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.