Comment by vinceguidry
10 years ago
> I think that the idea that humanity is always marching forward to better days is something implicit among people who live in peaceful affluent societies. But if you look at history, the world has always gone through cycles. No matter how much we improve socially, a regression seems almost inevitable. The Roman Empire did fall, and was followed by the Dark Ages.
The so-called Dark Ages were a period in which Roman-style governance was exported to the individual kingdoms of the former Roman Empire. Rome could only ever maintain political dominance for so long. Stability increased the might of kingdoms, these kingdoms didn't always want to live under the thumb of Rome. Rome kept it up for a good long while, but it couldn't do so forever.
The Middle Ages was when Europe became Europe. It saw the rise of a completely new type of institution, the pan-national Catholic Church, which became a third check against the power of kings. The manorial system grew out of the old Roman villa system and increased the output of farms and industry. This allowed militaries to professionalize and central government to flourish. Instead of one Rome and many vassal states, the vassal states each became their own Rome.
The intense competition between states eventually produced a theory of sovereignty that cut down on warfare tremendously.
The Middle Ages were not some dystopian hell out of which the Renaissance magically sprung up.
I think you are projecting the narriative of Progres (TM) onto the accurate facts you are presenting.
i.e. the Catholic Church did not invent checks and balances. They used to have those in the Old Republic, but those were abandoned after the Roman Civilization reached the appex of its, let's call it cultural vitality. I see the authoritarism of the Caesars as a symptom of Rome having run out of fresh ideas, they "jumped the shark" if you will.
I agree the Middle Ages were not some sort of dystopian hell. There was a Dark age after (or more precisely, around) the time when Rome fell. Those were hungry and dangerous times, and the people that survived were more impoverished (both in the material and the intelectual sense) than their forefathers, but survive they did. The Middle Ages is what resulted when the survivors rebuilt society out of the wreckage.
I agree that many former Roman institutions were repurposed during those times, but I do not see this as a way of purposeful progress. Rather, those obsolete institutions were salvaged and repurposed by the new Medieval society for its own needs. Superficially they look like a continuation of the same, but they were successful because they had a different cultural sensitivity, they had fresh ideas now, with their own new values and their own expectations of how things should be. And they pushed those in directions that no old Roman philosopher would've been able to imagine.
I think people tend to conflate Middle Ages with "Dark age" because the Middle Ages ended in a relatively mild collapse. The (Christian) Reformation and the Enlightenment allowed much of the cultural treasures of the past age to be preserved, but also caused warfare, famine, dislocation of whole nations, etc. Again, hungry and dangerous times, and again the survivors picked up the pieces and build the world we know today.
Our world looks superficialy like a continuation of the Renaissance, but it is not. The Renaissance is the apex of the cultural vitality of the Middle Ages, and our own World's foundations rest upon many of its repurposed ideas and institutions. But it had ideas and values of our own, and our forefathers took that in directions that no Scholastic monk would have ever imagined.
So, you can see, we are no closer to a future of endless joy, anymore than any other society that inhabited this planet ever did. We are going our own way around the cycle, and clearly we have ran out of fresh ideas ourselves.
I will not pretend to be subtle, our times will be on the down slope and depending on how fast this proceeds we ourselves or our children may end up in one of those dark ages (no uppercase, thank you very much) where hungry and dangerous is the norm. And then others will come and pick up the pieces. I guess what I expect to acomplish in life is to leave behind some cultural artifacts in good working order; and I hope that, one or two centuries from now, some smart guy will pick those up and push them in directions that I'd never be able to imagine.
I think it's you projecting a narrative here. :)
> I agree that many former Roman institutions were repurposed during those times, but I do not see this as a way of purposeful progress. Rather, those obsolete institutions were salvaged and repurposed by the new Medieval society for its own needs.
Seems to me a distinction without a difference. The "new Medieval society" was the same as the old Roman society. It may have been different families in charge in many areas, but they were all cut from the same cloth.
> Again, hungry and dangerous times, and again the survivors picked up the pieces and build the world we know today.
I think you overestimate the scale of collapse and rebuilding. The most devastating collapse the world has ever seen, World War II, directly transitioned to the biggest boom the world has ever seen.
To me, a collapse is like a forest wildfire. It burns away overgrown areas and makes room for a fresh start. If we see a decline in American hegemony in our lifetime, and that's big if, I'm confident it will be replaced by something far more interesting.
Just FYI, the "dark ages" are not called that because they were literally dark and miserable. They're called the "dark ages" because we don't know much about what happened during this time, due to lack of source material.
I suggest you don't dig too deeply into why this might be, or the provenance of most of the historical documents we have that describe Rome. When I did, the results were quite disturbing.
What was disturbing about them?
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You sound like you've been reading a lot of Rod Dreher :-). If you haven't been, you might be interested in his blog, where he discusses "The Benedict Option" as a (Christian) response to this sort of cultural decline. He's also working on a book on the topic...