The Real Dark Ages

Intellectual Snobbery Plays Tricks on Both the Dead and the Living

The dominant narrative of Western history runs something like this: the classical age (Greece, Alexander, and Rome) represents a crowning glory of human achievement.  This age was marked by an explosion of refined cultural achievement, knowledge, discovery, and scientific advance.  It was followed by the Dark Ages when the West came under the aegis of the Christian faith and its attendant superstition.  During nigh on a thousand dark years, the West lived in penury, illness, and degradation, presided over by tyrannical feudal despots and a superstitious religion.

Then came the Enlightenment which threw off the shackles of religious superstition and began to recover the glories of the classical age.  Out of the resulting explosion of knowledge and cultural advances of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment came the Western dominance of the world--culturally, politically, academically, scientifically, and so forth.

But as Voltaire observed, "history" is a trick the living play upon the dead.
  History is a story we tell ourselves, suggests Voltaire, to magnify ourselves at the expense of our predecessors.  But it remains a trick: that is, something fundamentally untrue.  Nevertheless, it is a cute story which has entertained the arrogant, credulous West for some centuries now.  Yet a trick it remains, and a cheap one at that.

The reality is that during the Roman period, the classical age--such as it was--stultified.  Most people lived as they had for centuries--in grinding poverty, barely above subsistence level.  There was no economic progress; there was no GDP growth (to employ a modern metric).  Most lived little better than their oxen--since around half the population are estimated to have been slaves.  But even if you were a freeman, things were little better.

But even most free Romans lived at a bare subsistence level, not because they lacked the potential to achieve a much higher standard of living, but because a predatory ruling elite extracted every ounce of "surplus" production.  If all production above the bear minimum needed for survival is seized by the elite, there is no motivation for anyone to produce more.  Consequently, despite the fabulous wealth of the elite, Rome was very poor. [Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion (New York: Harper One, 2011), p. 239.]

All roads lead to Rome, they say.  But the Rome they led to by all accounts was filled with splendid monuments and grand edifices to magnify the pride of the rapacious plutocrats (who fled the city in the summer because of the stench), but the vast mass of the population lived in filth, squalor, and disease.  Ironically, for the Empire did manifest skill at engineering, Roman residential architecture was a disgusting joke. Moreover, the Tiber ran through the city as a polluted open sewer.

When the Rome Empire disintegrated people began to breathe free air.  No longer crushed with the weight of supporting a rapacious plutocracy, the Roman army and its military campaigns, nor the endless building of monuments to celebrate the grandeur of tyrants, people began to turn their attention to bettering themselves.  Population numbers began to rise again after centuries of decline.  To employ modern parlance yet again, GDP in Western Europe began to rise.  The fruits of technical and scientific innovation began to flourish.

But our contemporary Western Commentariat continues to focus upon "high culture" as the hallmark of human civilisation.  So the consensus remains that the Classical Period was advanced and what came after were Dark Ages.  Why?  Because they can see a few monuments, a few Ozymandian statues.

But because so many centuries later a number of examples of classical Greek and Roman public grandeur still stand as remarkable ruins, many intellectuals have been prompted to mourn the loss of these "great civilizations".  Many who are fully aware of what this grandeur cost in human suffering have been quite willing even to write-off slavery as merely "the sacrifice which had to be paid for this achievement."

To put is plainly, for too long too many historians have been as gullible as tourists, gaping at the monuments, palaces, and conspicuous consumption of Rome, and then drawing invidious comparisons between such "cosmopolitan" places and "provincial" communities such as medieval merchant towns.  . . . But perhaps the most important factor in the myth of the "Dark Ages" is the inability of intellectuals to value or even to notice the nuts and bolts of real life.  Hence, revolutions in agriculture, weaponry and warfare, non-human power, transportation, manufacturing, and commerce were unappreciated.  So too did remarkable moral progress.  For example, at the fall of Rome there was very extensive slavery everywhere in Europe; by the time of the "Renaissance" it was long gone. [Rodney Stark, op cit., p. 240f.]

It is right to marvel at the architectural wonders of the Parthenon, and the intellectual foundations underpinning its construction.  But the Parthenon must never be separated from the society which produced it.  One must never forget, for example, the Athenian tyrants, nor the totalitarian, tyrannical form of government advocated by Plato, nor the rampant homosexuality and the buggery of young boys, nor the wretchedness of hoplite existence, nor the aversion of the Greeks to labour and diligent work, and so forth.

The established narrative of Western history, with its fawning over the Classical Era and its sneering at the medieval period tells us much more about our culture than many would care to admit.  At best, it represents intellectual, elitist snobbery.  At worst, it is just plain ignorant.