Comment by stereolambda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stereolambda | Hacker News Reader

I don't where the author frequents but my experience on the internet about the Dark Ages is much opposite. People who have strong opinion about them tend to go past "nuance" straight into denialism, as if there wasn't obvious archeological, economic and literate decline in Latin Europe.

This is a problem where historians look at what they're saying more as being a part of a continuing debate, where they can say revisionist stuff to sound more original in their field, with an understanding that their interlocutors will know the basics. There are many ridiculous views in public which form when historians effectively say "for a long time we have been thinking A <the basic thing about the subject>, but on the second/third order, if you look at it sideways, in some cases B". The whole part besides B gets cut off, because people stopped actively writing A 50-70 years ago. Now A is completely boring and passee and even suspicious to younger audience. But B can serve as fodder for video essays, tik toks, blog posts for us ancient peoples etc.

I think this might also explain much of WW2 revisionism. Of course knowing that especially for this period it can be ideologically motivated in some cases, and in the extreme can lead to someone like David Irving. This also isn't new.

Also, in general if a field of scholarship advertises consensus more than sound dispassionate methodology, then of course various randoms will think of having their own "consensus" because why not.

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> People who have strong opinion about them tend to go past "nuance" straight into denialism, as if there wasn't obvious archeological, economic and literate decline in Latin Europe.

I don’t think most historians have a problem if you argue that by “dark ages” you mean that the amount of primary sources decreases significantly due to a range of societal and economic factors. However, this is not what is meant by the vast majority of people who talk about dark ages as a period of backward evolution and human regression. Most of these people go to the other side of the purely ideological coin, and proceed to show their complete lack of understanding of what the Roman Empire or the early medieval period were in Europe.

So yes, when you start talking about dark ages you paint a target on yourself. It does not reflect very well because it means that either you are accepting that uncritically, or that you know better but are trolling.

It’s not very difficult to see why that could cause a somewhat unsympathetic reaction. It’s not persecution and it is not a cabal.

"when you start talking about dark ages you paint a target on yourself"

I'm out of the loop, what is the controversy about the dark ages?

I'm assuming the WW2 controversies is the 'right' sugar coating Fascism, what is the dark ages angle?

Basically that it's an old and largely discredited notion that the centuries directly following the fall of Rome Europe was plunged into a period of regression and backsliding. It's an ambiguous term in that it can mean that the times themselves were "dark" as in grim and bad, or that the records from that time are few, and therefore visibility in the historical record is "dark" or lacking.

Dark Ages : The idea that the decadence and "Fall of the Roman Empire" led to 1000 years of European social and cultural decline and stagnation, in which Christianity and feodalism have played a large part. It goes with "people only bathed once a year etc".

You might have seen a largely shared picture showing "Scientific Progress in the West" which shows "progress" vs time. It goes dramatically up during Antiquity, dramatically down between 400 and 1500 and exponentially up afterwards. Even without the ideologies on both sides it's easy to see that defining an entire millenium (and the Renaissabce) as underpinned by a single concept is simplistic.

It's a lot of teenage atheists vs people with alt-right-like views and right-wing Catholics.

Interesting is that a similar debate was already there at the time ("back when we were pagans we didn't have troubles with Germans pillaging Spain and Tunisia", vs the positive retelling of the Fall of Rome in a Christian light by iirc Augustine).

Another factor here is the lack of sources, making a lot of things hard to understand. Wars and political instability are one reason, but also for example the fact that a lot of less-important paperwork was written onto some kind of papyrus, which generally doesn't age well outside of dry deserts, contrary to the better, but much more expensive parchment.

It seems like you've decided to demonstrate stereolambda's thesis about "straight up denialism". The guy who invented the term "Dark Ages" was Petrarch, and he certainly didn't mean that the amount of primary sources had decreased significantly. He didn't need primary sources to learn about the Dark Ages; he could just look around¹.

The standard rebuttal to your sort of denialism is https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/ and its followup https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/17/highlights-from-the-co.... Its central thesis:

> The period from about 500 to about 1000 in Christian Western Europe was marked by profound economic and intellectual decline and stagnation relative to the periods that came before and after it. This is incompatible with the “no such thing as the Dark Ages” claim except by a bunch of tortured logic, isolated demands for rigor, and historical ignorance.

As persuasively argued in those essays, this is supported by mainstream historical understanding of the late Western Roman Empire and the early medieval period in Europe; it is nearly universally agreed among historians that, in Christian Western Europe, this period (0500–01000 CE) showed long-lasting declines in wealth, population, urbanization, large-scale infrastructure, technical innovation, and literature, not just surviving primary sources. (The author has inserted notes in them to link to corrections where he turns out to have been mistaken.)

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¹ Nowadays, though, the term "Dark Ages" is commonly defined to end several centuries before Petrarch.

> It seems like you've decided to demonstrate stereolambda's thesis about "straight up denialism".

I did not realise I was denying anything. Could you explain what? What I wrote is that reality is more nuanced than "everything was absolutely terrible", which is the sort of things that people during the Renaissance wrote to feel better about themselves.

> The guy who invented the term "Dark Ages" was Petrarch, and he certainly didn't mean that the amount of primary sources had decreased significantly. He didn't need primary sources to learn about the Dark Ages; he could just look around¹.

The good thing is that our understanding of things improved quite a lot since Petrarch, and he hasn’t been cutting edge for a few centuries now.

Anyway, it is natural that a lack of things like written records and monumental architecture would lead someone to conclude that the most likely explanation was systematic decline. Since then we’ve had primary sources from elsewhere, and archaeology techniques that had no equivalent back then.

> The standard rebuttal to your sort of denialism is […]

I did not say that there was "no such thing as the Dark Ages", just that the lack of primary source does not imply general decline (and certainly not intellectual). Though yes, otherwise I am in pretty much complete disagreement with this paragraph. This sort of opinion is absolutely not representative of our current understanding of the period.

If you are interested in good vulgarisation, the series that starts here is far more convincing: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f... . There certainly was decline in different areas, but the aspects and consequences depend on the location and was not generalised. And how we got there was much more complex than barbarian invasions.

The excellent series you link by Devereaux about the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire, which I've read before, agrees in great detail with the SSC post, except about the etymology of the nomenclature "Dark Ages". I agree that it's a good popularization ("vulgarization" unfortunately has the wrong meaning in current English) of the history, and it is a good demonstration that a popularization if history can still be history. The SSC post is much shorter, so if someone hasn't read either, they should read the SSC post first.

Unfortunately, by being "pretty much in complete disagreement" with my summary, you're also in complete disagreement with Devereaux's series.

For the record, I have no idea where you got 'persecution' or 'cabal' from. I do not tend to engage in flamewars on that topic, just observing the discourse.

What I am talking here about is this. Most historians are aware of ground level facts like: decline of urbanism, trade, loss of a bunch of literature, political chaos, and Eastern Roman and Arabic world overtaking the former Latin part of the Empire that used to be at least nominally dominating. That's why I precisely indicated my geographic scope by the way. 'Western Europe' does not equal 'humans' by any means.

And on top of that you can have some kind of correction and nuance, where you say well, actually it wasn't completely catastrophic, some institutions survived, there were complex social factors and transitions, there used to be oversimplified narratives by Humanists and Enlightenment and so on. Then you have people who only get the correction and nuance part, because this is more recent and in some ways more interesting, and you get to "destroy" some people on the internet with your fresh facts and logic.

But really all that correction part does not erase the basic fact of the matter that this was a decline by most metrics that we can check. Less sources doesn't mean something like 'dog ate them', it was just a society less capable of creating sources, which says something by itself. And as I mentioned, we still have archeology.

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