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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

#41

Post by beat »

szemet wrote: post #25
beat wrote: post #15

"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.

Also, we should rename the Thirty Years' War to "Thirty Years' War in Europe but mostly peace elsewhere", and then we can can call World War I and World War II simply War I and War II - if we assume by default that every event is global (maybe we should add "except Switzerland,etc..." there too...) Just joking: IMHO if someone knows what dark ages was, usually know where it was... It is that simple!

It's not that simple, though. A lot of people - a lot of people - have no idea that during the "Dark Ages", huge swaths of the rest of the world (larger than Western Europe) were going through a Golden Age. It took me rather a while to realize that myself.

And, since WWI was fought in large part over colonial resources and Japan was involved, and since Japan was a major power in WWII (and China was involved as well, if only as Japan's victim), I'm pretty satisfied with "World War" as descriptors.

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

#43

Post by smacktoward »

> 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 they looked like (except from black‐and‐white photos) through accurate and beautiful copies painted by a group of nuns, by sheer chance, in the 1930s.

This feels like a weird argument. Yes, the paintings were lost. But we have tons of documentation about them! We have records of their creation by Hildegard of Bingen. We have photographs and reproductions to tell us (imperfectly, but still) how they looked. We know they were taken to Dresden, and we know when -- 1945. We know that Dresden suffered a devastating firebombing by the Allies in February of that year, and we know that nobody has been able to locate the paintings since that firebombing occurred. In other words, we may not have the paintings themselves anymore, but we can construct a pretty reliable history of them -- what they were, how they were created, and when they were (sadly) destroyed.

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. Kingdoms rose and fell, wars were won or lost, languages and faiths adopted or abandoned, and we can't even begin to tell any of those stories today, because nobody was keeping records. Who can say how much art was created and then destroyed in this period that we'll never even be aware existed? Who knows how many geniuses there were whose insights have been lost forever?

None of this is to say that what happened in Dresden in 1945 isn't a tragedy; it absolutely was, and for lots of reasons beyond just the loss of some paintings. But the loss of something that we know existed (and can even look at photographs of!) is very different than destruction so total that it even obliterates the possibility of remembrance.

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

#44

Post by gp7 »

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.

When you write like this a lot, you end up talking like it, too.

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

#45

Post by coldtea »

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.

You should use those alarms on PG's writings:

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

As for the particular author, he was born in another culture (not all cultures appreciate the matter-of-factness as-you-talk anglo-saxon style of writing, many prominent European writers have called it "barbaric" and "only good for business"). He was also born in a whole other era.

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

#46

Post by choeger »

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…

Thanks for that link.

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

#47

Post by gonehome »

mikeash wrote: post #35
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.

That’s good advice but it’s also highly dependent on culture and time. It’s food advice because the English-speaking culture of today values writing that sounds like speech. It may not have been good advice at all for someone writing in 1920s France. And beyond that, it’s really hard to apply this sort of advice to a translation.

I’d argue it’s good advice for people that value clarity over sounding smart.

I’d guess there were people that valued this in most times and cultures.

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

#48

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

btilly wrote: post #32
jcranmer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early Middle Ages is common, generally dating from "the fall of the Roman Empire" (which is itself a very ambiguous term) to around 1066. The collapse of the Roman Empire from the 3rd to the 7th century (the process is somewhat more gradual than depicted in popular culture, and the timing depends on where you lived in the Roman Empire) resulted in a serious loss of administrative capability and economic and military…

The Roman Empire's collapse was more drawn out than that. The Empire split into Eastern and Western empires under Constantine. The Eastern half got renamed to the Byzantine Empire and it lasted until the successful Ottoman conquest in 1453. This is not to be confused with the Holy Roman Empire which was not holy, nor Roman, nor a true empire. But which survived until Napoleon conquered it in 1806.

This reminds me a lot of bigger companies (IE Microsoft and their "lost decade") that lose time and experience and product margin to their competitors but that get back after a while- the Romans had so much consolidated power that, if it weren't for people jockeying for power, they could've survived in a shrunken, but still pretty huge form.

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

#49

Post by factsaresacred »

beat wrote: post #15

"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.

That's like describing 'The Great Leap Forward' as a Sino-centric view of history.

"The Dark Ages" refers to a time as well as a place. Specifically, Western Europe.

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

#50

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

jcranmer wrote: post #40
btilly wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Roman Empire's collapse was more drawn out than that. The Empire split into Eastern and Western empires under Constantine. The Eastern half got renamed to the Byzantine Empire and it lasted until the successful Ottoman conquest in 1453. This is not to be confused with the Holy Roman Empire which was not holy, nor Roman, nor a true empire. But which survived until Napoleon conquered it in 1806.

It's even more complicated than that. The Byzantine Empire was conquered by a group of crusaders in the Fourth Crusade in 1204, with several rump states cropping up. The Empire of Nicaea reconquered Constantinople in 1261, so people usually call it the continuation of the Byzantine Empire. By the 1400s, this Byzantine Empire quite literally existed at the whim of the Ottomans, even if they only entered Constantinople…

so is "the one true UNIX" just history repeating itself?
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