[Elrac]

I realize I don't have the chops to argue against a professional historian, but here's what I'm seeing:

The period after the fall of the Roman Empire is often called "The Dark Ages," though a lot of revisionists try to make us think this wasn't nearly as ominous as it sounds. OK, we know that time wasn't called "dark" because the Sun failed to shine; it's called "dark" because we have a dearth of historical information about it.

What does this tell us? The Greco-Roman civilization produced truckloads of books on all topics of interest; there were libraries both public and private, and schools to support general literacy, often bilingual, among the upper class, at least. A good part of the literature from that age survived the multiple sackings and burnings of Rome, etc.

In the Dark Ages, on the other hand, literacy was heavily monopolized by the clergy, and a preponderance of new books dealt with theology. It's a period where even many kings signed an "X" for their names. A period where intellectual energy went into religious ruminations and little else. A period of intellectual barbarism, in other words. A thousand years of barely any scientific progress.

In another top-level comment, user "causality1" mentions a large handful of side effects of this intellectual decline, including decreases in population, life expectancy, trade, infrastructure and technology. Unlike the author, I believe a decline in a whole slew of markers of societal functionality is bad indeed.

[drewcoo]

All history is revisionist. Those dark ages were so called because of people who called their time the enlightenment, throwing a little shade at their past to make themselves seem all the brighter.

[dTal]

Revisionist? Are you saying it wasn't a period of intellectual stagnation for the many reasons detailed in the comment you're responding to?

[mcv]

I don't know if drewcoo is saying that, but I certainly am. There was plenty of intellectual stagnation during the Roman Empire, and plenty of progress during the Middle Ages. The claim that the Roman Empire was so enlightened while the Middle Ages were stagnation, is revisionism.

[cygx]

The term was coined during the Renaissance...

[jhbadger]

Exactly, the article tries to say it was a good thing because it was the time that modern national identities emerged (Spanish vs. French, etc.), but it is questionable if that was really a good thing. While the EU (minus Britain unless there's a last minute saving) is a thing, wouldn't it have been better if Europe never culturally fractured in the first place?

[mcv]

> "wouldn't it have been better if Europe never culturally fractured in the first place?"

It would have been better for the people living at the time, but probably not for us. It's that diversity in different nations, different cultures, different forms of government and different ideas, that drove progress.

Compare China, which has been mostly unified for that period of time. Despite starting out as the most powerful country on Earth, it was eventually overtaken by European countries. A famous example is how China built a massive fleet ready to colonise the world in the 14th century, but then a new emperor came alone who decided there was nothing of interest outside China. In Europe, if one country wouldn't be interested in something, another would. That diversity and competition was probably why Europe eventually overtook China. Though there are benefits to both approaches: as long as you can avoid stagnation, there can also be a lot of efficiency in a single central government.

[QuesnayJr]

I'm not a historian either, but historians of the Dark Ages always come across as weirdly defensive about the era.

[knolax]

If people who have more information on a topic become "defensive" against viewpoints from people with less information, on first glance I'd trust the former group better.

[QuesnayJr]

If I'm sure of something, I don't become defensive when I argue my side. I just argue my side. (Maybe this is what historians of the period are doing, but it doesn't come always come across that way to me.)

[mcv]

> "In the Dark Ages, on the other hand, literacy was heavily monopolized by the clergy, and a preponderance of new books dealt with theology. It's a period where even many kings signed an "X" for their names. A period where intellectual energy went into religious ruminations and little else. A period of intellectual barbarism, in other words. A thousand years of barely any scientific progress."

Careful there. You quickly move from what's true and run into what's false in that paragraph. Yes, literacy was down, but it was absolutely not a thousand years of barely any scientific progress.

A lot of important advancements stem from the early middle ages: windmills, water mills, pumps, many agricultural improvements. And if you want to look at a 1000 years (from 500 to 1500?), you're going to have to include steel metallurgy, gothic architecture, and the renaissance, the introduction of Arabic (Indian) numerals, the invention of gunpowder, and many others.

There may have been a lot of problems with that period, but claiming there was barely any scientific progress smacks of Voltairian revisionism.

[Elrac]

Well, I'm basing that particular claim on the published opinion of a professional academic historian of science.

If you or anyone else interested has a lot of free time, you may want to skim these pages by Dr. Richard Carrier:

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2006/11/science-and-medie...

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/search/label/history%20of...

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/14660

Unfortunately, especially the first two links are into his blogs and challenge the reader to wade through a whole lot of polemic. The third one, though, makes for interesting general reading.

In the second link, he explicitly addresses a list of advancements allegedly from the early Middle Ages. I did some rather superficial research on the first three items you mentioned: windmills and water mills and pumps. Lo and behold, all three were known and in use in the Roman Empire or well before the period Carrier focuses on, to wit, 200-1200.

Admittedly, his focused time frame is shifted a bit from that of the discussion here in HN: We're talking about what happened after the Roman Empire tanked, while he's arguing against claims that Christianity was a boon to science.

[mcv]

You're not kidding about that polemic. He's projecting quite a lot of personal opinion on this. In any case, he's a professional academic historian of science. He makes it clear right at the start that there are people who disagree with him. I'm not surprised that there are people who think his way; it has been the dominant view since Voltaire at least. But that doesn't mean it's correct. It intentionally ignores many advances made during the early middle ages, because it needs to ignore those advances in order to make its claim. The simple fact that there were many advances in the fields of engineering, metallurgy, architecture, transportation, mathematics and others, easily proves he's wrong.

I'm probably mistaken about watermills, but I don't see any mention of Roman wind mills in your links, and I know those were used in the 10th century to drain swamps. Gothic architecture, with its glass walls and flying buttresses, started in the 12th century, and explicitly did not call back to Roman architecture; to the contrary: it replaced the existing Romanesque architecture. In mathematics, there's the Hindu-Arabic numerals, which, during the period from 500-1200 AD, found their way from India to Europe.

Of course if by "science" you mean very specifically philosophising in the style of Plato, you're right that Europeans rediscovered that later in the Middle Ages. But that's more of a regression in science than a resurgence of it. In fact, some of those ancient Greek ideas that held back science in some cases. For example: the idea that Earth is at the center of the solar system while other planets revolve around it in complex patterns of circles in circles. Even Galileo, who championed heliocentrism, held on to the Platonic ideal of circular orbits, and the church rejected it because it did not fit observations (the ultimate scientific reason). Only with Kepler's elliptic orbits (which Galileo ridiculed) did they let go of that Platonic idea.

I'm not saying the Romans didn't do anything or the Middle Ages were the high point of science, just that the traditional view of the Middle Ages as a scientific dead zone, and that Christianity is to blame for that, is nonsense. It's not objective history, it's projecting a very specific agenda onto history.

I'm also not arguing that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire had no negative consequences: it was devastating for trade, and therefore also to the spread of ideas, including new scientific discoveries. But that lack of trade forced communities to be more self-sufficient on a local level, which spurred innovations which weren't needed in Roman times, necessity being the mother of invention.

[Keysh]

advances made during the early middle ages, because it needs to ignore those advances in order to make its claim. The simple fact that there were many advances in the fields of engineering, metallurgy, architecture, transportation, mathematics and others

I would specifically question the argument that were "significant advances" in mathematics in the area of the former Western Empire in the early medieval period. There were advances in the Islamic lands, but Western Europe was mostly stuck with Boethius's 6th Century summaries. The Arabic/Islamic advances (and the rediscovery of much of ancient Greek mathematics) did not really spread to Western Europe until the 12th Century, when you start getting translations into Latin of mathematicians like Euclid and al-Khwarizmi.

[Keysh]

the church rejected it because it did not fit observations (the ultimate scientific reason).

No, the Church rejected heliocentrism because it clashed with scripture, and because Giordano Bruno had promoted it, so they associated it with heresy. Their argument was that it was OK to use heliocentric models purely as calculational devices, as long as one did not attempt to argue that it somehow reflected reality. The Church did not begin to formally accept heliocentrism until the 1750s, when they dropped the general prohibition against heliocentric books. The prohibition against Copernicus's book De Revolutionibus was only rescinded in 1835.

[mcv]

That the church rejected heliocentrism because it clashed with scripture is a common misinterpretation. It had nothing to do with scripture, and indeed scripture says nothing definitive about it in a way that would trump observation. The church did not have a problem with heliocentrism before Galileo started picking fights over it, and it seriously considered Galileo's model. Galileo's model did not match the observations of the time though, because Galileo insisted on circular orbits, which was wrong. (Who knows what would have happened if his model had been shown to match observations?) When Kepler proposed a model with elliptical orbits, Galileo even ridiculed that idea.

Once Galileo had fallen out of favour with the pope for insulting him (in a book that was supposed to be an evenhanded comparison of geocentrism and heliocentrism, he had a character called "Simplicio" repeat arguments that the pope had used), he got investigated for that, and eventually got house arrest. It's entirely possible a heresy charge got piled on top at some point, but that's not how it started; the pope was entirely willing to consider heliocentrism. And Galileo was not the first to propose it either.

Perhaps it should be mentioned that Kepler actually had religious reasons for proposing his heliocentric model, believing the sun to represent Jesus, around which the universe revolves. That didn't stop him from using observation, and thus science, to perfect his model.

Many of these people held what we now would consider pseudoscientific beliefs: Galileo insisted on the Platonic idea of circular orbits, Kepler was an astrologer, Newton had some weird alchemical ideas. And many, many important scientists have been devout Christians. That never stopped them from advancing science.

[Keysh]

That the church rejected heliocentrism because it clashed with scripture is a common misinterpretation.

No, it's the simple truth, as the Church and other documents from the time attest.

Galileo's model did not match the observations of the time

Galileo did not have his own model of the heavens; he was a proponent of Copernicus's heliocentric model, which gave predictions approximately as accurate (or inaccurate) as those of the Ptolemaic model. Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus, however, did render the Ptolemaic model untenable, as most astronomers admitted once they had confirmed Galileo's observations themselves. After that, the debate was between heliocentrism and various neo-geocentric models, like Tycho Brahe's.

Galileo may well have offended the Pope with the character of Simplicius, but that character appeared in the book Dialog Concerning the Two World Systems, which was published in 1632. Copernicus's De Revolutionibus was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, along with other heliocentric texts, 16 years earlier, in 1616. (This was also the time of the Inquisition's first investigation of Galileo, for promulgating doctrines contrary to scripture.)

The official Church decree of 5 March 1616 read, in part: "This Holy Congregation has also learned about the spreading and acceptance by many of the false Pythagorean doctrine, altogether contrary to the Holy Scripture, that the earth moves and the sun is motionless, which is also taught by Nicholaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and by Diego de Zuñiga's On Job. This may be seen from a certain letter published by a certain Carmelite Father, whose title is Letter of the Reverend Father Paolo Foscarini, on the Pythagorean and Copernican Opinion of the Earth's Motion and Sun's Rest and on the New Pythagorean World System (Naples: Lazzaro Scoriggio, 1615), in which the said Father tries to show that the above-mentioned doctrine of the sun's rest at the center of the world and the earth's motion is consonant with the truth and does not contradict Holy Scripture. Therefore, in order that this opinion may not creep any further to the prejudice of Catholic truth, the Congregation has decided that the books by Nicolaus Copernicus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) and Diego de Zuñiga (On Job) be suspended until corrected; but that the book of the Carmelite Father Paolo Antonio Foscarini be completely prohibited and condemned; and that all other books which teach the same be likewise prohibited..."

("Corrected" in this case means with their heliocentric content censored.)

See the following for more of the background: http://copernicus.torun.pl/en/revolution/reception/2/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1989JHA....20....1W/abstra...

[Keysh]

James Fallows is not a "professional historian", he's a journalist. Go ahead and argue with him; this is a very confused and silly article.

[Elrac]

Ah, sorry about muddling that up. I understand that Fallows is a journalist, but he looks to be distilling the ideas of "real" historians including Peter Brown and Walter Scheidel. So to my way of thinking (and arguing), Fallows is just the proxy (facade? I suck at design patterns) for those guys.

[Keysh]

Peter Brown and Walter Scheidel are indeed real historians (Brown of "Late Antiquity" and Scheidel of the Roman Empire). Not everything they're quoted as saying is necessarily that solid, though. For example, if Scheidel is really attributing "the dawn of the university" to the fall of the Western Empire, then he's eliding about seven or eight hundred years. (Fall of Western Empire: 5th Century; dawn of universities: 12th or 13th Century.)