[addaon]

The Middle Ages, for all of the holes in our documentation, is the best understood extended period where people looked back on a well-remembered past that was more organized, in many ways more advanced, and more “civilized” than the age in which they found themselves. It led to a generational mental model of inevitable decline, or of cycles. Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of humankind is progress, and has been for centuries — this difference, and its impact on society, is absolutely fascinating to me and is part of the draw of learning about the Middle Ages (or, for that matter, reading about Middle Earth).

[majormajor]

> Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of humankind is progress

I don't think this is true of the under-20s in western countries. Technologically, yes. Socially? Culturally? Mental-health-wise? Prospects of doing better than their parents? Not from the kids I talk to.

I think that's fairly unique in the last couple of centuries outside of certain religious groups with occasional end-times/moral-panic phases.

[addaon]

Perhaps. But the narratives we as a society build our culture around are a serious low pass filter — time constant of centuries, not years. The pain around short-term regressions is because there’s such a strong narrative against which to contrast them — the same steps backward, against a backdrop of inevitability, would hit differently, no?

[jcranmer]

> It led to a generational mental model of inevitable decline, or of cycles.

No, it didn't. That model of decline or cycle describes essentially every cultural viewpoint--the view of an inevitably inclining state of humanity is quite rare, and I'm not aware of anyone advancing that before the rise of humanism. It predates not only the fall of the Roman Empire, but the rise of the Roman Republic before it, probably predating even the Greek and other civilizations that arose out of the Bronze Age collapse.

Medieval civilization did live amongst the ruins of the earlier Roman civilization, but their experience did not originate the idea that humanity lives after the end of a golden age.