> 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.
> 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.
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:
"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.
David Graeber’s book “debt: the first 5000 years” has some passages on this. I think they just bought everything on credit, and continued to give prices in denarius even though nobody had any. Then periodically they would settle debts in a circle, so to speak. They also had a system of debt sticks where they would snap a stick in half, each party getting one, then when the debt was settled the “stock” and the “foil” were matched together and discarded. It’s a fascinating system but basically the point of the book was that during large sections of human history coinage wasn’t the method people used to buy things, and right now we’re moving away from coinage again as most people use credit cards and so forth for purchases.
The Dark Ages were very much regional, with separate areas undergoing their own eras of 'darkness' and losing communication with the rest of the world.
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).
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.
> 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).
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?
"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]"
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.
This seems so overly simplistic, and perhaps misleading. Not just because, as evidenced in the article and is consensus among scholars, that the pejorative term, Dark Ages, itself is misleading. But There seems to be so much other blatant evidence which calls your premise into question. After all, Caeser made his name as he led a conquest with what was not fundamentally different to a warring tribe, and marched it back into Rome as a final affront to Cato and the state of Rome.
Meh, this is just the latest fad with 'scholars' ...the whole thing about how The Dark Ages weren't really dark, has been going on for about 20 years now... there are good reasons that this period is called the dark ages.
I suspect it will die a slow death, just like the 'The Civil War wasn't about slavery' schtick.
>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.
The idea that the civil war wasn't about slavery is mostly the view pushed by the North before the war. Before the war, there was a balance of slave and non-slave states, and any time they were added, that balance was preserved. Lincoln's position was that slavery was OK, but should spread into any new states, and that would have tipped the balance in congress to anti-slavery. After Lincoln was elected, the states began to succeed, and in their succession documents, they quite clearly stated that it was about slavery. The public position of the North was that they fought to prevent the South from succeeding, and they didn't want to end slavery (followed with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge). And its that attitude that allowed the South, after the fact, to promote the idea that it wasn't about slavery, and the North wasn't about to correct them.
>Lincoln's position was that slavery was OK, but should spread into any new states
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.
He's not writing confederate propaganda. Can we graduate from this idea of calling everyone you disagree with a nazi or racist? You can see here, what he wrote is consistent with my reading of history: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0032.105/--lincoln...
The states' rights narrative isn't recent, but my understanding is that it's a very selective reading of history that ignores many of the stated rationales and events leading up to and throughout the war. Yes, war is complicated and slavery wasn't the only factor, but I understand it to have been the predominant one.
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.
> Yes, war is complicated and slavery wasn't the only factor, but I understand it to have been the predominant one.
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.
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.
The Southern States were fighting to keep slavery and they would agree to a ceasefire and to join the union if the north alllowed a constitutional amendment making this clear.
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.
>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 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.
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.
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.
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).
I'd wager that if the modern globalized economy were destroyed, people everywhere would become healthier, going from single-crop intensive farming, garment working and assembly lines back to localized farming and manufacturing. The populations would dwindle, of course, but the survivors would be healthier and happier.
It was always my impression that the term “dark ages” was never about quality of life, but created in opposition to the enlightenment (partly because we don’t know much about that age, partly because of the role superstition and belief held in documented cases).
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 concept of the Dark Age was, indeed, invented in the Enlightenment, and contemporaneous rhetoric did use it to portray the Enlightenment project in a favorable light as a break from a benighted past.
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.
> 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.
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.
That's the thing with urbanization : it's great for production and capital but it's terrible for your health. The industrial revolution was very much a low point in human welfare.
Yet somehow the population still declined significantly[0]?
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
Where as at its peak the Roman Empire alone had a population of 70 million.
"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.
Read my comment. I specifically mentioned Britannia. The Franks (i.e. Merovingian), had less than 20% of the former Roman Empire in control. About 18%. The rest of Europe was extremely fragmented, and territories changing hands often (and always through war).
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
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.
Yeah, I mean it's not as if people haven't learned new things from their conquerors throughout the ages. For a modern example look at Japanese society now versus Japanese society pre-WWII. The US completely remodeled their society. While we have long since handed over control of their government to the Japanese people they continue to have strong Western influences in their buildings, fashion, and culture. It has a distinctly "Japanese" tint to it but if you visit Japan you'll observe largely the same social mores around commerce as exist in the US.
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.
I think you misread the parent: "The so-called dark ages are not much worse than other periods of human history when there is were no large government institutions." It's not a comparison to the Roman Empire.
Has anyone else here heard of the historical conspiracy theory (I don't know how else to describe it) that the european dark ages literally never happened, and the Gregorian calendar simply skipped those years entirely?
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!
You might be thinking of Fomenko's New Chronology, presented in a series of books that were popular in Russia in the 1990s. It sounds very far-fetched:
I actually thought this on my own after watching some history channel series about the first millennium AD, roman empire, whatever. I was struck at the similarity of some events that were supposedly separated by hundreds of years, almost as if it was the same story told from a different perspective.
Then I found Anatoly Fomenko, Gunnar Heinsohn, Herbert Illig, etc had investigated this.
Definitely a fascinating topic. I emerged from that rabbit hole unconvinced but definitely with far more doubt about the reliability of the mainstream chronology.
This is a very specific, narrow interpretation of the dark ages. It is not a good term to use in any circumstance, which the article illustrates well.
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.
I think you've misinterpreted their point. They were pointing out that whether or not we know the thing existed doesn't change the fact that we don't have it, and it's the fact that we don't have it that prevents it from contributing to culture today.
San Francisco disproves this thesis. It's impossible to build anything new, because of inane historical significance given to even the most decrepit cow palace or laundromat. I can only pray that San Francisco experiences a "Dark Age" where ugly old crap is replaced with shiny new towers.
Easy there, Le Corbusier[0]. That may be your preference, but others, like me, have seen enough giant glass monoliths to last a lifetime.
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.
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.
My family history, for example, have always seemed weird in that regard. Genealogy up until 11-12th century is pretty straightforward and documented, with notable rabbis and doctors, but then it jumps straight to legends and familiar family names from antiquity, without any information from Dark Ages straight out missing from any records. And other old Jewish families I know are very similar: all genealogical information just vanishes for these centuries, even if there are older reliable sources picking up the story from antiquity and beyond.
The only reason for this is that power changed from Romans to tribes in Northern Europe. If you trace genealogies, you'll see that modern families descend from tribal leaders in Northern Europe, and these ancient kings had nothing to do with the old power elites of Rome. Of course, the thing is not so simple, because with the help of Catholic Church there were some marriages arranged between the so-called barbarian rulers and noble families in Rome. So the powerful Roman families still survive in some way, but not in a direct lineage like it was before the fall of Rome.
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.
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
> It's sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry.
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.
Well, wealth during that period was determined by military power, not by an International system as we now know. Without a good army there was no way to maintain land ownership, for example. Similarly, slaves could only be maintained by the threat of armies. Therefore, all the fabulous wealth of Roman families declined to practically nothing with the end of the Roman Empire.
Sort of off-topic; what was your overall impression of Wickham's book (or the greater series that his is a part of, if you've read them)? Do you think they're generally humble overviews of their respective periods?
Wickham's book is extremely hard to read - and as a matter of fact, I've never pulled off reading it to the end, even on the 3rd try. The issue is he's extremely meticulous, and goes on ad nauseam on methodology, on what to make of the sources he's referencing, and so forth. This is all extremely interesting, mind you. But the amount of methodological asides is such that you rapidly lose track of where you were in the narrative, and it's easy to go through a chapter without remembering what the first few pages were about, or indeed anything at all.
For the others in the series I've no idea. They've been on my reading list forever.
Is it a sensible expectation though? I would fully expect the richest/powerful to bear the brunt of retaliation as a civilization crumbles. The sins of the father and all that.
Would you want to be related to Trump if the economy tanked and social services started breaking down?
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.
Do we know, is this because of a change in society, such that it became difficult or less important to track these things? or is it because of a change in the people, for example people of Roman descent mixing with local tribes, like the Franks, and the local tribes didn't have the traditions of tracking the things that would allow us to trace this back?
Tribal cultures tend to have long and complex, even tedious oral histories and initiations into them. With a knowledge keeper, shaman, druid, healer etc. Could be that the old druid power structure was in decline and so the typical transmission of information was interrupted. We know a similar thing happened later to the midwives/fertility women who were persecuted as witches with I suspect dire consequences to infant mortality rates. Originally it's hard for me to believe that people could be that stupid, but if pre-romans you had a loose confederation of naturalist-priests which kept practical knowledge shrouded in magic ritual as a means of exerting power any intergenerational disruption would be catastrophic. I think the Scandinavians have a slightly clearer picture of their descent due to the later expansion of the new religion into their territories. If reading declines I wonder if people will move back to a digitally transmitted oral history as a type of living memory which quickly becomes too vast to comprehend and may lead to similar transmission problems in the future with historians studying unimportant but vast repositories of codebases, the clay tablets of our day to piece together what went wrong with the C++ culture.
> I think the Scandinavians have a slightly clearer picture of their descent due to the later expansion of the new religion into their territories.
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. :-)
That's a good point. Unfortunately this leads to another cause of destabilization at the end of the Roman Empire: Christianity. You see, Christians precipitated the destruction of the pagan culture, which was the only culture shared by all people in Europe. Not only Roman history and culture was almost erased in that change, but also the oral traditions of nations around the Roman Empire that were also converted by the Christian Church. Of course, the ascension of Christianity as a power is also a result of the decline of Rome itself, so it is not like Christianity caused this, but it was a big factor in the cultural destruction that occurred at that time.
"Christians precipitated the destruction of the pagan culture, which was the only culture shared by all people in Europe."
? '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 am not saying the Christianity lead to the decline of the written word, education, and governance. I am saying that it contributed to the end of oral traditions that were the only form of history known by non-Romanized pagans. It also lead to the destruction of many monuments and collections of books associated to pagan traditions in Rome.
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.
There’s a funny story about history of the Slavic tribes as it relates to this. Since Slavs didn’t write, the only reason we know their migration pattern into eastern europe and the balkans is by tracking when catholic churches stopped reporting back to HQ.
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.
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.
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. "
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.
both alchemy and astrology mix metaphorical and symbolic (psyche) information with worldly, factual information; if your direction is science and factual information, not a great place to explore IMO. If your brain is activated by elaborate language, symbols and art, and factual is not the goal, why not?
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?
Early Middle Ages is common, generally dating from "the fall of the Roman Empire" (which is itself a very ambiguous term) to around 1066.
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 Roman Empire's collapse was more drawn out than that.
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.
It's even more complicated than that. The Byzantine Empire was conquered by a group of crusaders in the Fourth Crusade in 1204, with several rump states cropping up. The Empire of Nicaea reconquered Constantinople in 1261, so people usually call it the continuation of the Byzantine Empire. By the 1400s, this Byzantine Empire quite literally existed at the whim of the Ottomans, even if they only entered Constantinople itself in 1453. The third rump state of the Byzantine Empire was the Empire of Trebizond, whose last bastion in Theodoro held out against the Ottomans until 1479.
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.
The Byzantines not call themselves Byzantines; they considered themselves Roman. See a helpful answer on Reddit¹ which notes an episode in which the Byzantines imprisoned an envoy for calling their emperor that of the Greeks. It would of course be obtuse to call the Byzantine Empire the Roman Empire, but the renaming was after 1453.
During the Greek war of Independence I believe, children on a small island in the Aegean ran out to see the Greek soldiers who landed. A reporter asked them "why do you want to see them". The children replied "to see what the Hellenes(Greeks) look like". The reporter confused said "but you are Hellenes". The children laughed and said "no, we are Romanes".
This reminds me a lot of bigger companies (IE Microsoft and their "lost decade") that lose time and experience and product margin to their competitors but that get back after a while- the Romans had so much consolidated power that, if it weren't for people jockeying for power, they could've survived in a shrunken, but still pretty huge form.
> The Eastern half got renamed to the Byzantine Empire
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.
To be clear, we're the ones that renamed it the Byzantine Empire. As far as the people who lived there were concerned, they were living in the Roman Empire, and they would not have understood in the slightest why anyone would think otherwise. Constantine moved the capital, and there was no disruption in the government and administration of the empire until the Fourth Crusade, although they did lose a tremendous amount of territory in the early Muslim conquests.
Late antiquity generally refers to the period around and after the emperor Constantine when the Roman empire started to fray around the edges. It includes writers like St. Augustine who IMHO was as good as any thinker before or after. Not to mention artistic creations like the churches of Ravenna and the laws of Justinian. It's quite different from the period that set in after the invasion of the Lombards (568 AD) and more particularly the Moslem invasions of Africa (630s AD), which severely disrupted communications in the Mediterranean.
The Pirenne thesis is superficially plausible. However, McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy, which represents perhaps the most innovative approach in dealing with a paucity of evidence to date, suggests otherwise.
“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.
Thanks, McCormick looks like a really interesting source. This seems to support the notion that however you define 'Dark Ages' the darkness was in Europe, especially the north and west, not necessarily elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To be clear, the science, knowledge, and skills of humanity continued to advanced during the European dark ages. Outside of Europe there was the Islamic Golden Age and the Tang Dynasty period of China. The scholarship and science of the Islamic Golden Age actually continued the intellectual development of the Romans (which is why we still have the Elements and other Greek works), probably because the Caliphate had conquered so many important Byzantine urban centers.
Absolutely, Dark Ages is the event local to Western Europe, although IMO the rise of church power had negative impact on the Byzantine Empire too. They've kept the culture and knowledge of Ancient Greece and Eastern Roman Empire, but contributed very little to it, unlike Arab scholars who made a significant progress under the Omayyad caliphate.
Regarding the catholic Church, one could make the argument that it helped preserve and translated Antic texts in the monasteries. And there are a few point on which society regressed in the Middle Ages: human trafficking for slavery disappeared in the Middle Ages (but not slavery, since one could argue that serfdom is a form of slavery) and reappeared in the age of enlightenment; the place of women improved during that time too.
Church also played important role as a base for scholars, giving smart people the basic education and a chance to live without having to work hard to survive, so they had time to study and learn and think. However, in the beginning monasteries did preserve some knowledge, but severely filtered and censored selection. Also there wasn't that many books there as one might think. When Toledo fell back into the hands of Christians in 11th century its library had (significantly) more books than all of the West Europe together. Only after that the effort on translating books really took off, the first Universities started forming, and the shapes of new civilization started to take shape again.
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.
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.
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.
What "held science back" was the obsession with sticking to Greek dogma.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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!
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...
"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.
It’s supposed to be a Eurocentric era: it happened in Europe. You wouldn’t talk about Charles Martel or Pepin the short living in the era of the Tang Dynasty just as much as you wouldn’t talk about Tang Gaozu living in the Dark Ages.
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!
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
> the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.
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.
What exactly are you referring to? Early Christians didn’t have the political power to destroy Greek texts, and Muslims didn’t arrive on the scene until 600 years later, so they could not have saved Greek texts from Christian abuse. And even then, Constantinople was the major and often sole source for many Greek texts, particularly after the collapse precipitated by the Muslim invasions and subsequent wars; many of them spread to the West when Roman scholars began fleeing wear and revitalized interest in Greek language and learning.
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.
That's simplified history at best. Greek texts were much (much) better preserved in the Byzantine empire, and were lost to the West mostly because people forgot Greek and copies decayed.
This has been debunked many years ago and is only perpetuated by wishful and disingenuous revisionism. Ancient Greek texts were being translated in the heart of France half a century before Arabic texts reached the kingdom. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/world/europe/28iht-politi...
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.
> but "Dark Ages" isn't really taught as specific to western Europe.
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.
Yeah, the language of this website is English, which is a European language. Which means that most of the audience is European or live in a country that traces its cultural heritage to Europe. So of course the stuff on here is Eurocentric. Just like the view of history that you find in Chinese publications will be primarily Sinocentric, etc.
That's a real stretch. Not only are there a number of countries where English is sometimes/often spoken but isn't the dominant cultural heritage (India, S. Africa, Liberia just to name a few) but we're on a programming language website with a truly global audience. We should not assume a eurocentric view of history in any case.
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.
> 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).
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.
I have a pet theory about this and the development of "advanced" civilization in general, that civilizations always advance relatively rapidly due to constant conflict. It doesn't necessarily have to be military conflict, but it generally seems to have been right up to the 20th century.
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.
It's more about attempting to quantify the level of civilization than theorizing about underlying reasons, but I found Why the West Rules for Now a reaaly interesting chronicle about the West (and China) over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_West_Rules%E2%80%94For...
> 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.
Western Europe is not so special as people imagine. The Greeks and Romans managed to conquer pretty much everything that was important for them at the time, and they did it centuries earlier. The difference for Europe is that they were able to build on top of ancient knowledge passed down by Greeks and Romans. With modern technology they were able to reach everywhere in the world and create armies that were almost impossible to defeat. I think earlier empires were much more impressive for doing so much with so little knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
Yep, it's extremely mistaken (but very American) to assume that American preferences on writing style prevail in all other languages and regions. To take one example, in written German the passive voice is often considered better style, whereas in contemporary English it's the exact opposite.
I'm assuming you're using "an affect" in the sense of "an affectation" or "affected" here, in which case, no. Plainness, simplicity, straightforwardness are words that would describe "as spoken" writing. They are also literally antonyms of "affect" in this context, which would mean pretentiousness, artificiality, pomposity.
I just mean that there's nothing inherently sincere about plainness and simplicity. Some people adopt a plain and simple style disingenuously, and others write in a more flowery style out of a genuine aesthetic motive. In French, 100 years ago, the kind of style you're advocating would have been the "marked" case. That is, readers would probably have attributed disingenuous motives to someone who chose to write a history book in the style of spoken conversation.
> * That is, readers would probably have attributed disingenuous motives to someone who chose to write a history book in the style of spoken conversation.*
Okay, but they'd also probably be able to understand it. So, tradeoffs.
I want my clothes to be practical. Some people want this and want everyone else to know it, so they buy really ugly clothes just to prove that they don’t care about aesthetics.
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.
You said “Okay, but they'd also probably be able to understand it", which clearly implies that people wouldn't be able to understand the current text. Then you denied that the text was was "comprehensible" ("I find it neither [pleasing or comprehensible]").
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?
You cannot be serious. I refuse to believe that you actually read this literally and cannot recognize nuance. If you read an article about the contents of Fort Knox and the vault is described as "impenetrable", would you write the author angrily asking how they could possibly know what's inside if it's "impenetrable"?
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.
I don't think the impenetrability analogy works, because of course you don't have to be able to enter a vault to know what's in it; whereas by the nature of the thing, there isn't some kind of alternative means of figuring out what a text says that doesn't involve comprehending it.
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.
You’re really going to double down on the pedantry? Rather than simply recognize that the most literal interpretation of a word isn’t always the correct one, you argue that there’s a possible loophole. Maybe the author really thinks literally nothing in the universe could penetrate the vault. Not a missile. Not a comet. Not even the US federal government who owns the vault and ostensibly has access. Long after the heat death of the universe, there will still be the Fort Knox vault floating in the nothingness, along with everything anyone has ever described as impenetrable, because that’s how words work.
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.
>Plainness, simplicity, straightforwardness are words that would describe "as spoken" writing. They are also literally antonyms of "affect" in this context, which would mean pretentiousness, artificiality, pomposity.
"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.
>Snobs in general tend to look down on people who …
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 is just stupid to say "this style is the only acceptable style and anyone doing anything different is an asshole".
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.
>My problem with overly-flowery writing is specifically that it's about style and not substance.
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".
"You have a different opinion from me. Therefore you are a snob." Boo. You brought up style and substance, and when I answered you called me a snob. This is not what snobbery means. It is not snobbery to hold an opinion. Nor is is snobbery to think something is bad if you have reasons.
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.
And cruder people in general tend to consider pomposity what's just eloquence or refined prose.
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.
First, it is a century old translation from French. What might sound perfectly normal in French might sound silly in English if you do a literal translation. Matching the tone between languages might significantly change the message.
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.
> what boils down to shaming people for not communicating the way you want is 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.
The second half of his post is not a critique of how the point to which he responds was communicated, but of the point itself. He's saying that the message "people shouldn't write like that" is problematic and flawed, not that it itself shouldn't have been written like it was.
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.
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.
Yeah, written English corresponds to spoken English more than in a lot of other languages, where the vocabulary and grammar can vary considerably between the written and spoken word.
> It’s food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like 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.
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.
That's a very absolutist take on it. I genuinely don't find the text difficult to read or light on information. In fact I think it makes a very interesting point. You've also got to take into account that it's a translation of a French text written almost 100 years ago.
> 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?
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.
Writing that is intentionally eloquent, clever, intricate, etc. isn't inherently bad and most certainly need not adhere to the gospel of some arbitrary Venture Capitalist in silicon valley.
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.
Yes and no. It’s valid that values change and perhaps in the past this sort of dense, self-important prose was the preferred way to write. No doubt many even today would say it sounds more intelligent or educated. However, if the goal is to write in a legible, understandable, comprehensible way, then this has never been a good way to do that. (Indeed, many scholarly works are still written this way, and they are far less accessible as a result. People might feel smarter for reading them but they probably get less from them than if they were written simply.)
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.
Having read the article, I disagree. What "style" of writing? The sentences aren't excessive, the language is all fairly common (the author even takes pleasure in simplifying "scramasax", clearly inviting us to take pleasure in it as well). What's wrong with it?
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?
The first paragraph of the quoted piece is a nightmare. The first sentence of the second and third paragraph are poorly drafted as well. In the rest, the verbose recounting fits the theme and does not distract from the point.
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 first paragraph of the quoted piece is a nightmare.
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.
You're replying after the quoted paragraph was snipped from the thread, so I'm not sure if you actually read my post with the full context.
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.
Fossuser’s criticism was not directed at the article at all. It was directed at the Fulcanelli quote given by ohaideredevs.
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.
Which words seem absurd and word soup to you? "Paradoxical"? "Sagacity"? "Manifestation"? "Resolution" Perhaps because Spanish is my first language, none of those seem purple prose or difficult to me. They are very straightforward, with the possible exception of "paradoxical": most people who don't read books don't know what it means. For example "sagaz" (someone who displays sagacity) is a very common word to us; Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings is called Samsagaz in the Spanish translation.
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'd say "Sagacity" is definitely a very rare word in English, certainly less common than "paradoxical". It is often the case in English that a Romance loan is considerably more high-brow than its Germanic synonym ("wisdom" in this case).
The problem is not merely with the words chosen but they way they're stitched together. Someone else tried to rewrite it without the over-the-top flowery language and it's far more concise despite still not being particularly minimalist.
The rewrite, while simpler and arguably clearer, also seems more boring to me. It doesn't engage my imagination.
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!
That's fair and maybe it is more boring. It was, after all, an off-the-cuff rewrite by some random person on HN. It wasn't written to demonstrate the ideal way to present the argument, but as a way of showing that the original used a whole lot of words to say not that much.
If you read carefully, the rewrite leaves out a lot of the content. For example, the original text claims that "all the Gothic buildings without exception reflect a serenity and expansiveness and a nobility without equal". That claim simply isn't reproduced in the rewrite. Nor, to take another example, is that claim that certain monuments were built "in the enthusiasm of a powerful inspiration of ideal and faith".
The rewrite leaves out a lot of words. The bits you've quoted don't actually say much, which is rather the point. If you take the quoted bits literally, the first is absurd (all Gothic buildings, really?) and both are begging the question because they already assume the premise is correct. There's precisely nothing that demonstrates that Gothic buildings are reflecting the serenity of society, nor that monuments are accurately portraying an idealistic or faithful society. It's a whole lot of not content.
It's quite silly to suggest that a book could be made more "concise" by omitting what appear to be some of its central theses. (This is an extract from the first few paragraphs). It's also silly to expect the introduction of a book to provide detailed arguments in favor of those theses. If you want to evaluate the argumentative rigor of the book then you'll have to read the book, which presumably goes into more detail in subsequent pages.
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.
The only phrase which really is "too French" here is "proposes to the sagacity of its admirers". (It's not wrong, but not many English speakers still use "propose" in its sense of "set before someone as a goal".) Other than that, I see a well-balanced sentence in which every word has a purpose – but "well-balanced" versus "straight-forward" is a matter of taste.
Every time I read that sentence I can't help but picture some huckster standing on a soap box at an intersection in an impoverished neighborhood in the 30s. It's so clearly crafted to impress rather than inform that I can't help but feel a sales pitch is coming.
Well, yeah, which just goes to show that you're interpreting a work written by a French alchemist in 1929 in an American cultural context where everything is some kind of sales pitch - which is why you're getting the wrong end of the stick.
I agree that's the most cumbersome phrase. But I think the difficulty people are perceiving here is more in the grammar being difficult to parse rather than in the vocabulary being florid.
I think the issue is that the author doesn't establish a clear thesis from the very beginning. Additionally, the bizarre nature of the thesis and long run-on sentences only serve to confuse the reader as to what it is exactly that he is trying prove or disprove.
PG’s essay is good advice for modern American culture when addressing what it is explicitly framed as being for: maximizing the number of people who will read through your writing.
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.
I can’t claim to be a big fan of Fulcanelli’s, but in the same text, he talked about how philosophers would communicate with ciphers. I have absolutely no proof of this, but wouldn’t put it above Fulcanelli to embed coded messages in his writing, or to write in a way that suggests a cipher. Again, I have no proof, other than that he fancied himself the man who rediscovered alchemy in the 20th century and, since many alchemists embedded codes in their writing, I can see him playing the part.
It's a common theme - that it's all a very clever cipher - that the metals, planet alignments, etc are either code for chemical reactions or "transformations of the soul." I got into it as a teenager, but called it quits at some point, because while Fulcanelli is vague, he is at least a competent human being. That much can't be said for the authors of most "alchemical", and similar, texts.
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.
I understand where you are coming from, but this guy came off as intelligent to me DESPITE all the alarms going of. That's not to say he wasn't trolling.
What is specifically triggering your bullshit alarms? I'm intrigued. I like to think my own bs alarms are very sensitive, but in this particular case they remain silent; the prose seems only mildly flowery to me, and no assertion seems like pseudoscience or quakery.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.