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The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

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Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#161

Post by fallingfrog »

acqq wrote: post #96
smacktoward wrote: post #43

> 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…

> 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: http://www.numsoc.net/darkages.html "Hi…

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.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#162

Post by coliveira »

choeger wrote: post #63

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 produ…

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.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#163

Post by gonehome »

mikeash wrote: post #138
gonehome wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

I guess I don’t agree.

I’d be willing to bet that simpler is generally easier to understand than complex. Maybe some exceptions exist, but I’d suspect they’d be outliers.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#164

Post by ghaff »

ardit33 wrote: post #156
coliveira wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imme…

Not correct. They were much worse indeed. 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…

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.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#165

Post by Balgair »

acqq wrote: post #150
Balgair wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

> 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 somethi…

Sorry, coinage isn't an area of expertise for me. I'd just be googling for any info.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#166

Post by dpark »

foldr wrote: post #140
dpark wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741886 >60% reduction in content for a single off-the-cuff rewrite implies the original work needs an aggressive editor with an aggressive amou…

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.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#167

Post by llukas »

ardit33 wrote: post #156
coliveira wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imme…

Not correct. They were much worse indeed. 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…

> This all slowly degraded and eventually disappeared with the fall of the empire.

BULLSHIT. How on earth you can present blatantly false presumptions as information?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Romanesque_art_and_archite...

"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.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#168

Post by incog-neato »

topynate wrote: post #82
dpark wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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.

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.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#169

Post by foldr »

dpark wrote: post #166
foldr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

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.

Re: The 'Dark Ages' Weren't as Dark as We Thought

#170

Post by jschwartzi »

llukas wrote: post #167
ardit33 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not correct. They were much worse indeed. 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…

> This all slowly degraded and eventually disappeared with the fall of the empire. BULLSHIT. How on earth you can present blatantly false presumptions as information? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Romanesque_art_and_archite... "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…

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.

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