This is such a naive comment… look at what religious cultures used to do prior to the Rome converting or the Aztecs in the Americas — they’d literally sacrifice humans. That was the norm prior to the dark ages.
During the dark ages, they developed a wealth of technology. The challenge more had to do with the plague, famines, raids from the nords / Muslims, etc
Anyway, I recommend reading some books on the topic of you’re interested. Particularly because it’s around 1/4 - 1/3 of western history (at least the history we have decently documented).
Even if you would consider the Romans to engage in explicit ritual human sacrifice they just weren’t within five orders of magnitude of the Aztecs. We have less than ten attested instances of Roman human sacrifice ever. Human sacrifice was the irreducible core of the Aztec religion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_ancient_Rome#Hum...
> Human sacrifice in ancient Rome was rare but documented. After the Roman defeat at Cannae two Gauls and two Greeks were buried under the Forum Boarium, in a stone chamber "which had on a previous occasion [228 BC] also been polluted by human victims, a practice most repulsive to Roman feelings".[56] Livy avoids the word "sacrifice" in connection with this bloodless human life-offering; Plutarch does not. The rite was apparently repeated in 113 BC, preparatory to an invasion of Gaul. Its religious dimensions and purpose remain uncertain.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cul...
> What the Aztec priests were referring to was a cardinal Mesoamerican belief: that a great and continuing sacrifice by the gods sustains the Universe. A strong sense of indebtedness was connected with this worldview. Indeed, nextlahualli (debt-payment) was a commonly used metaphor for human sacrifice, and, as Bernardino de Sahagún reported, it was said that the victim was someone who "gave his service".
> Human sacrifice was in this sense the highest level of an entire panoply of offerings through which the Aztecs sought to repay their debt to the gods.
Wikipedia and the library are available to you too.
I grant you the Aztecs seemed far more extreme, but it was also core to the Roman belief system.
But to this day, there is no land transport connection between North and South America! Corn eventually made it from South to North America, but the potato was stuck in Peru until the Spaniards showed up on very nice boats.
China was doing great until Mongke Khan showed up.
First, are you equating "tech tree development" with pure engineering? Because that sounds like a reductionist view on history given that human advancement in thinking stretches far beyond technical / practical innovations. And that surely arbitrarly didn't stop between 500-1500AD just because the Roman Empire dissolved either.
Second, taking a eurocentristic perspective is a fallacy when it comes to history. Other parts of the world saw plenty of advances in mathematics, astronomy, navigation, trading, finance, public administration, medicine, literacy and so on. Just consider the many advances in the Islamic world or the Mongol empire. Ghengis Khan wasn't just a warlord, he was also a surprisingly progressive statesman introducing notions such as "freedom of religion" throughout his empire. The Silk Road wasn't just the odd caravan passing through the desert. It was as an intricate trading network connecting cultures and continents. Arguably, many of the ideas that was spawn the age of Enlightenment in Europe can be traced back as imported from outside.
Third, The so-called "Dark Ages" are a contested concept in modern historiography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) It's, at best, a form of value attribution. And modern historians are quite reluctant to label the period between 500-1800 as "stagnant". On the contrary.
Fourth, neither religious zealotry nor progressive thinking are absolutes. Sure, the world wasn't an utopia in the past. History is rife with examples of barbarism and persecution. But let's not pretend that the Industrial Revolution somehow did away with all that. In fact, while the world entered the so-called Information Age over the past 40 years, it also saw subsequent wars spurred by religion in the Middle East, Balkans, Africa and South-East Asia.
The scientific method itself, such as it was developed during the 18th century, is a poster child example as thinkers at the time hit the so-called Problem of induction. The great enlightened tinker David Hume provided foundational insights through his work "An Enquiry concerning human understanding" and "A Treatise of Human Nature".
Scholars have argued that David Hume has been influenced by oriental ideas when he developed his thinking regarding observations, causality, induction and self. Ideas which were paramount when it comes to defining a formal theory regarding the "scientific method" such as we understand it today.
The picture we have in our minds of the scholar monk copying the Greek classics was only really true starting with the 1200s, not earlier.
After the proclamation of Christianity as the official religion of the empire, it took only a few years/decades before Christians were on a full-blown iconoclastic campaign of destruction of so-called "pagan" religion, and all non-Christian culture in general. This meant murder and forced conversions, but also destruction of patrimony: libraries burned, temples razed, schools closed, statues smashed, etc.
But seriously, I know that you have been fed this line by various popular media, most of us were, and I don't blame you for it. Still, you should try to think about it a bit.
Like, how many of those "RESET BUTTON" cases can you name? When they happened? How come rest of the world didn't make any separate progress? How is it that those same zealots founded almost all universities in Europe etc..
On economic and technological growth Brad Delong has a new book out, Slouching Towards Utopia, and he kind of hits the idea of very, very slow technological progress before 1870 over and over again. I want to say 1% growth every 50 years on average? Doubling slow enough to be easily outpaced by population growth anyway.
The Church preserved learning. It didn’t stifle it. For most of the history of the Church it was the only set of institutions one could do intellectual work in at all.
Alas, just classic HN tech bro nonsense.
In essence, it's about not seeing the role of an economic window of opportunity for opening up a then rapidly advancing segment of the "tech tree". E.g., the idea of the locomotive only became viable with the Napoleonic wars and the (at times) exponential increase in prices of horses and/or fodder (esp. between 1808 and 1824 in the UK, these spikes are also, when we see any major projects started). With maintenance costs of horse driven machinery rising, even marginal technology like early locomotives became viable, eventually leading to a mature technology, which is economical sound even in normal times. (We me see similar with rising natural gas prices in Europe, nowadays.) So, why hadn't this been pursued earlier? Well, it must have been because of the stubbornness of the ancestors. Usually, this is accomplished by ignoring that there had been always a difference between a commonly acknowledged working model and a higher spiritual truth, which seldom clashed, only when it came to claims that endangered the hierarchy. (E.g., the idea of everyone actually believing in a flat earth originates essentially in a 19th century play about Columbus. However, the T-shaped world map was never a working model, it conveyed a spiritual truth only. Columbus' problem was really him proposing that the world was smaller than generally assumed, thus there would be no room for another continent – for which there had been some evidence – and a direct way to India. Which is, as we know, not how it works.)