Are ‘Dark Ages’ Inevitable?
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it’s much easier for them to control and build personal wealth/power when isolation is rampant. lock in—or metaphorically, when wings are clipped.
one of graeber’s three freedoms is: the freedom to move _from_ one situation _to_ another if you feel it will measurably improve your life.
we currently see example after example where someone with influence—monied or political—is actively trying to limit our abilities to change situations. and of course as you pointed out, this is heavily applying in technologies as well.
But it would be so for a lot of other things we modern humans take for granted.
We are underestimating the impact of peace on global prosperity. When there is no peace, there is no trade. If there's no trade, there is not enough energy. No energy = no power.
And modern society simply can't exist without power.
I know of a certain country that loves war against small states and interfering with regional conflicts thereby disrupting peace.
Your above comment could be rewritten replacing literacy of reading and writing with digital literacy and coding. Hackers (in the vernacular sense) may be required to "take back technology" in some future idiocracy of intellectual oppression.
The normal use of the term "dark age" refers to a time period for which historical records are not available. This makes it difficult to see in the dark age.
The term "dark ages" was coined by Petrarch with an explicitly negative connotation. It has never been a neutral term.
But the trauma isn't why a period deserves to be called a dark age. It's called a dark age because it's hard to see.
I must say, I wonder if the dark ages were dark because of all the factors you cite ... or simply because they started using a non-durable writing material and historians can't find much information because all that was written down disintegrated before it could be found.
IIRC if any ancient work was transcribed around 9-10th century there is a pretty decent chance it survived until today. The thing about ancient Roman/Greek texts is that they had to be continually copied every few generations or so. So 50-100 years of extreme social upheaval might be enough to lose a significant proportion of all literary works.
Imagine if today the oil trade stopped completely. In a matter of months, the civilization as we know it would collapse. Even with this current crisis, we are seeing a sharp decline in the standard of living.
Well the grain was as important or even more important to the ancient societies than oil is to us. Without it, the civilization would revert to tribal hunting and gathering of food.
We can argue about the role of religion for the lack of prosperity but without cultural and spiritual connection provided by organized religion, people would not band together as they were. Grain alone was not enough.
Only when science allowed for more comfort and easier transportation (railroads, ships, roads, sturdy homes, etc.), did people start putting religion aside.
I would argue that some ancient civilizations were more advanced when compared to some medieval nations.
Trade disruption was not the only reason why those civilizations fell. The lack of a reliable way to preserve knowledge was another.
Now, imagine what would happen if modern humans lost access to Internet for a couple of years. It was about several orders of magnitude worse when ancients lost written knowledge that was kept, most of the time, in a well renowned place.
One such example was the Library of Alexandria. Imagine all the secrets and ancient technologies that were lost when they burned it.
Basically it’s an anti-dark-age view that talks through specific examples or art, culture, science, etc through the period that’s typically called the dark ages (~400-1300AD)
It was recommended by the always excellent ACOUP (https://acoup.blog) who’s often linked on HN too. This was the specific post covering Rome’s decline and fall and discussing the contrasting positions in academia on bright vs dark vs just continuing ages: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...
Of course those people might be locally very successful in keeping their people illiterate, poor, miserable, and suppressed for some time. You can find examples of that on most continents. But mostly, that tends to be a highly unstable situation because people don't tolerate being miserable and poor very long and inevitably come into contact with people that can teach them how to fix that. The more miserable they are, the bigger the incentive. That's how revolutions start.
That's how the dark ages ended in Europe. There were still people that knew how to read and write. The Roman empire fizzled out and moved east but it continued to exist. Constantinople was a cultured place for many centuries before it became Istanbul. And that eventually spread west again. What is now Austria and Germany actually used to be called the holy roman empire. Which was a thing that emerged out of the ruins of former actual roman empire after a few centuries of various tribes of Europe rebelling, converting to Christianity, and regaining literacy.
And that's just Europe. The Chinese, Indians, Persians, Arabs, etc. might have a few things to say about their long and interesting history. Europe was a bit of a back water for most of that.
Obviously it’s politically expedient for the US and the countries under its hegemony to provide aid to Ukraine and I don’t imagine that will change, but I wonder whether “bomb them back to the Stone Age” will prove true.
The collective trauma and destruction of infrastructure must surely have a devastating effect on the entire population, especially the younger generations who are the ones fighting.
I can easily imagine a dark age of sorts in Ukraine.
If there is a long term decline of material/energy resources for whatever reason, we will be in a world of pain in terms of information preservation. Will we favor food or archiving? Yes, this is an extreme scenareo but one that is fun to think about.
SSD's, Hard drives, chemical photographs and high acid paper printing will end up being the Achilles heal of this stuff. It still feels like stories and stone tablets are the best we have for real multi generational - multi millennial information storage.
We also have the books of the last two centuries very well preserved, so yes some High Tech Processes are very hard to duplicate or even to archive. But these processes are hard to rebuild anyway as soon as organization and key people are lost.
Do I have a enough stuff in the local libraries to rebuild the civilization from scratch into the 80s? It's a university town, it shouldn't be a problem... and that's just one town.
The issue with this type of thinking is that it assumes some level of material surplus before those books are both physically and intellectually lost to future generations.
A societal collapse already implies a critical level of material scarcity that would make information or industrial preservation low on the totem pole. Where are you going to get the raw and human resources to maintain what remains let alone rebuild industrial processes? And what if those "human resources" don't want to rebuild?
The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart has a pretty candid take on what would happen if an academic survived a systemic collapse of the United States and tried to rebuild the Old World from what was left of the survivors. I think Stewart's vision is extremely plausible, even with the advent of the Internet and digital storage, possibly more so.
Now what?
A modern nuclear or orbital engagement could very well bring this about, although, I would assume it wouldn't last as long as the middle ages did.
Not true. A "dark age" only implies some contrasting age, not necessarily a predecessor.
The European "dark ages" were named that by people who claimed to be "the enlightenment." I would guess elsewhere it's also always a slur used by elites to distance themselves from whatever they see as lesser.
And while I don't disagree some things were lost, some other things were made. Industrial processes have their roots in the 'dark ages' experimentation in dye, and new modes of production, in the new social structures which replaced the Roman systems, in the consequences of the black death (which came later) on economics of labour and labour migration. It has aspects of "let a hundred flowers blossom" which is of course destructive of some things, but gives birth to others (I know this is a contentious analogy)
It was during this time the Rus (vikings basically) went down the rivers from northern europe to the byzantine empire.
It was during this time Visigothic culture exploded in Spain and southern France, and new laws and social constructs emerged.
Rome tended to aggregate capital into the center. When there was no center, capital distributed. A flood of enterprise emerged, because there was no longer a central taxing authority stuck on an old model. That said, a lot of it was wasted, and lost. The existence of "hoardes" implies people strategising burying value in a field and running away was a better bet than admitting it existed.
Transmigration was happening. The Silk road, spices, all kinds of things flowed. The portugese were on the brink of discovering the grand banks. Iceland was meshed with Orkey and Denmark in trade and religion.
Monks went from Ireland into the north of Britain (and beyond) and swept down, meeting Monks coming up by more orthodox routes from the south.
No, the "dark ages" terminology is from the renaissance. Petrarch is named as the possible origin. They considered classical antiquity the height of civilization and the age after the fall of Rome the dark ages.
"Psychohistory is a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe that makes general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people"
The Roman empire collapsed, but it had a few children, the link wasn't entirely broken.
Latin and Greek were still taught in school in large parts of Europe until recently.
Spain, the Netherlands, the British Empire and now the United States can be considered as a continuation of Rome.
I'm curious what claim you think Spain, Great Britain, not to mention Netherlands or the US have to be considered successors of Rome.
As a predominantly Islamic country, I would argue this precludes the Ottomans from being considered a continuation of Rome.
So we could have seen an islamic roman empire in the late stage which, according to the parent is what the ottomans apparently considered themselves to be.
Although the idea of being the "Continuation of Rome" is sometimes seen to be about dominance over the same areas as the Roman Empire more broadly it is meant as having ideological foundations that began in Rome. And I would argue it is near impossible for the Ottomans to fit this description especially as they were increasingly Islamic and presented themselves as leaders of the pan-islamic world which I think we would agree could not be genuinely thought of as a continuation of Rome.
Wikipedia tends to support this interpretation (I know it's wikipedia but still it does back up what I have read in various books about Rome and its aftermath in hearts and mind). Islam is a totalising belief system that claims supremacy and a "blank slate" to the states that have it as a political ideology. This is in direct conflict with claiming to be a successor to the Roman Empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_claim_to_Roman_success...
> Recognition of the Ottoman claim to be Roman emperors was variable, both outside and within the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were widely accepted as Romans in the Islamic world, with the sultans being recognized as Roman emperors. The majority of the Christian populace of the Ottoman Empire also recognized the sultans as their new emperors, but views differed among the cultural elite. Some saw the Ottomans as infidels, barbarians and illegitimate tyrants, others saw them as divinely ordained as punishment for the sins of the Byzantine people and others yet accepted them as the new emperors. From at least 1474 onwards, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople recognized the sultans by the title basileus. Whereas views were variable in regards to the legitimacy of the Ottomans as sovereigns, they were consistent in that the Ottoman Empire as a state was not seen as the seamless continuation of the Roman Empire, but rather its heir and successor, as the former empire had far too deep theological roots to be compatible with a foreign Muslim ruler. Thus, the former Byzantines saw the Ottoman Empire as inheriting the political legitimacy and right to universal rule of the preceding empire, but not its other theological implications. In Western Europe, where the Byzantine emperors had not been recognized as Roman either, the Ottomans were generally seen as emperors, but not Roman emperors. Views on whether the Ottoman sultans were the successors of the Byzantine emperors or a completely new set of rulers varied among westerners. The right of the Ottoman sultans to style themselves as Roman emperors and claim universal rule was challenged for centuries by the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire and the Russian Empire, both of whom claimed this dignity for themselves.
Especially in a discussion that started with the claim that
> Spain, the Netherlands, the British Empire and now the United States can be considered as a continuation of Rome
it's pretty hard to argue that the Ottomans did not have a claim that's at least as valid as those.
> they were consistent in that the Ottoman Empire as a state was not seen as the seamless continuation of the Roman Empire, but rather its heir and successor, as the former empire had far too deep theological roots to be compatible with a foreign Muslim ruler. Thus, the former Byzantines saw the Ottoman Empire as inheriting the political legitimacy and right to universal rule of the preceding empire, but not its other theological implications.
The theological implication tie heavily into the civilizational ideals that a society is based upon even to the modern day. Try and understand modern China without Confucianism for example.
The import of Islam into the Ottoman empire was a clear break between any theological/ideological basis that could tie it to Rome and therefore it is not a continuation of Rome. Whereas all the other nations mentioned retained Christianity which for thousands of years was transmitted through the church into these nations and is the oldest institution that remains of Rome.
If a nation is not majority Christian (or post-christian) in my view it is unable to claim to be a continuation of Rome in the most meaningful sense (as a transmitter of the major ideas and conventions that held sway in that society).
Christianty is a religion heavily influenced by the Roman civilization, Islam is not. The nations mentioned all still abide by the beliefs inherited from the Roman past to a much greater extent than the Islamic nations.
The Catholic Church specifically (which was the only church until the reformation) was and is a Roman institution. The groups that splintered off in the reformation were still heavily shaped by the 1000+ years of of this dominance. That is why they (and all other Christian nations) can to at least some extent claim to be descendants of Rome in a way Islamic nations cannot.
Just because there are competing claims does not make all claims equal. Islam being the dominant belief system precludes a nation from being an heir to Rome in any meaningful sense.
From here the entirety of Europe, the Americas, large swathes of Africa, and many nations in the South Pacific carry on traditions descended directly from this legacy.
There is obviously a lot of variation within these societies but I would argue that the core beliefs of the people within them are noticeably and identifiably "Christian" even if these people no longer believe in God or engage with the bible in any significant way.
A Dark Age is always, or at least has always been so far, bound to a specific region. You might as well ask if there really was a Ming Dynasty when the Aztecs never heard of any such empire. These days, the term "Dark Age" is usually used to mean the dislocation and disruption caused by the Roman Empire abandoning its western regions and retrenching in the east, around Constantinople. We can't answer how Dark that age was in that region by focusing somewhere else.
Objectively one also considers if people move, and flow of money. I can’t tell what is there that make a region a key factor in determining light or dark ages of physical sciences.
My point is that regions have dark ages, if dark ages exist at all, and trying to disprove the existence of a regional dark age by pointing out that other regions weren't in a dark age is a non sequitur. For example, I think it's widely recognized that the Islamic Golden Age occurred during at least part of the time usually regarded as Western Europe's Dark Age.
The fall of Rome in Western Europe was followed, after a lag of some centuries, by the rise of Islamic civilization and its peak in the Islamic Golden Age (c. the Umayyad and early Abbasid Caliphates). During this golden age, the Islamic world became a center of trade routes, agriculture, population, wealth, and knowledge-- a center of civilization.
But the later Abbasid Caliphate declined as well, marked by the dispersal of trade routes, agriculture, population, wealth, and knowledge. Then, some of that knowledge, wealth, and control of trade routes migrated West during its High Middle Ages, bootstrapping the Western millennium. The rest, is History.
[0] Bas van Bavel, _The Invisible Hand_
Most physical forms of history are destroyed, eroded or buried over time, but can last hundreds or thousands of years sometimes. Digital media perhaps can last the same hopefully, but its shelf life while still in use is much lower.
A book from 100 years ago can still be in good condition and perfectly legible. Early era CDs that are now 20y old are starting to fail. The average spinning disk hard drive in use lasts roughly 6 years. Our longest form of digital storage, tape, only lasts up to 30 years.
If we want our knowledge to be available to future generations and not just for our own backups, we need faster and longer lived storage. But we won't see everything ported onto it either, so history will probably have a gap of data from the 1990s to the 20XX.
I believe the bigger problem will be dealing with so much information, it will be hard to catalogue. And the problem of nuance, where future archivists won’t know whether something was AÍ generated, a shitpost, or otherwise false.
"We know less about some periods than others, but the meaning of ‘Dark Age’ is multifarious and often loaded."
These days, for some reason, some certain groups of people are trying to rename the Dark Ages and whitewash them, but I think it's pretty clear that there was a lot more learning and recording of knowledge after the Enlightenment than before.
Failure to transmit the culture's foundations to the next generation? Given the contempt for "dead white European males", arguably we're in a dark age by this standard.
Loss of technical progress (and even technical regress)? No.
Few records or little information about that age available to future ages? No. Even if you worry about loss of digital information, our garbage dumps contain insane amounts of printed matter, most of it buried quickly enough and deep enough that it's in anaerobic storage. There will be plenty for future societies to read about our current age.
Perhaps they're just a "Under new management" sign.