Thanks for the great response on the Lifespan of the US thread.
In all the mention of the government and state collapse, does anybody think another Dark Age could ever occur? It is possible for another global information vacuum to ever occur again for any duration of time?
I guess short of being struck by a meteorite.
The likelihood is slim, I suspect, because of the massive amount of information we store and the attention we pay to it’s storage, as well as the facilitation of its transmission. Perhaps something like a meteorite as you mentioned or a nuclear war that eliminated the means of transmission to a significant enough degree could cause a new Dark Age, but I doubt anything short of that.
A global resurgence of religion could do the trick.
Yes, because everyone knows that the monasteries had nothing to do with the preservation of what little scientific and historical knowledge there was at the time of the fall of the Roman empire. Nothing at all.
Religion is not the cause of a Dark Age. Hard times combined with a breakdown of social order is. The original Dark Ages in Europe came about because the social order that Rome imposed on the continent collapsed with the fall of the city.
And religion had as little to do with the fall of Rome as its fabled acceptance of homosexuality did.
If Theodosius ‘The Great’ had spent less time praying for devine intervention and would simply have given the army the go-ahead to confront the Goths, the outcome might have been very different. As it was, the army was kept pent up in Ravenna while the Goths were free to devastate Italy and Theodosius lay prostrate in front of a bloody cross.
That doesn’t mean anything. Information is not knowledge is not wisdom.
We have lots information, but I am not so sure about knowledge and I am very sure that we do not have much wisdom.
**Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T.S. Eliot
**
I might be tempted to say that a modern society with a high degree of access to information per capita was sucessfully controled by its government and lurred into an unjustifed war.
A final remark: what good is information/knowledge if nobody reads/cares about it?
Even the Dark Ages weren’t the Dark Ages. After all, Byzantium didn’t collapse; the Chaliphate appeared a few centuries after Rome and flourished; Persia, India and China did just fine. What we call the Dark Ages were limited to a very small part of the world - namely, non-Balkan Europe. It was by no means a global collapse.
So no, I don’t see it happening, Even if the U.S. collapses, the rest of the world will rush to fill in the gap, and it’ll do it much faster than it did in the Middle ages.
What whiny nonsense. I’m sorry to hear Eliot say such a thing. Wisdom comes from experience, and experience is gaining knowledge and information. Is he, or are you, really suggesting that people are less wise than they once were? People as a whole have plenty of deficiences, but I’d say things have at least improved a bit.
You’re way overstating the case. This community wouldn’t exist if nobody cared about those things. Reading isn’t the only way to get information. And more people read now than did in the Dark Ages by far. Mass literacy didn’t exist at that time.
My opinion is that we would be quite vulnerable to an info blackout after a major catastrophe, because:
We increasingly store information electronically, and are extraordinarily dependent on uninterrupted energy, and
The paper manufactured over the past few decades is expected to decompose after about 80 years due to its chemical composition (additives). A hundred years down the road you might be more likely to find a book dated 1800 than one dated 2000.
Shrugs.
No, but information can sure help to stave off a panic when something bad happens. (Usenet was instrumental in standing up to the Communist Coup at the end of the Soviet Union, as I recall.)
I seem to recall thinking that Yeltzin being shown on Russian TV outside the Kremlin gate, denouncing the coup WHILE STANDING ON A TANK, was more the deciding factor. How many usenet users could there have been, and of what importance?
Society, and its use of information, are nowhere near as sophisticated as you seem to think. If he was standing on the sidewalk or in a room, it wouldn’t have made any impression on anyone IMHO. Let alone if he was pecking away on a computer in his pyjamas.
Now that I think more, though, I’m wondering how the TV stations knew it was safe to broadcast that images?
Honorius, not Theodosius.
At any rate, there is no reason to believe that Honorius ( an incompetent youngster quite aside from religion ) had the strength to confront Alaric at that point, the execution of Stilicho and the purges of the Anti-German faction having weakened the army, despite the arrival of some reinforcements from the east. His mistake was not coming to terms when he had the chance and thereby buying time to retrench and rebuild.
Further, the resulting sack of Rome was a symptom, not a cause. Defeating Alaric at that late date would not have resurrected the fortunes of the West Roman Empire.
The OP is a bit misinformed about the Dark Ages. It was not a global blackout, but rather a European one. The Chinese went about the business just fine, and the Arab world really started to flourish at the time that Europe was falling backwards. And of course events in the Americas were completely disconnected from whatever was going on in the rest of the world (a few Viking excursions at the end of the D.A.s notwithstanding).
Despite concerns about too much reliance on electronic storage of information, that fact is that our knowledge today is much more widely dispersed than it was 1400 yrs ago. This doesn’t mean a new Dark Age isn’t possible, just very unlikely.
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What I think would be an interesting question is if we’re headed for an information plateau where we discover all we can with our current tools and stagnate while we wait for the next big earth shattering breakthrough
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No no no. There have been countless “Dark Ages.” For instance, what people usually call the magnificent 3000 year history of ancient Egypt was actually… well, imagine 3000 years of history. Sumeria/Akkadia/Babylonia was even worse.
There as a Mycenean civilization in Greece, then the Dark Ages, then the Dorian civilization that we call Classical Greece.
China? Holy Shit.
The Indus (Harrapin) civilization to known Indian civilization? Long spell in between.
There was a civilization in Israel (around Jericho) documented around 9000 BC. Next one we know of is in Anatolia (Turkey) at Catal Huyuk ca. 7000 BC (my personal favourite). Also, there’s lots of hills in the middle east, and I dare say, very few of them naturally occured. None excavated.
And I’m not even going to get into the topic of what may or may not have occured before the last ice age, which ended ca. 10,000 BC. I’m sure they just didn’t all of the sudden make this stuff up. You think?
Oh, I get it. Kind of like there was “Survivor: Amazon”, a long dark age, then a new awakening tonight with “Survivor: Pear Island”.
Is that what you meant?
Oops. That was “Pearl Island”.
That’s true to a certain extent. I work in a museum, and certainly the book printed more a hundred years ago are in better shape than ones from only 60 years ago, but museums put a remarkable amount of effort into preserving them. With the right temperature, light and temperature controls, we can keep them in pretty good condition.
Surprisingly enough, one of the best ways to preserve paper seems to be to dump it in a landfill. I’ve been reading about an Arizona univeristy that has been doing archaeological digs in them. The contents are astonishingly well preserved. Even things like potato peels are easily identifiable decades after being buried. Newspapers and the like are found almost in the exact condition in which they were disposed of. Apparently the anaerobic environment keeps them from decay.
That being said, I think the greatest risk of a new Dark Ages comes from anti-intellectualism. Should a man-made disaster of epic proportions occur which is blamed on science, (such as a plague, or nuclear disaster) it’s remotely possible that intellectuals could become a despised class–much like the Jews in Nazi Germany. Human nature is to love to hate, and when the shit hits the fan, what mankind desires most is a scapegoat.
Hell, we’re already prepped for it. Look at the way smart people are portrayed in the media. They’re socially gauche and unnatractive, or gorgeous-librarians-hiding-behind-dorky-eyeglasses, yearning for a generous cool person to transform them into a social butterfly with the just the right shade of lipstick. They’re scatterbrained, and ignorant of truly “important” things (just waiting to be set straight by a person with little “book learning” but deep wisdom,) or they’re crazy, planning to use the power of their brains to become an Evil Overlord.
Children are almost programmed from birth to avoid deep or critical thinking. Our school system is set up around the concepts of memorization and regurgitation upon command. Little, if any, emphasis is placed on learning analytcial skills. Sometimes, it’s actively discouraged. As Mel Gabler, textbook censor extroidinare, put it: “Too many textbooks and discussions leave kids free to make up their minds about things.” God knows, the last thing we want is for kids to reach their own conclusions instead of mindlessly parroting the data they’ve been fed.
The news media has no interest in discouraging gullibility, either. They obediently report any new study “findings” without bothering to look into how the study was conducted, or by whom with what agenda. Soon, the previous study is debunked, and the next is reported with equal credulity.
Nor do they wish to dampen the moral outrage created by a story with something as drab as all of the facts. Had the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit been fully explained by the news outlets, the public would not have reacted in the way as they did. The media counts on knee-jerk reactions to stir interest, and doesn’t appreciate the idea of their audience at home reacting with, “Yeah, but . . .”
The greatest enemy to free thought and expression is not censorship: it’s * apathy. * In our society, information on just about any subject is freely available-- it practically lies at their feet, but they will not pick it up.
Orwell didn’t understand the nature of Big Brother. There is no need to censor anything, as long as the public is distracted and disinterested. Sure, there will be a few losers who bother to read everything, but who cares about them? They could shout their epiphanies from the rooftops, and no one would listen. They would rather read about J-Lo and Ben’s breakup than about some war occuring in some country they can’t even locate on a map.
Conspiracy theorists gnash their teeth in frustration. So few are convinced by their evidence (such as it may be) because few people care if there even if there IS a conspiracy. As long as there’s cheap gas in their car and the cable reception is good, many Americans are content, regarldess of what’s happening far away.
While I wouldn’t call anti-intellectualism rampant, there is definitely a strong undertone of it in our culture. How much would it take to turn that undercurrent into outright dislike and distrust?
I don’t think so. There’s simply too much still to find out. Information is coming to us at an accelerating rate. And we’re improving those tools at the same time.