There’s a third alternative at the very least. Dichotomies are so easy to propose and are often false. For the serfs, the Russian Revolution was supposed to be an escape from bondage. Revolutionary leaders could have stayed true to that ideal.
But not under Marxist-Leninism, by its very nature.
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I think we can all agree on that as well. Anybody familiar with Greco-Roman history would affirm that bloody oppression and bloody wars were not recent innovations. [Any British visitor to this forum will be horrified at what will sound to them like terrible cursing in that last sentence.]
The Middle Ages would be a much more accurate term—and one which avoids popular mythology about the era. Historians of long ago called those centuries “The Dark Ages” because those historians had relatively little material to work from to understand that era. They called it “dark” because they were lacking in the light of insights into a somewhat mysterious period of European history. It had no connotation or denotation of backwardness or oppression. Now we know so much more about the intellectual progress and the revolutionary inventions of that era (e.g., new applications of gunpowder, dry compasses, multi-masted ships, astrolabes, water-powered mills, new construction techniques, windmills, mechanical clocks, crop rotation.)
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On the great british show “IN OUR TIME” they have a show on the library.
It seems it was a great library.
Yet if knowledge only came from the library then it was not very good at speading its knowledge. Since they are saying the destruction of the library ended a superior civilization.
it was not a christian mob but a mob using christian identity etc to impose its will. no real christians were in the mob. it was not a christian agenda to stop smart things in the roman world. possibly pagan things but thats it.
the reality is that the greek/Roman world then was destroyed by the invaders from the north/east of europe.
they stopped a civilization. in fact it was Catholic christian scholarship that preserved the old knowledge as far as it did.
yet it was under christian banners that europe rose to its dominant intellectual/moral position and then the reformation that made it explode in advancement to this very day.
Enemies of Christ/christianity trying to use this old Egyptian library as good sampling of what cHristians are like, did, or create culturally is just a hopeless case.
Its a good link to understand the sampling agendas of opponents.
I think we need to factor in that the term was coined pejoratively by Renaissance people essentially espousing a new pop-philosophy and despising all that had come before. The fact that all the positive things about those centuries are only just coming to light academically, and even more slowly permeating society, is the result of a highly successful disinformation campaign over the centuries (including the Enlightenmnent itself) more than it is of lack of historical sources.
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True enough, but no need to go back that far!
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And why do you think that was? Almost everyone was illiterate and intellectual pursuits were often relegated to monasteries where they had little chance of spreading and impacting the world. The vast majority of European society fell into intellectual darkness. The existence of a few examples notwithstanding, for a period of about 1200 years, progress was haltingly slow in almost every intellectual area (history, philosophy, civics, science, literature, music, and art). I’m not saying no progress, but rather very little and it was mostly ephemeral. I’m not blaming religion or religiosity for that. It was feudal and monarchical power and the dissolution of a functioning state, but it shouldn’t be ignored that the The Christian Church was an all-too-willing partner in the oppression. It’s also true that Catholic monasteries were the crucial repositories of the products of cultural accumulation of knowledge during those awful times. Anyway, the dark ages really were an awful time for most people in Europe and the enlightenment and it’s many associated movements (Renaissance, Age of Reason, Scientific Revolution, wrap it all up together) began with a rediscovery of the wisdom and knowledge of the ancients and then progress resumed.
Fell? The vast majority of European society before the Middle Ages (think about the vast areas outside of intellectual centers like Rome) had never been all that literate and intellectual.
True enough, but even the areas that the Roman empire had “civilized” also fell back. Roman Britain had been rapidly organizing and developing with new technologies and the emergence of democratic, or at least deliberative political life. The retreat of Rome ended that and there was a dearth of development until the Norman invasion. The Vikings brought a few things but mostly just added to the violence and misery.
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Long ago I had a history professor who kept reminding us that the collapse of the Roman Empire brought a new world which could be compared to a post-atomic war vacuum where there is a vast void and everyone is just trying to survive and somehow make things “work” again. There’s nobody [relatively speaking, of course] to preserve the peace and legal systems, nobody to maintain roads and repair bridges, and nobody to provide some sort of stable societal cohesion. (Yes, the church and the resulting alignments with various local and regional rulers was and were the obvious successors to fill that vacuum but they did so gradually and in limited ways, relatively speaking. Pax Romano was over and civilization-as-we-know-it was over. Again, I’m generalizing but the void was very real.)
Whenever economies and unifying governmental systems collapse, there is always a protracted struggle. It is hard to imagine it turning out otherwise.
By the way, the collapse of the “Arab Golden Age” is frequently misunderstood and grossly misrepresented by “arm-chair amateur historian” popularizers like Neil Degrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins. They blame the decline of Arab science, mathematics, technology, and architecture on the rise of Islam and especially theologian-philosopher-clerics like Abu Hamid al Ghazali. (Actually, al Ghazali could and has been argued by scholars to have played a very opposite role. As usual, the realities are complex.) Anti-theists often ignore the far more crucial geopolitical and economic factors which were virtually certain to soon destroy an Arab “renaissance” which arose in a fortunate but doomed-to-be-temporary period of affluence and relative peace. Indeed, the historians I’ve known who specialized in that era of Middle Eastern history claim that religious factors probably ranked around fourth or fifth place in terms of determinative causes of the deterioration and collapse of the Arab Golden Age. I’m hardly an apologist and defender of Islam but as an academic I’m annoyed at the all-too-easy and uninformed cheap-shots employed by Tyson, Dawkins, et al in their efforts to blame all bad things on religions.
[I’ve avoided starting an unnecessary tangent in distinguishing between the Arab Golden Age and the Islamic Golden Age. For now I’ll consider my generalizations sufficient.]
Economics always plays a huge role in determining whether a society will foster science and intellectual pursuits. If one is struggling to survive and make society “work” again, there will be limited emphasis and funding for the academy, research, and education at all levels. (Of course, today we better understand that more investment in such areas is actually one of the most cost-efficient long-term strategies for economic development. Yet, even today long-term considerations often lose out to short-term perspectives. There’s always that old adage about draining swamps and dealing with alligators.)
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I’m not sure whether Communism as proposed by Marx and Engels has ever properly been experimented with.
The point is that it is impossible to realize in a fallen world because it misdiagnosed and misunderstood the reality of human nature. Everyone will do it wrong because we do not have the nature to do it right.
Surely there comes a point at which the regular collapse into tyranny and econoimic failure of instantiations of a system must be attributed to failures in the system itself. Remember that Marx and Engels saw the socialist transformation of society as an evolutionary necessity.
I’m not advocating communism. Are you claiming it has been tried? Jonestown, maybe?
Rubbish! The Anglo-Saxons shared a heritage with Norman culture, both came late to Christianity. But culturally, not much to choose. Have you heard of the Alfred Jewel?
St Bede’s discovery of the gravitational effect of the moon on the tides was not insignificant, either - especially as Galileo got the same question so spectacularly wrong a millennium later.
Bede was educated in the monastic schools, of course.
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Indeed.
“Advanced” (?) civilization is heavily dependent on economics and greater affluence. The affluence of the elite in the Roman Empire was made possible by military brute force and the often forgotten vassal peoples supporting the powerful and the intelligentsia through oppressive taxation. When such economic systems collapse, intellectual pursuits, high technology, engineering, architecture, and educational systems deteriorate accordingly. Glorification of the Roman era and denigration of the cultures which followed should be judged through the prism of those realities.
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Culturally, sure, but who was talking about culture? We were talking about technology, philosophy, rights/dignity of all people, science, political theory, literary and artistic technique… the many aspects of “progress” that the ancient civilizations were all advancing and that the enlightenment rekindled. I’m not saying there was NO progress on any of these, so please don’t throw out solitary examples as proof of anything more than ephemeral isolates. I am saying that from around the fall of the Roman Empire to the emergence of modernism, there was precious little advancement in these areas. Considering that this era was at least 1000 years, 1200-1300 years in most places, that’s quite an extended pause on the rapid technological and moral advancement that was happening before and after that period. By the way, I don’t agree with your position, but I will refrain from calling it “rubbish” because that would be needlessly rude.
I was just disagreeing with your claim that from the Roman tactical withdrawal from the island of Britain till the Norman invasion, there was a cultural standstill.
…rudely.