[atoav]

It was always my impression that the term “dark ages” was never about quality of life, but created in opposition to the enlightenment (partly because we don’t know much about that age, partly because of the role superstition and belief held in documented cases).

In Austria and Germany most people descripe the Nazi era also as “dark times”, despite there beeing roads built (although the Nazis were so in debt at the beginning of the war already that you can hardly call this a success).

So dark has multiple definitions. I thought the most.common one was about a time where rational thought and humanism didn’t really win, but tribal rivalry (on any scale) and radical beliefs did

[scarmig]

The concept of the Dark Age was, indeed, invented in the Enlightenment, and contemporaneous rhetoric did use it to portray the Enlightenment project in a favorable light as a break from a benighted past.

The issue is that the Enlightenment wasn't a project to move human beings to some better plane, but to rationalize society and its members in a way that made it more amendable to control and planning. And so centralized power could use Enlightenment ideology to eliminate alternative power centers, centralizing power in the hands of a single state that could reorganize society for its own ends.

That itself had pros and cons, with the biggest con being the newfound ability for states to execute projects of mass violence more effectively.