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The brightness of the Dark Ages

The Blog

The brightness of the Dark Ages

Ron Londen

One of the traditions of the season is to summarize and compare the current year to what preceded it. 2016 is not ending favorably in many eyes. (Thanks, Donald! Thanks, Hillary!) Yet in many respects the year was, as National Review’s Kevin Williamson points out, the best in human history, simply because humanity is good at solving certain kinds of problems. 

Your car is more advanced than the richest person in the world could have driven a few decades ago. Your smartphone has more computing power than the spacecraft that landed men on the moon. Thanks largely to spread of trade around the world, the worldwide rate of extreme poverty has been cut in half in the past 30 years. 

Given this progress, one of the easiest human conceits is the assumption that the current time is more advanced because we are more advanced. But the year’s progress was build upon last year’s, and the year before, all the way back into the receding darkness of the distant past. Yet back in that darkness one finds amazing things.  

The roughly 1,000-year period between the fall of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Renaissance was originally known as the Middle Ages. Then they were widely referred to as the “Dark Ages,” at first because lack of information made them hard to research, then because of laughably inaccurate assumptions about those times as an era lost to stagnation and superstition.

What did the “Dark Ages” give us? Other than the idea of local self-government, the concept of the university, a system of musical notation, a rebirth of live theater, magnificent art and architecture as well as, oh… science, nothing comes to mind.

This video says it well:

Historian of science James Hannam closes his The Genesis of Science with an appropriate summary:

Life in the Middle Ages was often short and violent. The common people were assailed by diseases they didn't understand; exploited by a distant ruling class; and dependent on a Christian Church that rarely lived up to the ideals of its founder. It would be wrong to romanticize the period, and we should be very grateful that we do not have to live in it. But the hard life that people had to bear only makes their progress in science and many other fields all the more impressive. We should not write them off as superstitious primitives. They deserve our gratitude.