Are we headed towards a new dark ages?

[hrodbert696]

Yes, they sacked the city of Rome in 410AD, which was no longer the proper capital of the Western Empire, it was a symbol of the Empire. It had stood untouched for almost 1000 years, which is quite an accomplishment, but its sacking was a symptom of the Empire's decline and a huge symbolic blow.

There are some writers - remarkably few, actually - who lament the sack of 410. Augustine, Jerome, one other. It's actually surprisingly muted. From the few that there are, we can surmise that the event was a shock, and Augustine wrote the City of God to refute the remaining pagans around who blamed it on the new religion. But as a "symbolic blow" - by whom, against whom? As I said - the soldiers who did it were in Roman service. Their leader, Alaric, styled himself "King of the Visigoths," but the office he wanted was magister militum of the western empire. Holding Rome hostage was a ploy to try and get the government to give it to him, and it failed. Sacking the city didn't accomplish anything, and Alaric's successor rapidly negotiated a new settlement to reconcile his federates with the empire again.

These as well, but other divisions of labor that created tension among the different classes of society. The familiar outcry of proper Roman commoners about cheap labor from outside sources, essentially outsourcing of their military, and any land left to be given as a reward was either worthless or required months of travel just to reach. The rich living in lazy opulence bolstered by cheap labor while the rest scrabble for scraps from their table is something I think modern Americans can identify with.

What outcry from proper Roman commoners? I have no idea what this is supposed to refer to. The nearest thing I can think of are the conditions of the 1st century BC which led to the Republic's civil wars and ultimately the rise of the Caesars. That's 500 years before anything I was talking about, and the empire was plenty strong then and for a long time after.

There's a tendency in some of the older scholarship (like Gibbon's Decline and Fall), and in irresponsible use of it by popular modern writers, to grab a phrase or gripe from a solitary Roman writer and extrapolate it to being the universal view of millions of people, regardless of context or other sources or even the totality of what the same writer has to say - particularly when that gripe lines up conveniently with a modern political anxiety. If you want an example, I can talk about cutting off thumbs...

I do have my personal theories that the introduction of Christianity weakened the culture that made Rome what it was. My opinion is that it blunted the bloodthristy nature of a civilization that believed so wholeheartedly in its own superiority that no actions were too inhumane. If the ends were the greatness of Rome, the means were justified. Again, that's just my little personal theory.

It was Gibbons' theory too. All the smart young men became monks and focused their attention on pursuing heaven and theological quibbles rather than the practical business of law and military life. If it matched the facts, it would be a persuasive theory. But it doesn't.

You can call a donkey a mighty steed, but that doesn't make it so. It is analogous to what we did in Iraq. We bought off insurgence to stop fighting, which only worked until we stopped paying. Its a draining policy that fails the moment the money runs out, which we have seen first hand. It doesn't buy friends, it stalls enemies that will suck you dry then kill you when you are on your knees.

And here we have Roman history being interpreted through the filter of modern politics. Again, if it matched what actually happened to the Roman Empire, it might work... but it doesn't.

That's BS and here's why: We are discussing a possible "new Dark Age" which came about in Europe directly because of the crumbing of the Western Roman Empire, so the comparisons are unavoidable. Since Rome had such a massive influence on European history, as you've said, the greatness of that Empire is always going to be a benchmark by which others judge themselves. America has long been influenced by Greco-Roman culture as is evidenced by our preference for Democracy, which was spurred by Enlightenment thinkers that had "rediscovered" Greco-Roman philosophy, over the Monarchical Feudalism that was still common in Europe at the time of our founding. If the style of the buildings in our Capital aren't an indicator that we've always seen ourselves as some sort of descendant of the Roman Empire, I don't know what does.

What you're calling BS is exactly what I said - ever since Rome, everybody else has always liked to imagine themselves in Rome's image. And yes, that includes stately architecture that imitates classical architecture, Latin mottoes for states and government agencies, yadda yadda yadda. Nothing uniquely American about that, either. The Habsburgs, Napoleon, the British Empire, Tsarist Russia (Tsar means "Caesar," after all), Charlemagne... there's a long tradition in western political ideology of people imagining that their state somehow revives the Roman Empire. Rome casts a very long shadow. But that's propaganda. Tsarist Russia was NOT based on the same structure the Roman Empire was, nor did it face the same challenges. Neither did Napoleonic France. Neither did the British Empire, however much Edward Gibbon tried to make it look that way. Nor does the US. What was "democratic" about the Roman Empire? The analogies do not hold - except in propaganda.

 

[hrodbert696]

In the U.S. we have had wave after wave of immigrants. Each new group may struggle for a while to find acceptance by previous immigrants and their descendants.
What is different today is that some immigrants and their descendants have an option to a align themselves with radical cultural groups who seem determined to bring down western civilization. As hrodbert pointed out those groups didn't exist when their parent and/or grandparents immigrated to the U.S.
I have never heard of this happening in the past. Maybe some of the historians here can shed some light on this.

That's a great point. The only similar phenomenon I can think of are the anarchists who popped up in immigrant communities around the turn of the 20th century. But this is a much greater scale. Ethnically-based organized crime (Italian/Irish/Jewish/whateverish Mob) and street gangs (Jets vs. Sharks) might also reflect something similar. I do think it's related to modern telecommunications, for the reasons I've said - somebody that might once have been an isolated alienated individual, or joined a very local antisocial criminal group, now can plug into a global network of fringe persons.

 

[Gaolee]

I don't share your confidence in progress toward a more peaceful society. I wish I could. But if you take a look at the kind of people who leave the west to go sign up with al-Qaeda or ISIS, what's striking is that they AREN'T a bunch of old-fashioned conservatives who believe in old-fashioned ideals. They are a new generation of young people, second- and third-generation immigrants to western countries, who have had plenty of exposure to western peace and prosperity. It was their parents and grandparents who thought that leaving the Middle East and seeking a new life in the West was a good idea. But the new generation are faced with troubling questions about identity and acceptance (often denied them), so they activate alternative identities that had, in a sense, lain dormant, and reinvent them to match their anxieties in the world they find themselves in - which for some, means radicalization. They invent a kind of Islam which would have horrified their grandparents.

Now, one can say, "those are Muslims, they're immigrants, they're the exception," and in a sense that's true. But I think they reveal something important; identity-formation, and the possibility for conflict that it entails, does not move in predictable linear directions, from the particular to the universal or from the violent to the peaceful. People have multiple overlapping and competing identities and potential identities (regional, ethnic, racial, religious, class, kinship, ideological, political, etc.), and at any given time some are more dominant and foregrounded, others more background or dormant, and of course what each means and how it applies can be reinterpreted and reconstructed by the individual to meet a need they feel. This is a constantly shifting field of identities and communities as society changes. What that means is that, for the present mainstream young westerner, the kinds of identities and loyalties that preoccupied their grandparents may indeed be subsiding into the background - nationalism, race, institutional religion. But they don't disappear; they go into a cultural archive which could potentially be tapped and activated again in the future if people feel needs that they can answer. Meanwhile new identities and loyalties form, and there's no reason to assume that they will always trend toward the more universal or more peaceful structures.

Which actually goes back to the first post I made on this thread: in the west, at least, it seems to me like we have a very troubling trend towards increased, not decreased, tribalization. It's not necessarily ethnic or racial. But we have a virtual world of micro-communities that spin themselves into ever more extreme positions, and an evident disintegration of a mainstream middle ground that used to hold our various "tribes" together in a shared public discourse.

Things go awry. They go awry for a number of reasons, and what's happening with the ISIS recruits is that their integration into society is incomplete and has gone haywire, for any number of reasons. The fact that they are Muslim and immigrants is somewhat beside the point, since the Weathermen bombers in the 1960s were natural born American citizens, most of whom were middle class or more prosperous. Seattle has a healthy east African population, and they are integrating into society just fine for the most part. Interestingly enough, there are both Somali and Ethiopian populations, and they seem to get along just fine here, while they don't get along so well in the old country. My son went to high school with quite a few kids whose parents immigrated from east Africa, and they acted just like any other batch of American teen-agers. Some go off the rails. That's always going to happen. The point I'm making is that those who go off rails will eventually have a smaller and smaller impact on society. The outsized impact that "Jihad John," the blood thirsty British recruit, had seems to have dissipated somewhat now that his identity has been revealed and it turns out he was some geeky Londoner who grew up in a middle class family. He's hardly the action hero he saw himself as, and the internet, along with criminal investigations, has exposed him as a run of the mill murderer, not some religious hero.

Having lived through some of the Civil Rights era and all of the late '60s and early '70s, I can remember bombings, kidnappings, divisive politics, riots, assassinations, and all kinds of other stuff that is not happening now. Sure, we are politically polarized, but that's always been true. It seems worse now, because the rhetoric is overheated, and I have my theories about that. However, I still see things as evolving slowly to a better world. I'm not enough of a pathological optimist to think that there won't ever be setbacks, but overall, things will be better, more people will live with relative security, safety, and some modicum of prosperity, and ancient animosities will lose their appeal.

Something we should never forget is that Americans were involved in quite a few bloody internal struggles over time. The Pinkerton Riots, the Haymarket Riots, and all kinds of other instances of civil unrest were part of the early labor movement and capital's backlash against it. I'm not bringing this up to take sides, but rather to point out that nobody sees that as a good idea any more. Jim Crow through the Civil Rights era was punctuated by brutality and violence. It was sadly necessary for our culture to get where it is now. And, it isn't likely to happen again, because we can all see that it is counterproductive.

Your point about the anarchists is a good one. They were terrifying to most of the population a century ago. There weren't all that many of them, just as there really aren't that many ISIS and other recruits now. Some things don't change, unfortunately, and one of those things is that some individuals just flat don't do well and decide to take it out on society in violent and hateful ways.

 

[Bocete]

This thread is fascinating. Thanks all for contributing. Carry on

 

[slobake]

This thread is fascinating. Thanks all for contributing. Carry on

I agree.

 

[Gravedigger Dav]

The Western Roman Empire was already in a serious state of decay when it was first sacked in 410AD by the Visigoths, which is what allowed it to happen. Commentators on modern culture like Matt Taibbi stated in his book The Great Derangement that some of the similarities between the decaying Western Roman Empire and modern America are frightening. Roman culture had become lazy under its own affluence, relying on large numbers of foreigner from lands they hand conquered to do the work for them, and had become obsessed with idle or superstitious pursuits . It was already a shadow of its former self when those it had kept an uneasy peace with, mostly through bribes, decided they had enough. Remember what Ariel Durant said "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

As I've said, all civilizations ebb, but how that comes about is up to the civilization to manage, if it is smart enough to realize what its current position is. The US is the lynch pin of the modern world order, and if we were to tumble suddenly in some catastrophic way, my personal feeling is that it would usher in a new Dark Age reorganization. That can be avoided through many different paths available, but any of them require us to be a lot smarter than we are now.

Exactly, I wish I had said it that well.

 

[socialleper]

In the U.S. we have had wave after wave of immigrants. Each new group may struggle for a while to find acceptance by previous immigrants and their descendants.
What is different today is that some immigrants and their descendants have an option to a align themselves with radical cultural groups who seem determined to bring down western civilization. As hrodbert pointed out those groups didn't exist when their parent and/or grandparents immigrated to the U.S.
I have never heard of this happening in the past. Maybe some of the historians here can shed some light on this.

When you say "today" do you mean like 20th century until now, or in the last few decades?

 

[nashvillebill]

When I was a kid my uncle gave me dozens of classic books, including The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. While I tried to read and comprehend them, of course some of them were way too boring for an early teenager....we gave them away when we moved across country, I wish I had them now.

 

[slobake]

Things go awry. They go awry for a number of reasons, and what's happening with the ISIS recruits is that their integration into society is incomplete and has gone haywire, for any number of reasons. The fact that they are Muslim and immigrants is somewhat beside the point, since the Weathermen bombers in the 1960s were natural born American citizens, most of whom were middle class or more prosperous. Seattle has a healthy east African population, and they are integrating into society just fine for the most part. Interestingly enough, there are both Somali and Ethiopian populations, and they seem to get along just fine here, while they don't get along so well in the old country. My son went to high school with quite a few kids whose parents immigrated from east Africa, and they acted just like any other batch of American teen-agers. Some go off the rails. That's always going to happen. The point I'm making is that those who go off rails will eventually have a smaller and smaller impact on society. The outsized impact that "Jihad John," the blood thirsty British recruit, had seems to have dissipated somewhat now that his identity has been revealed and it turns out he was some geeky Londoner who grew up in a middle class family. He's hardly the action hero he saw himself as, and the internet, along with criminal investigations, has exposed him as a run of the mill murderer, not some religious hero.

Having lived through some of the Civil Rights era and all of the late '60s and early '70s, I can remember bombings, kidnappings, divisive politics, riots, assassinations, and all kinds of other stuff that is not happening now. Sure, we are politically polarized, but that's always been true. It seems worse now, because the rhetoric is overheated, and I have my theories about that. However, I still see things as evolving slowly to a better world. I'm not enough of a pathological optimist to think that there won't ever be setbacks, but overall, things will be better, more people will live with relative security, safety, and some modicum of prosperity, and ancient animosities will lose their appeal.

Something we should never forget is that Americans were involved in quite a few bloody internal struggles over time. The Pinkerton Riots, the Haymarket Riots, and all kinds of other instances of civil unrest were part of the early labor movement and capital's backlash against it. I'm not bringing this up to take sides, but rather to point out that nobody sees that as a good idea any more. Jim Crow through the Civil Rights era was punctuated by brutality and violence. It was sadly necessary for our culture to get where it is now. And, it isn't likely to happen again, because we can all see that it is

We also survived a brutal civil war in the U.S. I doesn't get much more polarized than that.

 

[aborgman]

But most moral systems in most societies through history don't automatically assume violence in itself is automatically a bad thing that only a morally delinquent person would turn to, the way the modern west does: only improper, unauthorized, or dishonorable violence. As long as it's pursued by certain kinds of people within the rules of the game society allows, it's accepted and even expected.

Much as not all opinions are equally valid, not all moral systems are equally valid or even valid.

 

[hrodbert696]

Much as not all opinions are equally valid, not all moral systems are equally valid or even valid.

I didn't say that they were. I was talking about using "sociopath" to describe someone who pursued a violent strategy to pursue their interests. If the person's culture approves of certain uses of violence, then they needn't be sociopathic to do so. Doesn't mean it's right in a larger moral scheme, just not sociopathic (nor psychopathic).

There's a long tradition of using the language of insanity to describe what one doesn't approve. It denies legitimacy to the opponent - what they do makes no sense, it's insane. It relieves the person using the term of the burden of understanding or admitting the reason for why the opponent acts as they do.

Something I always insist on to my students - when confronted by ideas and actions in history that seem bizarre or horrific, never hide behind the insanity label (nor other negative labels like "ignorance," etc.). Assume that the person is just as smart, just as sane, and just as moral as you are, by their own lights, and analyze what they DO think and ARE trying to achieve, not just that they don't think or act as you would.

 

[12bass]

Seems to me that the Dark Ages were characterized by the suppression of free inquiry, often with brutal consequences for those who dared to question authority and/or dogma. From the list in the OP, I do not see the same situation today, although there are some groups which appear to want to revisit that modus operandi. While authoritarianism still plays a role in the Western World, no one organization holds the same degree of power and control as existed in the Dark Ages. Frankly, I do not see any way to discuss this issue properly without bringing up religion, so there is not much else I can say....

 

[Gravedigger Dav]

Seems to me that the Dark Ages were characterized by the suppression of free inquiry, often with brutal consequences for those who dared to question authority and/or dogma. From the list in the OP, I do not see the same situation today, although there are some groups which appear to want to revisit that modus operandi. While authoritarianism still plays a role in the Western World, no one organization holds the same degree of power and control as existed in the Dark Ages. Frankly, I do not see any way to discuss this issue properly without bringing up religion, so there is not much else I can say....

There is a movement attempting to acquire the kind of power of which you speak, but as you said, without mentioning religion, we can't go there, so...

 

[Immigrant]

I sometimes feel empowered after attempting a movement.


Sorry. This thread got really smart since yesterday and needed to be dumbed down a little.

You guys are smart!

 

[hrodbert696]

Seems to me that the Dark Ages were characterized by the suppression of free inquiry, often with brutal consequences for those who dared to question authority and/or dogma. From the list in the OP, I do not see the same situation today, although there are some groups which appear to want to revisit that modus operandi. While authoritarianism still plays a role in the Western World, no one organization holds the same degree of power and control as existed in the Dark Ages. Frankly, I do not see any way to discuss this issue properly without bringing up religion, so there is not much else I can say....

Good lord. No no no.

First of all, for the umpteenth time, no professional historian with a doctorate specializing in the early Middle Ages (ahem) calls it "the Dark Ages" any more. That's a phrase that was coined by 18th century philosophes to condemn what they didn't like about their own society (blame the bad stuff on the "dark ages") and which gets used by book publishers and the so-called "history channel" to make money because it sounds so dramatic. Whenever you see it used, a big neon sign should go up saying "THIS PERSON HAS NO IDEA WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT."

As far as "free inquiry" goes: There was a decline in literacy and education following the breakup of the Roman Empire in its former western provinces. No doubt about that, though recent research would indicate it wasn't as catastrophic a decline as used to be made out. There was no more civilian bureaucracy, therefore a lot fewer careers requiring literacy, therefore less money for teachers and schools. How many modern college students would be there if there were no jobs waiting for them? Education continued through private tutoring in aristocratic families, who continued writing poetry and sending letters to each other, and in the Christian Church, that needed literate priests and bishops. Nobody suppressed anything, it's just that those were the "last men standing," so to speak.

It's also important, by the way, to make sure you're comparing apples to apples. How many philosophers and poets of the Roman Empire had come from Britain? None. How many from Gaul, or Spain? Maybe a couple. The intellectual powerhouses of the Roman Empire had been mostly in the East - Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor - and to a lesser extent Italy and North Africa: and those areas continued to be.

With Charlemagne's empire (768-814 and after under his heirs) you see renewed investment in basic education, opening new church schools (but also open to some non-churchmen), and the copying of books, just to make them available. With the transition from the early Middle Ages (500-1000) to the high Middle Ages (1000-1300) these schools snowball into a new intellectual/educational culture called Scholasticism. There was a new prosperity after 1000 and new opportunities in church and secular administrations for literate clerks, lawyers, and judges, so the economic incentive came back for education. Also, new texts started to become available in Latin translations of Greek classics from Arabic via Spain (long story). Philosophy, medicine, science, math, all were stimulated by the "new" ideas becoming available.

Carolingian education had been pretty basic; learn the classics and get your grammar right. Scholastics, though, realized this wasn't enough. The "authorities," Christian, Roman and Greek, didn't all agree with each other. So they had to analyze the differences and choose which to follow, or find solutions of their own. So even as they had deep reverence for ancient writers, they also developed an awareness that the ancients could be wrong, and that they could find creative new ideas to advance. As one scholastic put it, "We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants: we are lesser than they, but we see further than they did."

So far from the comic-book caricature of the Middle Ages as "dark ages" with no free inquiry and no creative thinking, the opposite was true. Education was prized, there was tremendous hunger for new books and new learning, and the whole educational system for scholastics was geared towards critical questioning of authorities and logical analysis.

Now, it is true, the high Middle Ages also saw the consolidation of a concept of "Christian society" and ever-increasing claims to authority by popes. Accusations of heresy had been rare in the early Middle Ages, and being convicted of it might mean being stripped of a church office and sent to do penance in a monastery. In the high Middle Ages, things got hairier. R.I. Moore writes of the rise of a "persecuting society." It wasn't uniquely a church thing. In both the new secular and church administrations, an ambitious man on the make could make his reputation as the guy who uncovered a heresy, much as a modern prosecutor can build a career in politics on a high-profile criminal case. Inquisitions were set up as ad hoc church courts to investigate and prosecute in areas where heresies had become widespread, and secular authorities cooperated by allowing them to operate and by executing convicted ringleaders by burning at the stake. Note that the secular authorities had to cooperate for an inquisition to happen: there never was an inquisition in England, nor, for instance, in Scandinavia, because the rulers were not interested in backing them there.

What's remarkable is how few heresy trials were brought against intellectuals for their ideas. There were a handful of burnings of a circle of intellectuals in the 11th century, Peter Abelard was made to recant some of his books in the 12th - very little else till Wycliffe and Hus in the late 14th/early 15th centuries. People were not being persecuted for "free inquiry." Rather, most inquisition victims were middle-class types who adhered to alternative religious movements that challenged church authorities. In fact, there was a very fine line between saints and heretics. Francis of Assissi bore a strong resemblance to Peter Waldes - but Francis got along with his bishop and Peter didn't. Meanwhile in the universities, different intellectuals argued very different ideas on all kinds of topics without getting dragged before the inquisition. You could pursue whatever theory you wanted in terms of astronomy or mathematics or medicine. It only got a little touchy around theology and philosophy, and even then you'd have huge debates between, say, Realists and Nominalists without anyone going to the stake for it.

Sorry for going to some length here, but this is important to me. An entire era of human history has been lampooned and demonized as "dark ages" by modern people who cannot be bothered to actually study it or understand its people. And that demonization and failure of understanding is then used ideologically to support a myth of our present that doesn't hold water.

 

[aborgman]

I didn't say that they were. I was talking about using "sociopath" to describe someone who pursued a violent strategy to pursue their interests. If the person's culture approves of certain uses of violence, then they needn't be sociopathic to do so. Doesn't mean it's right in a larger moral scheme, just not sociopathic (nor psychopathic).

By definition if society approves of it, it isn't sociopathic - so that is a bit of a tautology. That doesn't mean it isn't fundamentally morally ill, or that the societies beliefs themselves aren't.

There's a long tradition of using the language of insanity to describe what one doesn't approve. It denies legitimacy to the opponent - what they do makes no sense, it's insane. It relieves the person using the term of the burden of understanding or admitting the reason for why the opponent acts as they do.

Sometimes the opponent just has no legitimacy.

Something I always insist on to my students - when confronted by ideas and actions in history that seem bizarre or horrific, never hide behind the insanity label (nor other negative labels like "ignorance," etc.). Assume that the person is just as smart, just as sane, and just as moral as you are, by their own lights, and analyze what they DO think and ARE trying to achieve, not just that they don't think or act as you would.

While I agree that it can be a crutch for avoiding looking at true motivations - many motivations are mentally ill, driven by ignorance, or morally repugnant. The ends don't justify the means.

 

[Gaolee]

Another aspect of it is that Greek and some Roman literature, philosophy, science, and culture came to us by way of libraries in the Middle East. The Almoravids who ruled Spain were relatively enlightened and tolerant, compared to the Inquisitors who followed them. Arab intellectuals and European intellectuals communicated with each other. Both societies benefited from the communication and exchange of ideas and information. I don't think they were too willing to admit it much, though.

Technology advanced dramatically in the Middle Ages as well. An average Roman would have been completely astonished by the technology that was in routine use by 1000 AD. The plague took out a whole lot of people, and took a lot of knowledge with it. That may be part of where the idea of the dark ages came from. The plague was around for several centuries, with outbreaks here and there. That's got to put a damper on social progress.

My use of the word sociopath probably could use some clarification. Ancient Mezo-American civilizations practiced human sacrifice, including sacrificing children to bring life-giving rains. We would consider that utterly barbaric, but in their minds, it was essential to their ongoing existence. Those people weren't barbaric or sociopaths within their system of thought and the world they lived in. The current day is different. There is better information, better understanding of natural phenomena, and ways to distribute goods and resources are available and well understood. We know that we don't have to sacrifice children. Most people in the Middle East know that beheading people randomly is a brutal practice. And, being a sociopath does not make a person violent. Just immune to concerns about cause and effect when it comes to other people. You could also characterize it as ego, selfishness, or anything else you want to call it. My opinion, and the reason I'm as optimistic as I am, is that over time, the urge to take great power and grind on other people for your own benefit, whatever benefit you think you are gaining, will be channeled into less violent and less harmful avenues. Mostly. There will always be people who don't fit in and take it out on society. We have those people - Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, people like that. They are more and more isolated, and as the world becomes an easier place for the average person to live, those people will get less and less traction. There are large parts of the globe that were once violent, insecure places. They are now relatively safe, calm places that have crime problems, but that also are working on those problems.

 

[hrodbert696]

Another aspect of it is that Greek and some Roman literature, philosophy, science, and culture came to us by way of libraries in the Middle East. The Almoravids who ruled Spain were relatively enlightened and tolerant, compared to the Inquisitors who followed them. Arab intellectuals and European intellectuals communicated with each other. Both societies benefited from the communication and exchange of ideas and information. I don't think they were too willing to admit it much, though.

Europeans benefited from Arab learning way more than Arabs benefited from European, in the medieval era. They generally admitted it: "Averroes" (garbled Latin form of Ibn Rushd) and "Avicenna" (garbled "Ibn Sina") were names to conjure with in medieval universities, though there were controversies over them.

Technology advanced dramatically in the Middle Ages as well. An average Roman would have been completely astonished by the technology that was in routine use by 1000 AD. The plague took out a whole lot of people, and took a lot of knowledge with it. That may be part of where the idea of the dark ages came from. The plague was around for several centuries, with outbreaks here and there. That's got to put a damper on social progress.

Agree on the first part, though I'd set the technology at 1300 rather than 1000. Improved plows, irrigation, construction methods (except for domes), steel smelting, wire making, wind- and watermills, etc. I don't think the plague cost much of a knowledge base, though. There was very little of it between 600 and 1340. The Black Death hit Europe starting in 1347, and while it ran for five years, in any given location it only took two or three months to burn through the population. And it didn't destroy books. I can't think of any technologies that disappeared as a result. It recurred once a generation or so, but with a lower fatality rate each time, down to the 17th century.

My use of the word sociopath probably could use some clarification. Ancient Mezo-American civilizations practiced human sacrifice, including sacrificing children to bring life-giving rains. We would consider that utterly barbaric, but in their minds, it was essential to their ongoing existence. Those people weren't barbaric or sociopaths within their system of thought and the world they lived in. The current day is different. There is better information, better understanding of natural phenomena, and ways to distribute goods and resources are available and well understood. We know that we don't have to sacrifice children. Most people in the Middle East know that beheading people randomly is a brutal practice. And, being a sociopath does not make a person violent. Just immune to concerns about cause and effect when it comes to other people. You could also characterize it as ego, selfishness, or anything else you want to call it. My opinion, and the reason I'm as optimistic as I am, is that over time, the urge to take great power and grind on other people for your own benefit, whatever benefit you think you are gaining, will be channeled into less violent and less harmful avenues. Mostly. There will always be people who don't fit in and take it out on society. We have those people - Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, people like that. They are more and more isolated, and as the world becomes an easier place for the average person to live, those people will get less and less traction. There are large parts of the globe that were once violent, insecure places. They are now relatively safe, calm places that have crime problems, but that also are working on those problems.

Agreed.

 

[Gaolee]

Actually, there was one technology that was lost, or at least set back by the plague. The wooden stave churches in Scandinavia were nearly all built before the plague hit. The builders who understood the exterior envelopes of those churches must have been decimated, since there aren't many later versions, if any. I don't know of any built after about 1300 that still exist. The earliest that still exist are about a thousand years old now. Not bad for wood structures. The technology went on in modified form as a type of barn siding that placed wood over a stone structure. This Medieval technology is the precursor of our curtain walls and the kinds of exterior waterproofing systems we now use on apartment buildings and similar structures. I don't know if there were other technologies that were set back. Not all knowledge was written down. The loss of people set back certain kinds of practical knowledge. What was in books stayed there, fortunately.

It has been a while since I read a whole lot of history, so I'm not as up on specifics as you clearly are. It's a fascinating subject, and the progress of human society makes for great food for thought. As an offshoot of this whole discussion, I have thought about the recurring patterns that appear at all levels, and the organization of society seems to be crystallizing along the lines of early multi-cellular organisms. It will be different, of course, because humans aren't amoebas, but the underlying pattern is there to observe. Applying patterns can be pretty tricky, as you have pointed out in regard to later civilizations trying to take on the mantle of the Roman Empire and then trying to predict their own demise based on perceived Roman failings.

 

[12bass]

Perhaps the OP itself was malformed....

Do we currently live in an era where there are Crusades, Inquisitions, etc...? Do these things seem likely to reappear in the Western World in the near future? If not, then it would seem as if we are not returning to the "Dark Ages" whether the term is a misnomer or not.