When Did the The Dark Ages Really End?

Consider the following postulate about Western culture:

• The Dark Ages did not end in 1500 AD but merely began to end around that time.

While science and technology have the power to enlighten, progress in these areas does not in and of itself constitute enlightenment in the broader population and does nothing in and of itself to promote rational thought as the only valid basis for useful belief systems.  Even those who pursue science and technology may retain old ideas that contradict scientific knowledge, in particular ideas that:

• contradict scientific knowledge that lies outside of their specialty area
• conform to irrational belief systems to which they are bound by peer pressure

Mental attitudes or mindsets, moreover, can linger from past ages in the background, in spite of the logical transitive closure of what science and technology imply.  Consider these common examples:

• Do people who believe in a personified overseeing deity believe so:
  • on the basis of objective evidence, or
  • because their social peers expect them to?
  • If on the basis of objective evidence, then:
    • why do these people differ so widely on the names, agendas and other attributes of said deity?
• Do people who believe in scriptural creationism believe so:
  • on the basis of objective evidence, or
  • because their social peers expect them to?
  • If on the basis of objective evidence, then:
    • why do these people differ so widely on the time frame, timeline and other details of the creation story?
• Do people who dismiss the process of natural selection do so:
  • on the basis of objective evidence, or
  • because their social peers expect them to?
  • If on the basis of objective evidence, then:
    • why do these people differ so widely on the origin of species?

Ideologies like these linger on today in spite of the Englightenment and the acceleration in scientific and technological progress it brought on.  For these reasons it could therefore indeed be said that:

• The Dark Ages did not end in 1500 AD but merely began to end around that time.

From this perspective, we might suppose moreover that a full ideological recovery from the Dark Ages can be expected to take at least as long as the period itself lasted.  If ideology has a momentum analogous to that of a moving object such as an ocean liner then we cannot expect it to change course all at once on a certain date, no matter what sort of ideological icebergs may have been sighted up ahead.  Taking the commonly accepted start and end dates for the Dark Ages of 476 AD to 1500 AD (plus or minus a decade on the end date), that’s 1014 years.  But wait!  1500 + 1014 is not yet behind us.  That is the year 2514, which, as of this writing, lies half a millenium beyond our grasp.  What if that is how far we still have to go before we can expect of Western culture as a whole that it has fully emerged from the Dark Ages?

There’s a slight twist in this story.  Just as the Dark Ages were ending, Western culture broke into several parts as explorers like Columbus and Magellan set out to expand the horizons and fortunes of their sponsoring states.  Whatever small amount of momentum that Western Europe might already have gained toward full englightenment would have been left behind by such explorers, thereby stunting the recovery of the new colonies almost before it began.  Colonial recovery was further stunted by one of the two main motivations for such missions: the promulgation of Dark Ages ideology – arguably just a variation on the commercial motive.

I would ask of those who still consider the Dark Ages to have ended around 1500 AD whether they can declare with a straight face that a culture characterized by the following is not still mired in Dark Ages ideology:

• Westerners yet abound and even expand their numbers who cite Biblical scripture as objective evidence.
• Legal battles in a certain outlying Western colony over the teaching of Biblical creationism in public schools rage on even more frequently than they did in 1925.
• A small cadre of Congressional leaders in that same outlying colony continue to hold out in denial of scientifically accepted conclusions about climate change.
• A modern-day detective thriller about hidden Bible codes gains a huge following.  The point over which its characters are willing to cross oceans and continents to risk death in exposing it or kill to keep it secret from public knowledge is whether Biblical scriptures or hidden clues in Renaissance art yet remain undiscovered suggesting that a certain rabbi during the reign of Augustus in the Roman province of Judea may have had a girlfriend.
• Without a controlling interest, it is all but impossible to change what you do within a modern business entity.
  • I assert this unequivocally based on 30 years of experience in the technology sector.
    • It is also painfully common in the entertainment industry, where it is known as type casting.
    • The same actor is cast and recast in unrelated films playing similar characters, often wearing much the same costume and will sometimes even be obliged to speak much the same lines.
    • Only the big stars (those with a controlling interest in the production) can break out of this professional Groundhog Day and play the roles they choose to further or round out their careers.
  • Thus without a controlling interest, you will always be associated within a business entity with the specialty area through which you were introduced to that business entity.
  • With protracted pressure and strong recommendations, you can venture into new territory, but:
    • regardless of your performance in the new role, you will soon find yourself back in your original department.
  • It is very easy to do something completely different.  The only catch is that you have to do it in another company.
    • In the new company, you will always be associated with the new specialty area through which you were introduced to the company.
    • Any attempt to move into a different one (even the same one you couldn’t get out of in a previous company) will ultimately fail.
  • This is the most striking vestige of Dark Ages social organization that I’ve yet noticed.
    • During the Medieval era, the families in a community would specialize in various crafts so that the community could function efficiently in the absence of higher education.
    • A typical family would invest in the tools of the trade and pass these tools and the knowledge surrounding their use down through the generations using the apprenticeship system.
    • This is how names like Cooper, Smith and Carpenter proliferated during the Dark Ages.  People knew you by what you did.
  • After 500 years there’s been a mixing and diversification of surnames but the same outmoded social organization lingers on.  Despite many a brave claim to the contrary, all modern civil organizations ultimately devolve into Coopers, Smiths and Carpenters with little or no lateral mobility.  Submarine crews know better from experience than to leave themselves vulnerable to single points of failure and use cross-training to reduce the risk of incapacitation.  Incapacitated business entities don’t sink as quickly as incapacitated submarines but sink they must and sink they do, just as fully and finally.  On the postmortem committee for a project that had succumbed to management’s beguilement over the course of two painful years by a single self-serving narcissist who had long since flown the coop, everyone got to say what they thought went wrong but management’s only goal was to simply address the matter as a formal gesture, close the book and look the other way.  To do otherwise would have called for true understanding, confessions all around and a great deal of embarrassment.  I believe it will be many centuries before Western culture as a whole can outgrow this obsolete yet deeply entrenched social dynamic.  Until that happens, what you do is how they know you.  If you’re a sufficiently deft and persuasive narcissist or psychopath, on the other hand, you get to choose – how they know you is whatever you say you do.
• Premeditated nepotism, for lack of a better term, is another Dark Ages practice that lingers on in the modern workplace.  If you can’t do something you want to do (typically gain promotion), never mind the qualifications.  Just marry into the desired position, or at least into the career track that will get you there.
  • This practice is most prevalent in large and lucrative government contract projects in which people are paid more for the time they charge than for the results they produce.  This type of incentive structure is more inherently tolerant of corruption than are those organized around the pure, open-market profit motive of businesses operating in the consumer or secondary markets.  While the latter environments favor discipline, fairness and productivity over time, the former lay themselves wide open to exploitation by nepotists, opportunists, narcissists and psychopaths.
  • In all the time I spent on government contracts, I could never bring myself to stoop so low as to avail myself of the numerous opportunities for premeditated nepotism that came my way.  Most of these opportunities were clearly sanctioned by management though never spoken as such – not to me, at least.  I saw a few who had availed themselves, however.  My impression was one of kept men or women, socially muted and politically sheltered, as though stranded in time and space.  This was never a lifestyle I could have sustained as it conflicted with my personal goals and so I always turned away from such situations – a decision which always led by and by to the door.  If we can’t expand the cozy little dynasty we envision, I could almost hear them thinking on my way out the door, we’ll at least have a cozy little silence on the matter.
• It’s been all but impossible since the Roman empire fell to find a decent Roman bath.  Only in the late 20th Century has this crowning achievement of Roman technology and lifestyle begun to make a comeback, but you still can’t find one without traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to just the right 5-star resort.  We still use Roman arches, so why not Roman baths?  Here are a few of the answers:
  • because during the Dark Ages, Roman arches were needed for the construction of churches and monasteries but Roman baths were not.
  • because the vast network of Roman aqueducts that once brought clean water to many towns and cities throughout Western Europe were systematically dismantled during the Dark Ages and their materials repurposed for the construction of churches and monasteries.
  • because Roman baths aren’t much use without a renewable supply of clean water.
  • Do we see a pattern emerging here?  Did lavish bath houses fall out of vogue for other reasons during the Dark Ages?  Certainly the knowledge and infrastructure needed to build them disappeared along with Roman civilization but did such facilities also become a symbol of Roman decadence and excess as the Church took the reins of public administration from secular Romans? Would the preservation of the aqueducts and the facilities they served have limited the spread of the Black Death?
  • The benefits of the 3-part Roman bath experience go beyond mere cleanliness and disease prevention.
    • Cycling between the tepidarium, the calderium and the frigidarium exercises the circulatory system in ways that other therapeutic regimens cannot.
    • The tepidarium serves both to gently introduce the body to what follows and, for those who need it, as a transitional pool between the other two.  The calderium forces the body to shunt blood to the extremities in an attempt to convect heat away, while the frigidarium does the opposite, forcing the body to pool blood into its core in an attempt to conserve heat.
    • It is easy to see the appeal of this system to, for example, a Roman legionary, as its regular use would render the body extremely robust to conditions that might otherwise induce heat stroke.
    • It is also easy for those who use such facilities to see how the regular application of this regimen can rejuvenate a person both physically and mentally, much to the benefit of his or her quantity and quality of life and profession, whatever that may be.
    • The Roman bath served also as a place to exercise, unwind and socialize after a day’s work.  Modern churches serve but a fraction of these functions and usually just once a week, whereas the local baths in the Roman world hosted a daily ritual that everyone looked forward to.  Some modern church services allow for no more than a few minutes of socializing during the sermon, after which everyone promptly goes home.  And oh, yes – weekly sermons as we know them today originated in the Dark Ages for the benefit of the illiterate masses.  Today they can only serve to bestow upon most modern congregations a unified selection, edition and interpretation of scriptures available in many forms to anyone with an ebook reader and a basic education – tools that also provide access to the vast and rapidly expanding body of accumulated human knowledge.
  • Despite these many benefits, Roman style baths remain rare in Western civilization and appear to remain a symbol of Roman decadence and excess.  To me this is just another of many signs that the Dark Ages are not yet over.

• Many among those who don’t go so far as to deny the findings of modern paleoanthropology still believe that primitive humans lived in caves – that only the advent of religion and modern society permitted them to live long and healthy lives.
  • Aside from the paleoanthropological findings that refute this view, I believe that the cultural inclination to it is rooted in Dark Ages attitudes.
  • The paleoanthropological reason for this belief results from a lag between the discovery of cave paintings and a complete scientific assimilation of the meaning of such findings.  It is often the case, as with the myth of progressive brain cell death with age, that the initial faulty conclusions are taken up and assimilated by society before the results of subsequent analysis have come in.  By the time they do, the social understanding of the subject has already been saturated by the faulty initial findings.
    • In the case of progressive brain cell death, this result was later found to be an artifact of the brain cell counting procedure that made use of sonication to tease apart the brain cells before making a sample count under a microscope.  The sonication process was preferentially destroying older brain cells because they are more brittle than younger brain cells.  Glial cells, which constitute the vast majority of brain cells but were later found to serve a mainly structural support function, cloud the related myth that humans use only a small percentage of their total brain power.  Biological features, be they known, unknown, understood or yet enigmatic, don’t evolve except through mutation followed by advantageous usage, from which one can infer based on pure logic alone that all neuroanatomical features, just like all of the other parts of an organism, have remained in use until the present or at least until the relatively recent past (as in the case of the appendix or tonsils).
  • As it turns out, prehistoric peoples left paintings in caves because that was the only place from which weather and vandalism would not wash them away.  For all we know, they left paintings everywhere but for obvious reasons only the cave paintings survived to be discovered by modern explorers.  Either way, we must give the artists credit for realizing early on that paintings created outside of caves would not last through the ages for the benefit of subsequent generations.  We can infer that this legacy was important to these ancient artists from the thousands of years over which the users of the Chauvet cave in France maintained, preserved and added to the paintings only recently discovered there.  Aside from its obvious use as a shelter for paintings, the Chauvet cave most likely served as a venue for spiritual ceremonies.  One of the clearest findings about the Chauvet cave is that its human users never lived there.
  • Caves are not sanitary places to live.  Most have poor drainage, few have adequate ventilation and moreover there simply aren’t – and weren’t – enough of them to go around such that every prehistoric family could find a cave of their own in which to live.  Finding an otherwise suitable location that was also close to the neighbors would have quickly mushroomed into a problem of truly epic proportions.
  • A much clearer picture of prehistoric lifestyles was revealed to the relatively modern Norse and European explorers of North America.  The proud and fearless warriors and hunters, the “noble savages” with physiques to die for and a total and sustainable command of their environment by whose grace the sickly and wheezing Pilgrims survived their first New England winter hardly fit the image of cowering cave dwellers.
  • Most documented cases of sustained cave dwelling by humans were for a single and consistent purpose – to hide from other humans.
    • Close examination of the pre-Columbian cliff dwellings in Southwestern North America suggest their historicity as refuges from unfamiliar invaders – by one theory, native explorers form Central America.  A more commonly accepted theory concerning the massive stone pueblos at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico cites oppressive class structures such as the one through which the Spartans enslaved in perpetuity the entire ethnicity of the Helots.
    • Some of the caves surrounding the Qumran settlement on the West Bank of the Jordan River were used as hiding places for sacred scrolls during the Biblical era.  Some were used as dwelling places for settlers hiding from the Roman legions who had pitched an outpost camp on the site of the original Essene settlement nearby, most probably during the Siege of Jerusalem under the command of Vespasian and Titus.  The first-century Judeo-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, who was present at the Siege of Jerusalem as a liaison for the Roman high command in their negotiations with the fortress defenders, underscored their reasons for hiding (and for hiding their sacred scrolls) in a passage on the Essenes: The war with the Romans tried their souls through and through by every variety of test.  Racked and twisted, burnt and broken, and made to pass through every instrument of torture in order to induce them to blaspheme their lawgiver or to eat some forbidden thing, never once did they cringe to their persecutors or shed a tear.
    • Dating from 5,000 BC, the ancient kingdom of Cappadocia in central Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) has lain at the crossroads of conquering armies on the march from all directions.  Though called by different names down through the ages, the Cappadocian people have used the karst topography and readily-excavatable igneous geology to maintain the stability and permanence of their unique enclave through the construction and maintenance of 30 miles of cleverly concealed tunnels and caves whose entrances, terraces and overlooks roll, curve, arch and blend with the landscape – virtually invisible from the outside, in many cases even at close range – that have hidden and protected their people, their wealth and their livelihoods for 7,000 years.  This strategy continues even today in the Turkish tourism and hospitality industry to which the caves of Cappadocia add a unique twist for travelers and celebrities seeking the next level up in privacy and natural beauty.  It is important to note that even the ancient Cappadocians were not primitive people but the creators of a sophisticated, durable and resilient civilization who used the unique topography of the region not as such for shelter and protection from wild animals but to conceal both themselves and the prosperity that their central location along many a trade route afforded from ambitious and avaricious powers on the march through their highly connected and strategic territory – what the Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu called key ground.
  • Although it is a myth that the catacombs of Rome, for example, originated as hiding places (since their construction, so it is argued, would have been too easily noticed), their use as refuges for religious burials, religious practice and for the display of religious works of art is well established.  The extensive use of catacombs for these purposes before the acceptance and proliferation of Christianity leading up to the Dark Ages could have built up within the early Christian community a cultural memory of “living in caves” before civilization (Christianity in the parochial view) began in earnest and could be openly promulgated.
  • Be that as it may, to the degree that English Puritans were obliged to take any sort of physical or societal refuge form persecution in the 16th and early 17th Centuries, the Wampanoag who greeted the first Pilgrims in 1620 were the first in their tribal history to encounter bonafide cave dwellers.  An how it must have shown!

So where does that leave the various modern fragments of Western Civilization?  Still cowering in the cold, dank, unhealthy Dark Ages with 500 years to go before emerging fully into the light?  Moving faster than that?  Slower?  In the wrong direction?  Aware enough to care?  Whichever course this ideological ocean liner chooses, science will be there to guide it and technology will be there to speed it along to its ultimate destiny.  How far ahead it can see and what sort of obstacles it can detect will depend more on its way of looking than on the sophistication of its sensing equipment.