alt Hacker News> The "dark ages" never happened the way it is imagined in pop-culture.
They definitely did. Books stopped being published, even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution, and basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments that make current postmodern academic culture look reasonable.
We don't know what normal people were doing, technology advanced at a snail's pace, we don't even know where many cities and towns were located. We know far more about the Romans and the Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe. We're very lucky that some sense of religious nostalgia for the Classical age (from the fact that the Christian religion was an outgrowth of the late Roman state) kept them from losing or destroying all of the knowledge and documents of antiquity.
The Western world was saved from 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants. It wasn't that they were geniuses, but that they thought that there was some value to the individual other than service to the imbred descendants of Roman generals. This reinvented the concepts of philosophical disagreement and intellectual productivity in Europe.
The "there was no Dark Ages" revision is from people who would love to take us back to the Dark Ages. Nostalgic for the rule of elites, unfettered by the opinions of a population kept uneducated and on the edge of starvation. People associate the slaver culture of the US South with hillbillies, but they associated themselves, with their elaborate gowns and ballrooms, with a renewal of European culture, with the slaves playing the part of the serfs.
Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago. Somehow, with their weakness, Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness.
We've gone from a history described entirely in terms of nobles arguing with and sleeping with each other to a present entirely described in terms of oligarchs arguing with and sleeping with each other. The last few hundred years will one day probably be described as the "Popular Period." Historians will describe it as the short span of history in which it is trivially easy to find the price of a loaf of bread, or the rules of card games. "At least 20% of the commercial writings from that period have survived."
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> even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution
Medieval Christian societies were by and large certainly less brutal than ancient Greek and Roman states which were based on conquest and subjugation and extreme exploitation of slave labour. While admittedly some things did regress we have to thank Christianity for introducing the concept of universal human right (at least on a basic level) which is not something that existed in any shape or form back in e.g. 0 AD.
> basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments
Scientific method was pretty much invented in Christian universities. Of course the model they were operating on was "somewhat" flawed but the methods they invented to reason about it were certainly a stepping stone to
> Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe
Yes there was an ~200-300 year gap.
> 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants
The same people who brought back witching burning (coincidentally a wide spread ancient Roman practice which the church tried to stamp out with various degrees of effort and success during most of the early to high middle ages)?
> Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago.
lol... let's not get silly. Just how much technological progress do you think there was between e.g. ~ 300 BC and 400 AD? It was clearly much less rapid than e.g. between 1000 and 1400 AD.
The Dark Ages were actually something of a golden age for the Gaels with some of their best cultural artefacts being produced kn that period.
That happened in the Englightenment era too. The censhorship, tortures and whatnot, I mean.
>Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness.
Yeah, unlike the champions on killing 'witches', you know, the Germanic protestants.
Meanwhile, the Spanish Inquisition was depicted as brutal, but, trust me, you would prefer to be trialed by them that some bastard ruthless lord or worse, the villagers being more brutal than the Church itself.
Read about Alphonse X and the Book of Games. A book from the 13th century, Middle Ages, and yet more knowledgeable than the 90% of the self-called "Enlightened" Anglo-Saxon/Germanic protestants reinventing the wheel after the School of Salamanca from similar origins.
Humanism? Trades and agreements between nations? Modern Economics on value and production? It's all there from that School in Castille.
The Dark Ages were named in hindsight, with soft start and end dates, purposefully chosen. This period encompassed the Little Ice Age that put Europe in a long period of unusually cold and wet years included volcanic darkening events culminating in 536. That was the canonical "worst year" for humans to live. 4 years later, the Plague of Justinian wiped out tens of millions of people. It was a dark time, to say the least.