21–30 of 249 posts
"The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. What was going on in the Islamic world? In China? The Dark Ages of Western Europe were the brilliant Tang dynasty in China; and the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.
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.
I first ran into this theory in the only "alchemy" book (as in, I have no idea what it's actually about) where the author seemed immensely intelligent. Of course, I was too lazy to actually research any of his claims, but he was pretty eloquent: "Paradoxical in its manifestations, disconcerting in its signs, the Middle Ages proposes to the sagacity of its admirers the resolution of a singular misconception. How to re…
"The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. What was going on in the Islamic world? In China? The Dark Ages of Western Europe were the brilliant Tang dynasty in China; and the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.
Just joking: IMHO if someone knows what dark ages was, usually know where it was... It is that simple!
"The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. What was going on in the Islamic world? In China? The Dark Ages of Western Europe were the brilliant Tang dynasty in China; and the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.
"The Dark Ages" is also a Eurocentric view of history. What was going on in the Islamic world? In China? The Dark Ages of Western Europe were the brilliant Tang dynasty in China; and the explosion of Islam across the Middle East and across to India, bringing with it tremendous scholarship and economic prosperity.
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 be traced broke down for some time and only reformed later.
To me this is a concrete symptom of a fairly severe disruption. How it's labeled is an interesting discussion, but clearly something happened.
[1] See deeper discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think "Late Antiquity" is common.
I've never heard that and wouldn't guess that it meant the Dark Ages at all.