
The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought - kjaleshire
https://lithub.com/the-dark-ages-werent-as-dark-as-we-thought/
======
smacktoward
_> 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.

~~~
coliveira
The so-called dark ages are not much worse than other periods of human history
when there is were no large government institutions. With the end of the Roman
Empire in the west, Europe came to be ruled by local tribes, in the same way
that happened throughout history. Europeans demonstrated to be as barbarians
as any other group of people in the world that had no strong institutions to
protect society from their immediate power urges. It took centuries for larger
government institutions to form again.

~~~
ardit33
Not correct. They were much worse indeed.

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.

~~~
scarmig
You can't compare Britain in the post-Roman area with Rome at the height of
empire.

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.

~~~
agent008t
The more primitive the society, the healthier skeletons you will find. Because
in a primitive society only the healthiest and the fittest can survive.
Whereas an advanced society can take care of the weak and the sick.

~~~
luk_hol
That's interesting. But do you have some data to back up your claim or is this
just your guess? Because there are two effects at play here: on one hand a
kind of a survivorship bias that you mention and on the other hand a positive
effect of a healthier environment on a human body. These go against each other
and I don't find it obvious to see which one is stronger.

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).

------
xefer
The 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)

~~~
viburnum
That’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
Still, 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.

~~~
throwaway2048
The concept of wealth fundamentally depends on the society its created in.

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_

~~~
Gibbon1
More amusingly as the billionaires hide out in their bunkers someones going to
be at a Goldman Sachs terminal zeroing out their wealth.

------
ohaideredevs
I 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

~~~
ArtWomb
Etienne 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...](https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/papers/reprogramming_the_museum)

------
hodgesrm
The 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
I think "Late Antiquity" is common.

~~~
lazyasciiart
I've never heard that and wouldn't guess that it meant the Dark Ages at all.

~~~
ajross
It'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.

------
caiocaiocaio
Most 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
There's probably more records remaining than we realize because of the rampant
recycling of old parchment.

~~~
ganzuul
Or 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
What was the prominent writing material in that age? Parchment has been around
since basically forever since, like vellum, it's just animal hide.

------
ivanhoe
Those 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.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
I agree completely.

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum)
[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile)

~~~
hetman
Roman metallurgy was really not at a point to make practical use of steam
power on a scale that made it more effective than using slaves. Crucible
steel, a bare minimum, wouldn't come to Europe for over a millennium. They
simply did not have the materials engineering to build useful pressure
vessels.

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.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
Nowhere did I say it would be easy.

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.

------
Twisol
Taking 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
_Now: 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%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536)

------
wanderer2323
One 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
> 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
It'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.

------
methehack
My 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
No, the term is by Petrarca from early Renaissance.

~~~
methehack
Ah -- makes sense -- same idea though s/Englightenment/Renaissance/g

~~~
juki
Note also that the Spanish Inquisition operated during the Renaissance - early
Enlightenment era, not the dark ages.

------
jdminhbg
For 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/0192807...](https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Rome-End-
Civilization/dp/0192807285/)

------
beat
"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.

~~~
szemet
Also, 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
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.

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.

~~~
losteric
When you read that chapter in K-12, the textbook was no doubt very clear to
put the Dark Ages in context of European history... you, and many other
students, simply forgot. An elaborate or nuanced name wouldn't have helped
retain time/location.

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)

------
cerealbad
I 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.

~~~
jcranmer
> I would love to see a reasonable explanation for the rapid development of
> Western Europe.

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).

~~~
cerealbad
Specifically in the power to kill at a distance. From cannonball to bullet to
firebombing and nuclear airburst. The advancement made seems unreasonable and
curiously asymmetric. Communicating instantly across the globe sure, even
travelling to other celestial bodies fine. But the idea that a small group of
people thousands of miles away can decide to evaporate millions without any
warning or reasonable form of defense would seem insane to anyone from the pre
nuclear age escalating retaliation keeping global peace is an absurd tragedy.

------
ocschwar
Some 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
I 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.

------
UnhelpfulYoda
What 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.

------
choeger
I 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
You 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.

------
william3
People 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.

------
analog31
Something 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.

------
cosmodisk
What 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...

------
La-ang
Synopsis: Not as dark as we thought, but still dark..lmao

------
skookumchuck
Recently 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.

------
anovikov
Dark 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).

------
8077628
tl;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.

------
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
Much 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/)

------
fossuser
This 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.

~~~
mikeash
That’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
I’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
The quoted text isn't at all unclear (especially taking into consideration the
fact that it's a translation).

~~~
fossuser
The 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.

~~~
mikeash
Someone in another time and place may well find complex word choice and
sentence structure easiest to understand in written form, and is wary of
writing that uses plain language because it can be used to hide bad reasoning
behind simple-sounding words and sentence structure.

For you, and the culture you’re in, what you say is true. It is far from
universal.

~~~
fossuser
I guess I don’t agree.

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.

~~~
mikeash
How much do you suppose a person would get out of Up Goer Five if they didn’t
already know about Apollo and such?

~~~
fossuser
That’s fair - at the extreme end it is probably harder to understand.

Though going back to the first comment it’s also not how people talk.

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nostrademons
I'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
When 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.

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api
I 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.

