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Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

> I bet ancient people saw themselves as the pinnacle of civilisation, much like we do now.

I think the Romans were right to believe that, and so are we today.

But the ride wasn't sa clean, steady slope up. For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.

Now we live in the first period in history where knowledge of history is accessible to almost any person. So as a regular guy you can have a good sense of where to place these times on the scale of civilization.

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> For example there's a reason the dark ages are called dark. Most people of the time (except the few educated) didn't know there was something better in another time and another place. They probably thought that's as good as anyone's ever had.

I am pretty sure you are wrong on multiple counts there.

1. The "dark ages" were called dark because of a lack of written records, after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its centralised systems and imperial bureaucracy.

2. A lot of people did know there had been a different age before. Even if not literate they would regard the literate as the source of knowledge and every village would have some literate people.

3. Life was better for many people. An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.

https://www.medievalists.net/2023/06/middle-ages-dark-ages/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

Well that was trigger happy and arguing for the sale of arguing. We have different definitions of what an advanced civilization is.

On #1, do you see the lack of written records as cutting down bureaucracy? Because historians see it as a period of civilization downturn and turmoil. No focus on things outside the necessities which were mostly about survival. The enlightenment or renaissance didn’t have these names for the return to documenting thoroughly. It was because of everything in between.

#2 “A lot of people” says nothing. The average person in the year 900 had no formal education so would probably know at best some stories or legends about what came 500 years before. But let’s not pretend this changes the meaning of what I said.

#3 Many people today are slaves so were the dark ages more civilized?

I think that's true (particularly about the Dark ages not being uncultured), but in some places, the signs that what came before was vastly superior technologically (and culturally) would have been all around them.

E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.

And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period – in the service of religion in the monasteries, of course, but also in what we'd know call 'science'. E.g. wasn't Aristotle taken as the go to authority in scientific matters for the scholastics?

> E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.

Yes, but

1. Britain was where there is the best case for a serious regression. 2. Building those systems was also a matter of imperial priorities and imperial centralisation. Smaller kingdoms did not need it.

> And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period

Much was, and Aristotle was taken as far too much of an authority. There were probably not many advances in science during the early middle ages, but there were in high and late medieval. Even in the early middle ages there were advances in architecture and agriculture and some amazing art produced.

I chose Roman Britain because I live in a city (Deva) which was once meant to be the capital of the whole province, where the evidence of lost glories would have been glaringly apparent to everybody for a long time, even though the settlement was still major in contemporary terms.

More generally, some technology was lost everywhere (well, in the Western world anyway): nobody knew how to make waterproof concrete again until a manuscript reappeared in the fifteenth century.

Roman Britain is just one example, but it does disprove the general thesis that people always think they are the pinnacle of civilisation – and it's by far from the only example, of course. For much of the next thousand years (and beyond) Classical Rome, and later, Ancient Greece were seen as a lost golden age, something to learn from and aspire to (and adapt to religious dogma in a fallen world which was going to end fairly shortly anyway…)

Of course they had their fair share of brilliant people and they made significant advances and it's facile to disparage them ("Dark ages") but it does seem like a very different mental view of the world.

Wasn't the Renaissance about the idea that, after nearly a thousand years, society was finally approaching the levels that Rome had achieved?

There were many medieval advances in technology, art, architecture and science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology

There were serious scientific advances including the beginnings of the scientific method which goes back about 500 yeas earlier than the renaissance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_science_in_the_Middle...

>There were many medieval advances in technology, art, architecture and science.

My favorite is the gothic arch because it basically decomposes into the math of man hours, calories and the work of moving stone. They didn't have the surpluses the Romans did so they were forced to invent a more efficient arch.

Yes, I'm not denying that there were a lot of developments in that time period - more that there was a perception that things were declining, even if that wasn't actually true.

Medieval != Dark Ages

The Dark Ages refers to the 2-3 centuries immediately after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Medieval era / Middle Ages extend all the way to the start of the Renaissance.

The lack of written records during the Dark Ages is a sign of a major civilizational regression.

Writing and learning retreated to a relatively small group - the clergy. The cities that had thrived under the empire - and the public works that supported them - disappeared.

There has been a historiographical tendency to downplay the significance of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and to euphemistically refer to it as a "transformation." But we're talking about a massive decline in literacy and economic activity, and there are all sorts of indicators (like average human height) that show that people were dramatically worse off.

> An obvious example was the decline of slavery ( a huge proportion of the population of the Roman Empire) but the descendants of slaves were not the only people who benefitted from the removal of imperial power, and heavy imperial taxes, etc.

Look at how a lot of those societies were structured. Were those people really doing "better" or are we just assuming that because of the biases our modern culture brings?

Being not a slave across the rome-middle ages boundary is like having a degree in liberal arts. It might've meant something at first but the back slide basically watered it down to nothing for a lot of people. That's why it went away. There was no point in maintaining it as an institution generally after Rome fell.

More broadly, there's a reason nobody really cared about slavery, rights, freedom, etc, etc, until the 1600s+ (i.e. the beginning of the off ramp toward industrialized societies). Prior to then so much of society was enslaved by the literal physics of the work that needed to be done to keep a roof over everyone's head and food in their stomachs that it didn't really matter. Almost nobody was in a place to exert more influence upon their life arc than the wind does upon the path of a stone thrown through the air (which is to say some but not much) so society didn't expend effort to hash out the details of something that wasn't relevant. Only once there were more surpluses the various shades of freedom become something that society could benefit from defining.

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