yet it was struggling with the Slavic invasions/incursions from the north, and the wars with the Sassanid empire and the succeeding caliphates.
They did attempt to re-unify the empire with the Justinian Restoration (with Belisarious being the main general re-conquering vast territories), but that didn't last long either. As the economy was lagging the region was ravaged by the Black Plague, where it is estimated that 25–50 million people in two centuries of recurrence died, equivalent to 13–26% of the world's population at the time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian
To me, late Antiquity end, and the true dark ages begin after the death Justinian, and the decline of the Eastern Roman Empire to the point that it couldn't defend or keep its territories from the Slavic invasions.
Within that context it's hard to believe that the European tribes simply forgot how to build roads or monuments or architecture after Rome ceased to influence them.
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.
> If you care about sharing ideas it's better to write simply.
That's good advice if you're writing blog posts in 2019 with the goal of driving traffic to your site. And why should any writer aspire to a higher goal than that?
For you, and the culture you’re in, what you say is true. It is far from universal.
If your goal is to communicate your company or product; sure, keep it simple. But that's not everyone's goals, irrespective of culture or time period.
If I am the last person on earth, i effectively "own" the entire earth, but it means nothing.
Same for a man staving to death on top of a mountain of gold.
Which makes this billionaire New Zealand apocalypse compound trend all the more ridiculous, if society collapses, being a billionaire is going to mean absolutely nothing, you would think the money would be better spent ensuring that doesn't happen in the first place
The ancient patrician families had trouble with going extinct. Their decline started long before the imperial period.
Later European kings had the same problem, sometimes just failing to produce any heir. It only takes a single generation and the family is gone.
If anything, I'd attribute family extinctions like this to monogamy. The two standard defenses against a failure of this type are (1) letting a man marry into the family by wedding a family daughter (as opposed to having the daughter marry out into the man's family); and (2) taking more than one wife, which offers dramatically greater opportunity to reproduce.
For the others in the series I've no idea. They've been on my reading list forever.
Would you want to be related to Trump if the economy tanked and social services started breaking down?
"Spoken writing" can be just as artificial and pretentious -- e.g. upper class writers writing as if they grew up in da hood. Or people dumbing down their language to sell more.
How we speak with a friend, and how we write, doesn't have to share the same language or tone or expressions or vocabulary even. Spoken is a stream of consciousness that we express in real time. Written is forever, so we have time to refine what we write, go deeper, be more artistic, add flourishes, and so on. This is not the same as "being obscure for being obscure's sake".
To make an analogy, what you ask for, in photography terms would be "all photography should be real life documentary-style scenes".
In fact, even "spoken" changes form all the time: you don't talk to your bong buddy the same as you talk to your parents, or spouse, or the same way you give a lecture as when you casual chat over coffee, or when you teach students. Tone changes, expression changes, vocabulary changes, level of difficulty changes, etc.
That in itself is snobbery. It's just fashion bouncing back and forth between hating on the poor and hating on the rich. One is fashionable until everyone does it then the opposite is in vogue.
Are the cool kids today wearing factory-ripped jeans these days or are they hating on people who do?
It is just stupid to say "this style is the only acceptable style and anyone doing anything different is an asshole". Surface quality is boring, substance is important.
It isn't stupid. It's snobbery. If you denigrate straightforward writing as "barbaric", you're a snob, plain and simple.
> Surface quality is boring, substance is important.
My problem with overly-flowery writing is specifically that it's about style and not substance. If your goal is to educate or to entertain, put that first. If your goal is to impress the reader with your loquacious conveyance of verbiage, fine, but you're sacrificing substance for style. And I personally think this sort of writing shows a disrespect toward the reader, because it's literally about the author showing off and trying to impress the reader.
You know how sometimes you'll go to a website and it hijacks your scrollbar to show some unnecessary visualization or a gratuitous rotating 3D view of a product? And you look at it and you can appreciate the artistry that went into creating the visualization, the skill that went into rendering everything perfectly and syncing it with the scrollbar. But mostly it's fucking obnoxious because you just want to scroll down to read the article or click the "buy" link and instead you're wasting your time fighting with the site that broke your scrollbar because some product manager was sure you'd be impressed. This is the website version of dense, flowery, self-important prose.
It's "straightforward" for you and your era and culture. For others it's merely a plain and crude version of what could be better writing.
There is the snobbery. Bad writing is everywhere. Some people have large vocabularies and use them well, some people don't. Becoming a good writer also requires a lot of bad writing. Complex writing more so. If you say everything complex is just about style and showing off, it reflects poorly on your ability to determine quality of complex, or any writing.
There is nothing wrong with not understanding something or having no interest in something, but doing this virtue signaling to put yourself above anything you don't understand is anti-intellectual bullshit and you might as well be protesting against vaccines. It's the same as black kids shaming each other for "talking white" or people yelling about how "we speak English in this country".
Besides, for many people there's nothing wrong with what some call "snobbery" but they call elitism or quality or high brow, etc.
They're not "snobs" caring who has this or that ancestry, who has expensive clothes, etc., but particular about language, expression, etc. Which is par for the course of being a writer, artist, or intellectual in general.
Now if you're going to argue all Latin-based and Romance languages are less straightforward than English, that's a riskier (and dismissive!) proposition.
(I'm not a native speaker either, though.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741886
>60% reduction in content for a single off-the-cuff rewrite implies the original work needs an aggressive editor with an aggressive amount of red ink.
In any case, the original doesn't set off my "bullshit detectors". Such an aggressive way of commenting on a piece of writing! Not everyone must or should write like Hemingway -- not even Hemingway!
I’d be willing to bet that simpler is generally easier to understand than complex. Maybe some exceptions exist, but I’d suspect they’d be outliers.
Though going back to the first comment it’s also not how people talk.
If you don't like to listen to bubblegum pop, that doesn't make you a snob. If you argue that the lyrics are simple and the repetitive beats basic chord progressions are unoriginal or pandering to the crowd, that still doesn't make you a snob. But if you say that anyone who makes or listens to bubblegum pop is an idiot, now you're a snob. Snobbery isn't disliking something. It's looking down on something (or more practically on people who like that something.)
I don't think people who write flowery, dense prose are all snobs, nor did I say that they were. I said the ones who do this and then call straightforward writing "barbaric" are snobs, because "barbaric" is not a meaningful criticism, any more than "idiotic" is.
I gave you specific reasons I do not like the flowery style of writing, and why I find it counterproductive. I think writing in this way is very self-important and I think it puts the reader secondary to the author's ego. I think flowery writing has poor fit for purpose, if the purpose is to educate or even entertain. If the purpose is to demonstrate artistry in sentence composition, then sure, flowery writing seems great for that purpose, but I personally have zero interest in that purpose, and I think most people probably have zero interest in that. Slogging through three times as much text and reading every paragraph twice to make sure I understood the point is not a rewarding experience for me.
You really don't seem able to take a book on its own terms. This book wasn't written to give you personally exactly what you want from a book. Just because you want to read pages of dense logical argumentation in flat prose doesn't mean that you can fault every author who writes a different kind of book.
Okay, but they'd also probably be able to understand it. So, tradeoffs.
You seem to think that it’s impossible for prose to be aesthetically pleasing and comprehensible at the same time. But in fact, the quoted text is both. If it had been written in a plainer style, I probably wouldn't have bothered reading all of it. So no trade off in this instance.
At no point did I say it's literally impossible to read.
I really don't think you can have it both ways on this one. If, contrary to what you've been suggesting, the style only has a minor impact on your ability to understand what is being said, then what's the issue? Why get so worked up about the fact that some esoteric French alchemist writing in 1929 isn't writing in the journalistic style that's currently in vogue?
There's a wide spectrum between "easy to understand" and "literally impossible to understand". Everything to the left of "literally impossible to understand" can be understood (at least in part). That doesn't mean the effort is low. Hell, I can "understand" German but I'm going to spend a lot of time translating words I don't know.
Why are you so worked up about someone online doesn't share your love of flowery prose that you're willing to engage in borderline trolling to piss them off? Personally I don't care about Fulcanelli and had never heard of him before today. I do care about general quality of writing because I'm exposed to it constantly.
As to why I'm worked up: you're expressing so much disdain for any piece of writing that doesn't give you exactly what you want in exactly the form that you want it. A big part of a humanities education used to be forcing people to read lots of pieces of writing that don't meet that description. I think that was broadly a good thing. Reading shouldn't be a purely transactional activity.
Let’s be honest. You are not worked up because of my disdain for this piece or for flowery writing in general. You don’t care about me, nor should you. You are worked up because someone has the audacity to not hold the same opinion as you. It’s not possible to simply have differing opinions, especially if there’s a compelling argument for not-your-opinion, so the only possible reality is that they are wrong, wrong, wrong. So you’ll reply to every comment they make, even if it’s not to you, and you’ll argue irrelevant tangents and willfully misinterpret what they said and intentionally try to goad them to anger to prove that you are the one who’s right. Good luck with that.