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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

#191

Post by golergka »

xefer wrote: post #28

The thing that stands out for me about this period is the lack of a "descent from antiquity". [1] There is no well-established genealogical descent in Western Europe from antiquity to the modern era. Familial lines of descent can be traced to the very late Roman period, and from the early medieval period to the modern era. But there is a chasm that can't be crossed because the societal norms that allowed families to…

My family history, for example, have always seemed weird in that regard. Genealogy up until 11-12th century is pretty straightforward and documented, with notable rabbis and doctors, but then it jumps straight to legends and familiar family names from antiquity, without any information from Dark Ages straight out missing from any records. And other old Jewish families I know are very similar: all genealogical information just vanishes for these centuries, even if there are older reliable sources picking up the story from antiquity and beyond.

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

#192

Post by antidesitter »

colechristensen wrote: post #79
gonehome wrote: post #19

This seems like a perfect example of someone who needs to read pg’s essay “write like you talk”: http://paulgraham.com/talk.html I don’t get an intelligence vibe from this style of writing - it mostly just sets off my bullshit alarms.

First, it is a century old translation from French. What might sound perfectly normal in French might sound silly in English if you do a literal translation. Matching the tone between languages might significantly change the message. For example, to use the English versions of French words... To say "I'm sorry" in French you say "I am desolate" Talking about a broken phone or a stomach ache you would say they are der…

> shaming people for not communicating the way you want is wrong

No. It's not always wrong.

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

#193

Post by ivanhoe »

betterunix2 wrote: post #154
ivanhoe wrote: post #128

Those were the dark ages because previously there was a highly developed civilization with its sophisticated culture, art, science, technology and liberties, and then the western world sunk into an era where almost all of it was temporarily forsaken. It fell into the darkness and chaos (at least from the point of people who lived in the Roman empire). Barbaric tribes raided the lands, many local wars again started si…

To be clear, the science, knowledge, and skills of humanity continued to advanced during the European dark ages. Outside of Europe there was the Islamic Golden Age and the Tang Dynasty period of China. The scholarship and science of the Islamic Golden Age actually continued the intellectual development of the Romans (which is why we still have the Elements and other Greek works), probably because the Caliphate had co…

Absolutely, Dark Ages is the event local to Western Europe, although IMO the rise of church power had negative impact on the Byzantine Empire too. They've kept the culture and knowledge of Ancient Greece and Eastern Roman Empire, but contributed very little to it, unlike Arab scholars who made a significant progress under the Omayyad caliphate.

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

#194

Post by wallace_f »

coliveira wrote: post #94
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…

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…

This seems so overly simplistic, and perhaps misleading. Not just because, as evidenced in the article and is consensus among scholars, that the pejorative term, Dark Ages, itself is misleading. But There seems to be so much other blatant evidence which calls your premise into question. After all, Caeser made his name as he led a conquest with what was not fundamentally different to a warring tribe, and marched it back into Rome as a final affront to Cato and the state of Rome.

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

#195

Post by antidesitter »

wanderer2323 wrote: post #68

One should be aware reading it that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance in shaping our modern art and culture. Not saying that this particular article is necessarily an example, just wanted to bring an attention to the fact that the this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently and everything presented on i…

> that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance

What's your evidence for this claim?

> this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently

What are you talking about?

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

#197

Post by jimclegg »

antidesitter wrote: post #195
wanderer2323 wrote: post #68

One should be aware reading it that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance in shaping our modern art and culture. Not saying that this particular article is necessarily an example, just wanted to bring an attention to the fact that the this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently and everything presented on i…

> that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance What's your evidence for this claim? > this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently What are you talking about?

It's not that people are diminishing Europe's role, it's that Europe's role wasn't as big as euro-centric historians claimed.

The two most prosporous civilizations in human history had their richest periods during the European Dark Ages into the Renaissance but China and India are not even mentioned usually (when only 5 people could do long division in Europe, Indian mathematicians were discovering the basics of calculus, many centuries pre-Newton & Leibniz).

Truth is most of the knowledge "discovered" by Europe during this period was mostly translated from old Chinese/Indian/Greek texts (math/science/etc) and made available to Europeans via Persia.

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

#198

Post by hetman »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #190
ivanhoe wrote: post #128

Those were the dark ages because previously there was a highly developed civilization with its sophisticated culture, art, science, technology and liberties, and then the western world sunk into an era where almost all of it was temporarily forsaken. It fell into the darkness and chaos (at least from the point of people who lived in the Roman empire). Barbaric tribes raided the lands, many local wars again started si…

I agree completely. Perhaps it could be argued that the Roman Empire was simply ahead of their time, but we went from engineering marvels (of their time) such as the Roman aqueducts [1], the Pantheon [2], or the Colosseum [3], which held 50-80k spectators in 72AD, to very little of note for 100s of years following. What I find intriguing is that the Roman Empire even 'discovered' steam power in the first century [4].…

Roman metallurgy was really not at a point to make practical use of steam power on a scale that made it more effective than using slaves. Crucible steel, a bare minimum, wouldn't come to Europe for over a millennium. They simply did not have the materials engineering to build useful pressure vessels.

People get weirdly romantic about how easy these ideas would have been to implement; there's this weird conception that we should have been able to go from late antiquity Rome to early industrial revolution England in a matter of a couple centuries.

This ignores two things. First executing seemingly simple ideas can still require incredible expertise in a range of fields. Nuclear bombs are conceptually simple but building them still seems to require the economy of a nation state.

Second, Roman knowledge wasn't lost. It was all still there in the Byzantine Empire yet strangely they weren't sending rockets to the moon in the 1200's. The centres of knowledge simply migrated, and in every place knowledge grew and expanded. Whether work by Byzantine or Muslim scholars, science wasn't put on pause and without their contributions, we would not have advanced to where we are today.

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

#200

Post by dang »

gonehome wrote: post #19

This seems like a perfect example of someone who needs to read pg’s essay “write like you talk”: http://paulgraham.com/talk.html I don’t get an intelligence vibe from this style of writing - it mostly just sets off my bullshit alarms.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19741077 and marked it off-topic.
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