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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

#171

Post by foldr »

dpark wrote: post #158
foldr wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said “Okay, but they'd also probably be able to understand it", which clearly implies that people wouldn't be able to understand the current text. Then you denied that the text was was "comprehensible" ("I find it neither [pleasing or comprehensible]"). I really don't think you can have it both ways on this one. If, contrary to what you've been suggesting, the style only has a minor impact on your ability to unde…

You cannot be serious. I refuse to believe that you actually read this literally and cannot recognize nuance. If you read an article about the contents of Fort Knox and the vault is described as "impenetrable", would you write the author angrily asking how they could possibly know what's inside if it's "impenetrable"? There's a wide spectrum between "easy to understand" and "literally impossible to understand". Every…

I don't think the impenetrability analogy works, because of course you don't have to be able to enter a vault to know what's in it; whereas by the nature of the thing, there isn't some kind of alternative means of figuring out what a text says that doesn't involve comprehending it.

As to why I'm worked up: you're expressing so much disdain for any piece of writing that doesn't give you exactly what you want in exactly the form that you want it. A big part of a humanities education used to be forcing people to read lots of pieces of writing that don't meet that description. I think that was broadly a good thing. Reading shouldn't be a purely transactional activity.

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

#172

Post by mikeash »

gonehome wrote: post #163
mikeash wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much do you suppose a person would get out of Up Goer Five if they didn’t already know about Apollo and such?

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

#173

Post by ardit33 »

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…

Read my comment. I specifically mentioned Britannia. The Franks (i.e. Merovingian), had less than 20% of the former Roman Empire in control. About 18%. The rest of Europe was extremely fragmented, and territories changing hands often (and always through war).

Mentioning that there were plenty of building and construction happening in some part, doesn't negate that the rest (80%) was being ravaged and in continuous decline to the point of whole populations being displaced.

Only the Eastern Roman Empire (aka. Byzantine empire), had a unified government structure, yet it was struggling with the Slavic invasions/incursions from the north, and the wars with the Sassanid empire and the succeeding caliphates.

They did attempt to re-unify the empire with the Justinian Restoration (with Belisarious being the main general re-conquering vast territories), but that didn't last long either. As the economy was lagging the region was ravaged by the Black Plague, where it is estimated that 25–50 million people in two centuries of recurrence died, equivalent to 13–26% of the world's population at the time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian

To me, late Antiquity end, and the true dark ages begin after the death Justinian, and the decline of the Eastern Roman Empire to the point that it couldn't defend or keep its territories from the Slavic invasions.

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

#174

Post by dpark »

foldr wrote: post #171
dpark wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot be serious. I refuse to believe that you actually read this literally and cannot recognize nuance. If you read an article about the contents of Fort Knox and the vault is described as "impenetrable", would you write the author angrily asking how they could possibly know what's inside if it's "impenetrable"? There's a wide spectrum between "easy to understand" and "literally impossible to understand". Every…

I don't think the impenetrability analogy works, because of course you don't have to be able to enter a vault to know what's in it; whereas by the nature of the thing, there isn't some kind of alternative means of figuring out what a text says that doesn't involve comprehending it. As to why I'm worked up: you're expressing so much disdain for any piece of writing that doesn't give you exactly what you want in exactl…

You’re really going to double down on the pedantry? Rather than simply recognize that the most literal interpretation of a word isn’t always the correct one, you argue that there’s a possible loophole. Maybe the author really thinks literally nothing in the universe could penetrate the vault. Not a missile. Not a comet. Not even the US federal government who owns the vault and ostensibly has access. Long after the heat death of the universe, there will still be the Fort Knox vault floating in the nothingness, along with everything anyone has ever described as impenetrable, because that’s how words work.

Let’s be honest. You are not worked up because of my disdain for this piece or for flowery writing in general. You don’t care about me, nor should you. You are worked up because someone has the audacity to not hold the same opinion as you. It’s not possible to simply have differing opinions, especially if there’s a compelling argument for not-your-opinion, so the only possible reality is that they are wrong, wrong, wrong. So you’ll reply to every comment they make, even if it’s not to you, and you’ll argue irrelevant tangents and willfully misinterpret what they said and intentionally try to goad them to anger to prove that you are the one who’s right. Good luck with that.

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

#175

Post by edgarvaldes »

diminoten wrote: post #153
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…

Has anyone else here heard of the historical conspiracy theory (I don't know how else to describe it) that the european dark ages literally never happened, and the Gregorian calendar simply skipped those years entirely? It's pretty fascinating as a concept, though it hits many obvious pitfalls (what about all the stuff that's said to have happened during those years?!?!) and I'm not versed enough in the "theory" to g…

The Phantom time hypothesis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

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

#176

Post by sonnyblarney »

coliveira wrote: post #110
cerealbad wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tribal cultures tend to have long and complex, even tedious oral histories and initiations into them. With a knowledge keeper, shaman, druid, healer etc. Could be that the old druid power structure was in decline and so the typical transmission of information was interrupted. We know a similar thing happened later to the midwives/fertility women who were persecuted as witches with I suspect dire consequences to infan…

That's a good point. Unfortunately this leads to another cause of destabilization at the end of the Roman Empire: Christianity. You see, Christians precipitated the destruction of the pagan culture, which was the only culture shared by all people in Europe. Not only Roman history and culture was almost erased in that change, but also the oral traditions of nations around the Roman Empire that were also converted by t…

"Christians precipitated the destruction of the pagan culture, which was the only culture shared by all people in Europe."

? 'Pagan culture' is not some unified set of cultural norms. Rather, it's a broad category of possibly totally unrelated activities. Some of them codified via Rome (but those were adapted to Christianity) and then other, local ones.

The Christians in 300 CE were the most organized group on the continent, which was part of the reason the Emperor adopted Christianity.

An organized group of busy bodies might cause the decline of some thing (i.e. paganism) but certainly not the decline of the written word, education, governance etc. just the opposite.

One might argue that with the failure of Imperial Order, and the onset of tribal wars, it was the monks that carried most of the flame of civilization, which eventually led to the renewal of civil order and the reasonable ability to establish something approach civility.

Which is maybe close to the classical 'dark ages' narrative. Now of course maybe it was not as dark as we thought, but we certainly don't have a lot leftover from that time. Hence the historical narrative.

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

#177

Post by gonehome »

mikeash wrote: post #172
gonehome wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much do you suppose a person would get out of Up Goer Five if they didn’t already know about Apollo and such?

That’s fair - at the extreme end it is probably harder to understand.

Though going back to the first comment it’s also not how people talk.

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

#178

Post by jonjacky »

diminoten wrote: post #153
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…

Has anyone else here heard of the historical conspiracy theory (I don't know how else to describe it) that the european dark ages literally never happened, and the Gregorian calendar simply skipped those years entirely? It's pretty fascinating as a concept, though it hits many obvious pitfalls (what about all the stuff that's said to have happened during those years?!?!) and I'm not versed enough in the "theory" to g…

You might be thinking of Fomenko's New Chronology, presented in a series of books that were popular in Russia in the 1990s. It sounds very far-fetched:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)

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

#179

Post by Gibbon1 »

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…

> Stone building were replaced by mud huts, and I don't know about you, but not having running water in your town, or paved roads to the next town or port seem like huge drawbacks to life quality.

I read somewhere that skeletal remains show people got taller after the end of the Roman empire. And then started getting shorter through the Renaissance right up till the agricultural revolution in the early 20th century.

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

#180

Post by thaumasiotes »

ddebernardy wrote: post #67
viburnum wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not societal breakdown, that just means the inbred aristocracy doesn’t go back to antiquity. Society and its rulers are not the same thing.

Still, there were families in those days with unfathomable wealth. If memory serves me well, one was so wealthy that when they sold their land after becoming Christians they caused a real estate crisis across the Roman Empire. (Source: The inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham, one of the early chapters.) And just a few centuries earlier, Julius Caesar arguably was one of the richest to have ever lived on earth. It's se…

> It's sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry.

The ancient patrician families had trouble with going extinct. Their decline started long before the imperial period.

Later European kings had the same problem, sometimes just failing to produce any heir. It only takes a single generation and the family is gone.

If anything, I'd attribute family extinctions like this to monogamy. The two standard defenses against a failure of this type are (1) letting a man marry into the family by wedding a family daughter (as opposed to having the daughter marry out into the man's family); and (2) taking more than one wife, which offers dramatically greater opportunity to reproduce.

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