I'm seeing parallels between what the newspapers of the 1920s were reporting and Gramps49s OP. For example, the decline in institutional trust post-war seems to have been seen as a portent of a new Dark Age in the 1920s, and is seen as such by Gramps49 now.
Rather than argue about earlier "Dark Ages", let's discuss what may currently and imminently be happening.
As @North East Quine suggests, looking at earlier predictions of “Dark Ages” might inform discussion of what’s happening now and what we think might happen. At the least, it seems to me, they might counsel some caution as to human track records on accurately predicting what will come.
The Roman Empire didn't fall in 410 AD. The Western Roman Empire fell. The Empire didn't stop at Dalmatia. It continued on to the Black Sea (or nearly). The eastern part remained The Roman Empire until 1453.
I think the value of reason and the belief in civilised discourse about differences of opinion and belief are currently out of fashion. Whatever one means by the Dark Ages, the discounting of reason must be one dimension of them.
People, you are all hung up on two words. After some pushback I rephrased the question to: Do you see a contraction of civilization in the immediate future that could last for some time?
People, you are all hung up on two words. After some pushback I rephrased the question to: Do you see a contraction of civilization in the immediate future that could last for some time?
Are people “hung up” on two words? Or did the initial use of those two words prompt thoughts and ideas that are relevant to this discussion, even if not directly responsive to the question you posed as you want it answered. I’ve found the various posts thinking through “Dark Ages” to be helpful in considering we ing what you asked, and in avoiding simplistic answers.
As has been noted many times on the Ship, you can launch the question, but you can’t control the direction in which it sails after that.
People, you are all hung up on two words. After some pushback I rephrased the question to: Do you see a contraction of civilization in the immediate future that could last for some time?
Genuine question: what do you mean by civilisation? If you mean modernism in the sense of advances in science and technology that's one thing. But in many senses the cost of advanced lifestyles has been paid by other people.
For example it isn't uncommon for food to be cheaper in a western European supermarket that it is in the country where it was grown. The technology improvements have led to an abundance of affordable fruit in those supermarkets from around the world, but that hasn't necessarily led to changes in wealth disparity for the people who harvest it.
I think the value of reason and the belief in civilised discourse about differences of opinion and belief are currently out of fashion. Whatever one means by the Dark Ages, the discounting of reason must be one dimension of them.
When was the era of civilised discourse and the value of reason? I must have missed it.
Previously, I posted on the Trump, Hell tread, that he was wanting to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research which is a key center not only studying climate change, but one of the centers for accurate weather forecasting. Without it, we would not have models that help to predict the paths of hurricanes or the patterns for tornado weather, let alone drought conditions, or rainy seasons. If this center closes, we could lose over 50 years of weather research. While there are similar centers world wide,when one of them permanently closes it in effect creates a black hole of information. And like all black holes, I fear it would suck vital information critical to other meteorological centers' outputs. That is an example of a contraction of civilization as we know it.
I'm finally finding time to browse the British Newspaper Archive, to see how many of Gramps49's points were also regarded as the precursor to a new Dark Age in the 1920s. I am only drawing on articles which explicitly refer to "a new Dark Age."
Here are two parallel viewpoints:
Fourth, we have become technologically dependent, but it does not mean we are technologically literate. People are relying on complex systems they no longer understand. When knowledge becomes concentrated in a small elite, societies become fragile.
A Professor Burnet, Professor of Greek at St Andrews, saw something similar in 1923, but with regard to science, rather than technology.
"We are told...that specialism is the remedy. But specialism has its drawbacks. The recent enormous growth of potential knowledge has been accompanied by an a corresponding growth of actual ignorance."
Fifth, there is the rise of anti-intellectualism. Libraries, universities, and research institutions face political and economic pressure. Knowledge becomes harder to preserve and transmit.
A sermon preached at Manchester College in 1923 pointed to the penury faced by the educated people of Central Europe, for whom "books have become an impossible luxury" and students cannot afford light to study by night. "The mental impoverishment of one nation is the mental impoverishment of all."
This isn't a complaint about anti-intellectualism, but is a point about economic pressure (the result of war) on universities, making knowledge harder to preserve and transmit.
I think the value of reason and the belief in civilised discourse about differences of opinion and belief are currently out of fashion. Whatever one means by the Dark Ages, the discounting of reason must be one dimension of them.
When was the era of civilised discourse and the value of reason? I must have missed it.
See the link to the Age of Enlightenment above. Of course there were issues during that age about which folks were not enlightened, but the emphases on reason, the importance of each individual, and the value of scientific discovery were commonly held amongst intellectuals.
I think those three factors still have abiding value.
Well, the principles came before universal suffrage and education. Neither of which existed before and during the Age of Enlightenment. It takes a while for good ideas to get taken up politically.
Unfortunately it seems to take less time for bad ideas to get taken up politically.
Well, the principles came before universal suffrage and education. Neither of which existed before and during the Age of Enlightenment. It takes a while for good ideas to get taken up politically.
Unfortunately it seems to take less time for bad ideas to get taken up politically.
I don't have the exact dates but in Australia women got the vote in around 1902 but First Nation indigenous people didn't get it until the 1940s.
The "universal" part of universal suffrage is not necessarily defined the way we might assume.
And let's not even get started on the horrific history of the schooling system in Australia for indigenous people.
The "Enlightenment" went hand-in-glove with Eugenics and Colonialism and brutality. These things were not aberrations, this was part of the whole thing.
Orthodox Christians are often suspected of obscurantism and yearning after an idealised past - and with good reason. You will find people who think we should go back to Anglo-Saxon England or the time of the Tsars.
I tend to the view that there was certainly 'light in the Enlightenment' but that it wasn't all unmitigated sweetness and light. @Basketactortale has drawn attention to some unsavoury aspects of the whole kit and caboodle.
That said, it's not as if pre-Enlightenment colonialism or conquest were lacking in brutality. The Conquistadores, for instance. Genghiz Khan for a non-Christianised example.
I wouldn't trade in modern medicine, democracy or other products of the Enlightenment for a romanticised medievalism.
But neither would I overlook some of the more shadowy aspects.
How we juggle all that and hold them in tension is easier said than done.
That 'going to hell in a handbasket' feeling I get when trying to figure out the irrational thinking behind US strikes in north-west Nigeria on Christmas Day to supposedly protect Christians there, along with Pete Hegseth's obfuscations about the military build-up in the Caribbean. What @Barnabas62 says about the lack of reasonable discourse seems to apply.
Well, the journey away from human cruelty is essentially a personal one. In terms of more general social values, there are plenty of ups and downs.
For example, in Shakespeare, we have the ironic juxtaposition of Portia’s fine observation on the quality of mercy, followed immediately by antisemitism. It jars!
The Age of Enlightenment, which was far from perfect of course, is reckoned to have been followed by the Age of Ideology, which had and continues to have appalling consequences. In the iconic TV series “The Age of Man” (unfortunate sexist title but nevertheless) there is an arresting quote by the presenter Dr Jacob Bronowski, speaking at Aushwitz.
It's said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers.
Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken."
I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died here, to stand here as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.
What concerns me, as I journey through old age, is that the painful lessons which Bronowski expresses poignantly, seem to me to be forgotten in the increasingly bitter culture wars. It feels to me like a journey towards the dark again,
Eugenics was science. There was a whole department of study at University College London. It wasn't some wild idea spread by mavericks, it was at the centre of the respectable academic establishment.
And it still is. Ideas that started from people frantically measuring skulls to prove the superiority of the "white race" are still taught at British universities today.
Eugenics is science - in the sense that selective breeding and sterilisation is a thing we know how to do and that knowledge can be formulated as disprovable hypotheses. The issue is that it is massively unethical.
Race is a social construct, which can be studied and about which scientific hypotheses can be formulated. What we know is that racist statements about the superiority of the construct of the white race - in terms of a large range of variables including IQ - are wrong in empirical terms as those hypotheses can be and have been disproved by scientific enquiry. The value judgments racists and ablists make about whose lives are worthy, are not a scientific hypotheses.
(Aspects of eugenics remain government policy today, prenatal scans are not primarily provided to support you in preparing for the birth of a disabled child. Likewise, a lot of genetic research aims to prevent the birth of people with a range of different genetic conditions - via genetic counselling. There is controversy about what we should be trying to “cure”)
Most basic statistical ideas originated from Eugenics. Galton, Fisher, Pearson. All part of the history of statistics, but all enthusiastic believers in eugenics.
Ideas derived from Eugenics permeate much of human biology, sociology, psychology, development, economics, ecology and so on. It's part of the fundamental bedrock of how these subjects are taught that people rarely even notice it.
In fairness, it's not hard to see how decent, reasonable people could arrive at eugenics as a solution. It remains the case that genetics do have a strong influence on predisposition to disease or intelligence, and it's superficially attractive to imagine a world where people are, on average, cleverer and healthier. The problem is that, even if you could be sure about the genes involved, there is no path to those sunlit uplands had doesn't go through an absolute horror show. I'm not sure the latter point was obvious from the outset, though clearly it is now.
Eugenics is massively discredited. Which does not stop its repugnant ideas living on. I used to think that the fresh air of critical thinking would blow away its nonsense but, unfortunately, prejudices have proved harder to deal with than I believed. Like other flawed thinking, eugenics feeds on prejudice and ignorance.
Statistics is a branch of mathematics and morally neutral like its parent. Eugenicists are not the only ones who have misused statistical methodologies for nefarious purposes.
Eugenics in the 1920s did not seem as unreasonable as it does now. Then, provision of birth control to e.g. married women with TB for whom pregnancy was life-threatening was within the ambit of "eugenics." What might be described as the milder end of eugenic thought in the 1920s is now mainstream, and no longer thought of as "eugenics." At least one medical man opposed "eugenics" on the basis that it would mean Britain would have no supply of "cannon-fodder" were the First World War to be repeated.
Eugenics is massively discredited. Which does not stop its repugnant ideas living on. I used to think that the fresh air of critical thinking would blow away its nonsense but, unfortunately, prejudices have proved harder to deal with than I believed. Like other flawed thinking, eugenics feeds on prejudice and ignorance.
Statistics is a branch of mathematics and morally neutral like its parent. Eugenicists are not the only ones who have misused statistical methodologies for nefarious purposes.
I don't really think of things as being morally neutral when they were generated in a corrupt way.
And I think powerful ideas can't be simply rejected as being ignorance, it's a deeper thing than that. It speaks to a constructed reality and an intellectual pursuit of trying to make the data fit the preconceptions. If nothing else, that's an important lesson to tell everyone who is learning to use the statistical tools.
In recent years, I have become increasingly aware how much of science is ingrained with values and ideas despite hiding behind supposed neutrality.
For example the simple reality that many medications do not take account of the complexity and variety of women's bodies, that the standard model commonly assumes the patient is an average sized man.
In ecology, problematic language is still widely used. It means almost nothing to speak of "indigenous", "native"and "invasive", "alien" species in the context of the British Isles where we have very few unique species and where the collection we currently have was very largely set by the last ice age. This language in fact is a deliberate echo of eugenics. It's in such common usage that few stop to think about it and what the words actually mean in context. We collectively "want" and value some species and not others.
That’s the postmodern view and of course there is some truth in it. But not too much. The peer review process is a reasonable protection against distorted scientific findings.
Cynicism about the scientific process leads to all sorts of evils. For example, the denial of the value of vaccination.
Postmodernism asserts that truth is a matter of opinion and power. It isn’t. Given the fallibility of human beings, anything can be corrupted, anyone bought. But the key word is “can”. Two plus two really does equal four. Whatever the Party asserts it to be.
If we forget that, we really are heading for the Dark Ages.
Comments
Not so much for all the people and cultures destroyed by those who believed they were superior, though.
Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?”
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
A good message at any time but, especially at Christmas - thank you.
It's all a question of perception.
As has been noted many times on the Ship, you can launch the question, but you can’t control the direction in which it sails after that.
By the way, what would constitute an enlightened age in the years to come?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
That’s not a bad summary.
Genuine question: what do you mean by civilisation? If you mean modernism in the sense of advances in science and technology that's one thing. But in many senses the cost of advanced lifestyles has been paid by other people.
For example it isn't uncommon for food to be cheaper in a western European supermarket that it is in the country where it was grown. The technology improvements have led to an abundance of affordable fruit in those supermarkets from around the world, but that hasn't necessarily led to changes in wealth disparity for the people who harvest it.
When was the era of civilised discourse and the value of reason? I must have missed it.
Here are two parallel viewpoints:
Fourth, we have become technologically dependent, but it does not mean we are technologically literate. People are relying on complex systems they no longer understand. When knowledge becomes concentrated in a small elite, societies become fragile.
A Professor Burnet, Professor of Greek at St Andrews, saw something similar in 1923, but with regard to science, rather than technology.
"We are told...that specialism is the remedy. But specialism has its drawbacks. The recent enormous growth of potential knowledge has been accompanied by an a corresponding growth of actual ignorance."
Fifth, there is the rise of anti-intellectualism. Libraries, universities, and research institutions face political and economic pressure. Knowledge becomes harder to preserve and transmit.
A sermon preached at Manchester College in 1923 pointed to the penury faced by the educated people of Central Europe, for whom "books have become an impossible luxury" and students cannot afford light to study by night. "The mental impoverishment of one nation is the mental impoverishment of all."
This isn't a complaint about anti-intellectualism, but is a point about economic pressure (the result of war) on universities, making knowledge harder to preserve and transmit.
See the link to the Age of Enlightenment above. Of course there were issues during that age about which folks were not enlightened, but the emphases on reason, the importance of each individual, and the value of scientific discovery were commonly held amongst intellectuals.
I think those three factors still have abiding value.
Unfortunately it seems to take less time for bad ideas to get taken up politically.
I don't have the exact dates but in Australia women got the vote in around 1902 but First Nation indigenous people didn't get it until the 1940s.
The "universal" part of universal suffrage is not necessarily defined the way we might assume.
And let's not even get started on the horrific history of the schooling system in Australia for indigenous people.
The "Enlightenment" went hand-in-glove with Eugenics and Colonialism and brutality. These things were not aberrations, this was part of the whole thing.
I tend to the view that there was certainly 'light in the Enlightenment' but that it wasn't all unmitigated sweetness and light. @Basketactortale has drawn attention to some unsavoury aspects of the whole kit and caboodle.
That said, it's not as if pre-Enlightenment colonialism or conquest were lacking in brutality. The Conquistadores, for instance. Genghiz Khan for a non-Christianised example.
I wouldn't trade in modern medicine, democracy or other products of the Enlightenment for a romanticised medievalism.
But neither would I overlook some of the more shadowy aspects.
How we juggle all that and hold them in tension is easier said than done.
For example, in Shakespeare, we have the ironic juxtaposition of Portia’s fine observation on the quality of mercy, followed immediately by antisemitism. It jars!
The Age of Enlightenment, which was far from perfect of course, is reckoned to have been followed by the Age of Ideology, which had and continues to have appalling consequences. In the iconic TV series “The Age of Man” (unfortunate sexist title but nevertheless) there is an arresting quote by the presenter Dr Jacob Bronowski, speaking at Aushwitz.
What concerns me, as I journey through old age, is that the painful lessons which Bronowski expresses poignantly, seem to me to be forgotten in the increasingly bitter culture wars. It feels to me like a journey towards the dark again,
And it still is. Ideas that started from people frantically measuring skulls to prove the superiority of the "white race" are still taught at British universities today.
Race is a social construct, which can be studied and about which scientific hypotheses can be formulated. What we know is that racist statements about the superiority of the construct of the white race - in terms of a large range of variables including IQ - are wrong in empirical terms as those hypotheses can be and have been disproved by scientific enquiry. The value judgments racists and ablists make about whose lives are worthy, are not a scientific hypotheses.
Ideas derived from Eugenics permeate much of human biology, sociology, psychology, development, economics, ecology and so on. It's part of the fundamental bedrock of how these subjects are taught that people rarely even notice it.
Statistics is a branch of mathematics and morally neutral like its parent. Eugenicists are not the only ones who have misused statistical methodologies for nefarious purposes.
I don't really think of things as being morally neutral when they were generated in a corrupt way.
And I think powerful ideas can't be simply rejected as being ignorance, it's a deeper thing than that. It speaks to a constructed reality and an intellectual pursuit of trying to make the data fit the preconceptions. If nothing else, that's an important lesson to tell everyone who is learning to use the statistical tools.
In recent years, I have become increasingly aware how much of science is ingrained with values and ideas despite hiding behind supposed neutrality.
For example the simple reality that many medications do not take account of the complexity and variety of women's bodies, that the standard model commonly assumes the patient is an average sized man.
In ecology, problematic language is still widely used. It means almost nothing to speak of "indigenous", "native"and "invasive", "alien" species in the context of the British Isles where we have very few unique species and where the collection we currently have was very largely set by the last ice age. This language in fact is a deliberate echo of eugenics. It's in such common usage that few stop to think about it and what the words actually mean in context. We collectively "want" and value some species and not others.
Cynicism about the scientific process leads to all sorts of evils. For example, the denial of the value of vaccination.
Postmodernism asserts that truth is a matter of opinion and power. It isn’t. Given the fallibility of human beings, anything can be corrupted, anyone bought. But the key word is “can”. Two plus two really does equal four. Whatever the Party asserts it to be.
If we forget that, we really are heading for the Dark Ages.