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I realize I don't have the chops to argue against a professional historian, but here's what I'm seeing: The period after the fall of the Roman Empire is often
by Elrac 7y ago
I realize I don't have the chops to argue against a professional historian, but here's what I'm seeing:
The period after the fall of the Roman Empire is often called "The Dark Ages," though a lot of revisionists try to make us think this wasn't nearly as ominous as it sounds. OK, we know that time wasn't called "dark" because the Sun failed to shine; it's called "dark" because we have a dearth of historical information about it.
What does this tell us? The Greco-Roman civilization produced truckloads of books on all topics of interest; there were libraries both public and private, and schools to support general literacy, often bilingual, among the upper class, at least. A good part of the literature from that age survived the multiple sackings and burnings of Rome, etc.
In the Dark Ages, on the other hand, literacy was heavily monopolized by the clergy, and a preponderance of new books dealt with theology. It's a period where even many kings signed an "X" for their names. A period where intellectual energy went into religious ruminations and little else. A period of intellectual barbarism, in other words. A thousand years of barely any scientific progress.
In another top-level comment, user "causality1" mentions a large handful of side effects of this intellectual decline, including decreases in population, life expectancy, trade, infrastructure and technology. Unlike the author, I believe a decline in a whole slew of markers of societal functionality is bad indeed.
- drewcoo 7y agoAll history is revisionist. Those dark ages were so called because of people who called their time the enlightenment, throwing a little shade at their past to make themselves seem all the brighter.
- cygx 7y agoThe term was coined during the Renaissance...
- dTal 7y agoRevisionist? Are you saying it wasn't a period of intellectual stagnation for the many reasons detailed in the comment you're responding to?
- mcv 7y agoI don't know if drewcoo is saying that, but I certainly am. There was plenty of intellectual stagnation during the Roman Empire, and plenty of progress during the Middle Ages. The claim that the Roman Empire was so enlightened while the Middle Ages were stagnation, is revisionism.
- jhbadger 7y agoExactly, the article tries to say it was a good thing because it was the time that modern national identities emerged (Spanish vs. French, etc.), but it is questionable if that was really a good thing. While the EU (minus Britain unless there's a last minute saving) is a thing, wouldn't it have been better if Europe never culturally fractured in the first place?
- mcv 7y ago> "wouldn't it have been better if Europe never culturally fractured in the first place?" It would have been better for the people living at the time, but probably not for us. It's that diversity in different nations, different cultures, different forms of government and different ideas, that drove progress. Compare China, which has been mostly unified for that period of time. Despite starting out as the most powerful country on Earth, it was eventually overtaken by European countries. A famous example is how China built a massive fleet ready to colonise the world in the 14th century, but then a new emperor came alone who decided there was nothing of interest outside China. In Europe, if one country wouldn't be interested in something, another would. That diversity and competition was probably why Europe eventually overtook China. Though there are benefits to both approaches: as long as you can avoid stagnation, there can also be a lot of efficiency in a single central government.
- QuesnayJr 7y agoI'm not a historian either, but historians of the Dark Ages always come across as weirdly defensive about the era.
- knolax 7y agoIf people who have more information on a topic become "defensive" against viewpoints from people with less information, on first glance I'd trust the former group better.
- QuesnayJr 7y agoIf I'm sure of something, I don't become defensive when I argue my side. I just argue my side. (Maybe this is what historians of the period are doing, but it doesn't come always come across that way to me.)
- savastalan 7y agoNice
- Keysh 7y agoJames Fallows is not a "professional historian", he's a journalist. Go ahead and argue with him; this is a very confused and silly article.
- Elrac 7y agoAh, sorry about muddling that up. I understand that Fallows is a journalist, but he looks to be distilling the ideas of "real" historians including Peter Brown and Walter Scheidel. So to my way of thinking (and arguing), Fallows is just the proxy (facade? I suck at design patterns) for those guys.
- Keysh 7y agoPeter Brown and Walter Scheidel are indeed real historians (Brown of "Late Antiquity" and Scheidel of the Roman Empire). Not everything they're quoted as saying is necessarily that solid, though. For example, if Scheidel is really attributing "the dawn of the university" to the fall of the Western Empire, then he's eliding about seven or eight hundred years. (Fall of Western Empire: 5th Century; dawn of universities: 12th or 13th Century.)
- mcv 7y ago> "In the Dark Ages, on the other hand, literacy was heavily monopolized by the clergy, and a preponderance of new books dealt with theology. It's a period where even many kings signed an "X" for their names. A period where intellectual energy went into religious ruminations and little else. A period of intellectual barbarism, in other words. A thousand years of barely any scientific progress." Careful there. You quickly move from what's true and run into what's false in that paragraph. Yes, literacy was down, but it was absolutely not a thousand years of barely any scientific progress. A lot of important advancements stem from the early middle ages: windmills, water mills, pumps, many agricultural improvements. And if you want to look at a 1000 years (from 500 to 1500?), you're going to have to include steel metallurgy, gothic architecture, and the renaissance, the introduction of Arabic (Indian) numerals, the invention of gunpowder, and many others. There may have been a lot of problems with that period, but claiming there was barely any scientific progress smacks of Voltairian revisionism.
- Elrac 7y agoWell, I'm basing that particular claim on the published opinion of a professional academic historian of science. If you or anyone else interested has a lot of free time, you may want to skim these pages by Dr. Richard Carrier: http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2006/11/science-and-medieval-christianity.html http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2006/11/science-and-medie... http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/search/label/history%20of%20science http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/search/label/history%20of... https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/14660 https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/14660 Unfortunately, especially the first two links are into his blogs and challenge the reader to wade through a whole lot of polemic. The third one, though, makes for interesting general reading. In the second link, he explicitly addresses a list of advancements allegedly from the early Middle Ages. I did some rather superficial research on the first three items you mentioned: windmills and water mills and pumps. Lo and behold, all three were known and in use in the Roman Empire or well before the period Carrier focuses on, to wit, 200-1200. Admittedly, his focused time frame is shifted a bit from that of the discussion here in HN: We're talking about what happened after the Roman Empire tanked, while he's arguing against claims that Christianity was a boon to science.