Postmodern era = the second Dark Age?

[XT]

[QUOTE=donnie darko]
It’s easy to mistake GDP for actual affluence. A lot of the supposed increase of wealth is simply things that used to be free such as childcare ending up costing money. Or things like housing costing more money.
[/QUOTE]

And yet, in terms of real world purchasing power, Americans are MUCH more prosperous than they were in the 70’s. In the 70’s, only wealthy and upper middle class house holds had access to what we would consider the basics today…TV, automated appliances, multiple cars, dinning out, etc etc. There weren’t things like cell phones, cable or satellite TV or computers and the internet. Today, they are nearly ubiquitous, with even the poorest Americans (and Europeans/Westerners) having at least some if not all of that at their disposal.

Brazil is a success story but keep in mind Argentina is a total mess.

Let’s see a cite that Argentina is a model for this Dark Age of yours. That their real world prosperity is so much lower than in the past for the average citizen and that they are at Dark Age levels. And that this is meaningful in terms of the broader human population in the ‘Postmodern era’, leading to ‘The second Dark Age’. Because, so far, that sounds like a load of horseshit and hyperbole without any basis in reality.

Literacy has increased in much of the third world especially in China but the quality of literacy is actually declining in the western world, at least in the United States. Information is accessible but much of it is actually disinformation and falsehoods.

Do you have a cite that literacy is declining in the western world or, ‘at least in the United States’? As for the rest, it’s a load of bull. There is a lot of disinformation…lots of guys spewing hyperbole about dark ages, for instance, without backing any of it up, and without a good grasp of history…but that’s because there is exponentially more INFORMATION available to the average person than at any time in our history. Instead of having very few vectors of information available (say, the nightly news and the news paper in the 70’s), today there are practically limitless avenues available to the average person in a western nation. Certainly there is misinformation, disinformation and out and out falsehood there…but there always was, and now people can, if they want, check myriad other sources to verify what they are seeing and being told, instead of having to rely on a single, or maybe a few vectors of information. During the REAL dark ages, how much access to information do you think the average human had? How about during the Renaissance? How much access to information did the average human have…and how accurate do you think it was?

Africa didn’t have AIDS in the 1970s, but it does now. It’s true that war has declined but keep in mind one of the worst genocides in history took place less than 20 years ago. And a third world war could break out tomorrow if North Korea decides to nuke Seoul and it turns out China is complicit.

How does any of this lead you to think we are in a second dark age due to the post-modern era? Do you think less people died in African before the 70’s because they didn’t have AIDS? Or that because a war COULD break out between North and South Korea (a war that could have broken out any time in the last 60 years…but hasn’t so far) that means something?

[XT]

[QUOTE=donnie darko]
I wouldn’t call a war that killed as many as a million people [Iraq] even relatively minor. It wasn’t WW2 no, but come on.
[/QUOTE]

To get to a million people dead in Iraq you have to jump through a number of hoops about secondary and tertiary causes of deaths, so the number varies quite a bit. But ok, let’s go with that number. Compared to the past, do you think that, as a percentage of population (and if you use apples to apples comparisons that also look at non-direct military causes of death to a civilian population) Iraq was a big deal or small beer…comparatively speaking?

Take Vietnam for instance. They had between 1-2 million DIRECT military related deaths, IIRC…and if you use the same methodology people are using to inflate Iraq up to a million the death count in Vietnam would be much, much higher.

But even if Iraq WAS a huge deal it was unusual for the US. Along with Afghanistan, it’s one of the few times the US has used even a fraction of it’s military force overseas to a large extent and actually put down troops. Compare that to the past actions of military superpowers to get an idea of the difference. And, regardless, how does this fit into the model of a ‘second Dark Age’??

America doesn’t use violence in a large amount to extend its empire simply because technology is more efficient now and cultural colonialism generally works better than force most of the time. Not only that but we don’t want to alienate the rest of our allies. We haven’t attacked North Korea because they pose no threat to us and they don’t have any resources we can use. They are only a threat to South Korea.

Even if this were all true, it hardly props up your assertion that we are in a second dark age…in fact, just the opposite.

[puddleglum]

@donnie_darko

It’s easy to mistake GDP for actual affluence. A lot of the supposed increase of wealth is simply things that used to be free such as childcare ending up costing money. Or things like housing costing more money.

Brazil is a success story but keep in mind Argentina is a total mess.

Literacy has increased in much of the third world especially in China but the quality of literacy is actually declining in the western world, at least in the United States. Information is accessible but much of it is actually disinformation and falsehoods.

Africa didn’t have AIDS in the 1970s, but it does now. It’s true that war has declined but keep in mind one of the worst genocides in history took place less than 20 years ago. And a third world war could break out tomorrow if North Korea decides to nuke Seoul and it turns out China is complicit.

Were you around during the 70’s?
Everything sucked then.
Rivers were on fire, manufactured goods were shoddy, cars were huge, slow, rusty, broke down constantly and didn’t last. Television was poorly done, there were no video games or personal computers. Crime was skyrocketing, the politicians were corrupt. The US is so much better than it was back then.
Most of the world has improved so much more than the US. In huge parts of Europe it was a crime to speak out against the government and poverty was rampant. In South America it was a question of a right wing dictator with death squads or a communist dictator with death squads. China and India had literally billions of people in unimaginable poverty. Africa was politically like South America but much worse, South Africa still had Apartheid. There was domestic terrorism in the US, as well as the start of international terrrorism.
Nuclear war was a genuine fear, and not a suitcase nuke, but an actual war with thousands of warheads being exchanged.
If you wanted to read an article in a newspaper or magazine from a couple years prior, you had to go to the library, look in up in the appropriate year’s Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, then find the correct microfiche, take it to the microfiche reader, and read it at the library. Now we can have it in two seconds with a simple search.
The media was still biased back then, and the only ways to get news was a local paper or the evening news or a weekly magazine. Conspiracies theories about both Kennedy assinations, MLK assinations, the moon landing, flouride, etc were abundant and it was much harder to debunk the theories because it was so hard to access information.
Your link does not work, but the only reason literacy in America is declining is Simpsons Paradox.

[Sailboat]

@donnie_darko

With the exception of China and a few other fairly small areas of the world, today isn’t any more prosperous than the 1970s were. The Middle East and Africa are in worse shape than they were in 1979, and the west is about the same. Latin America is a mixed bag, the dictatorships feel but it also saw the economic disaster in Argentina and the drug war in Mexico.

A significant amount of what you said there simply isn’t supportable. It looks like you’re posting your impressions as facts. Unless you’re just trying to show how unreliable stuff on the Internet is.

@donnie_darko

And their government is still just as totalitarian as they were 24 years ago when they ran those kids over with tanks, despite embracing capitalism.

Except for times when China hasn’t HAD a government, and descended into warlordism, China’s government has indulged totalitarian impulses since at least…well, ask Qin Shi Huangdi. That hardly makes any statement about a postmodern era.

@XT

There is a lot of disinformation…lots of guys spewing hyperbole about dark ages, for instance, without backing any of it up, and without a good grasp of history…but that’s because there is exponentially more INFORMATION available to the average person than at any time in our history.

I’ll add that there are also more people alive now than at any time in history; if a fixed percentage of people at any one moment are liars, there’s just plain more lying going on now overall. We’re going to hear about more cases of everything involving people – plane crashes, diseases, entrepreneurs, whatever – everything people do is being done by more people now.

[Sailboat]

Missed the edit: I will say this, however. I do believe the Internet is leading us into a Dork Age.

[lekatt]

I disagree the Internet is bad. Eventually it will find its feet.

The dark ages were due to religion and the intense practice of
doctrine and ritual law.

The new dark ages will be due to science and the intense practice of
scientific principles and rituals.

The truth still evades us.

[John_Mace]

The OP is confusing the state of “more bad information out there” with “less good information out there”. A dark age means the loss of technical knowledge, among other things. That has not happened.

And note that the Dark Ages were more than a loss of knowledge, but also a breakdown in social order in large part of Europe. But scholars are less and less calling it a Dark Age, as that is very deceiving. Knowledge wasn’t so much lost as “misplaced”.

[donnie_darko]

@John_Mace

The OP is confusing the state of “more bad information out there” with “less good information out there”. A dark age means the loss of technical knowledge, among other things. That has not happened.

And note that the Dark Ages were more than a loss of knowledge, but also a breakdown in social order in large part of Europe. But scholars are less and less calling it a Dark Age, as that is very deceiving. Knowledge wasn’t so much lost as “misplaced”.

Lost, misplaced … tomato, tomahto I say. Either way people didn’t have access to quality information, so that qualifies it as a dark age.

[Human_Action]

@donnie_darko

Lost, misplaced … tomato, tomahto I say. Either way people didn’t have access to quality information, so that qualifies it as a dark age.

People, worldwide, have never had better access to quality information than they do right now.

[donnie_darko]

@Human_Action

People, worldwide, have never had better access to quality information than they do right now.

Begging the question

Sounds like someone still lives in the 1990s. :rolleyes:

[Human_Action]

@donnie_darko

Begging the question - Wikipedia

Sounds like someone still lives in the 1990s. :rolleyes:

My statement can’t be begging the question, because it doesn’t have a premise and a conclusion, and thus isn’t an argument, but merely a statement.

Still, thanks for the chuckle that comes from your using a multi-language encyclopedia with over 4 million articles in English alone, a storehouse of knowledge that dwarfs anything like it the world has ever seen, which is available to any person with an internet connection, as part of your claim that people don’t have access to quality information.

[XT]

@Human_Action

My statement can’t be begging the question, because it doesn’t have a premise and a conclusion, and thus isn’t an argument, but merely a statement.

Still, thanks for the chuckle that comes from your using a multi-language encyclopedia with over 4 million articles in English alone, a storehouse of knowledge that dwarfs anything like it the world has ever seen, which is available to any person with an internet connection, as part of your claim that people don’t have access to quality information.

The irony quotient is off the scale.

[BrainGlutton]

@John_Mace

The OP is confusing the state of “more bad information out there” with “less good information out there”. A dark age means the loss of technical knowledge, among other things. That has not happened.

And note that the Dark Ages were more than a loss of knowledge, but also a breakdown in social order in large part of Europe. But scholars are less and less calling it a Dark Age, as that is very deceiving. Knowledge wasn’t so much lost as “misplaced”.

The main reason European history between the fall of the Western Empire and the Norman Conquest is called the “Dark Ages” is because it’s so dark to historians. Too-scanty written records to fully reconstruct what was going on.

That will never be true of our present age.

[bump]

@donnie_darko

Back in the pre-Internet days (up to about 1994 or so) knowledge was much harder to come by, but the stuff that was available, you could generally be fairly aware of its veracity. Excluding things like political propaganda, but even that is in some ways worse now with things like Fox News.

Not to be some older guy with a “Back in MY day…” story, but your profile says you’re 23, which would point to you having been born around 1990 or so, which is when I was in high school.

Information was just as suspect back then- you had all manner of sketchy magazines and newsletters and what-not that were the print equivalent of blogs and informational websites, espousing the crazy-ass biases and views of the publishers.

What the internet’s done isn’t so much generate information, or even reveal it where it was formerly hidden, but rather it’s allowed it to be easily and cheaply published, and easily and cheaply obtained by interested parties. Caveat emptor (or lector, I suppose) still applies, but nowadays, the signal to noise ratio is slightly less, because that ease and cheapness makes it easier for any crank to publish his/her own loony ideas.

[Phnord_Prephect]

@BrainGlutton

The main reason European history between the fall of the Western Empire and the Norman Conquest is called the “Dark Ages” is because it’s so dark to historians. Too-scanty written records to fully reconstruct what was going on.

That will never be true of our present age.

Really? Because I can imagine a scenario wherein, over the next 50 years or so, the vast majority of communication and record-keeping is through electronic means, and very little is left in long-term storage such as libraries. Then, for whatever reason, the ability to recover those electronic data is lost and suddenly there’s a period of time about which little to no useful information is available in a readable format. Hence, a new ‘dark age’ for future historians to puzzle over.

Unlikely, perhaps, but not impossible.

[Condescending_Robot]

Electronic data has proven far less persistent than physical. Any book you publish will go to the LoC and hundreds of university libraries across the world no matter how obscure (many more ULs than that plus the public libraries and bookstores if anyone is actually interested in it). A webpage goes on one server, and when that server goes away, it’s gone. Try following a link to something from before 2011 and tell me how it goes.

[Jas09]

Just about any link to a news article from about 2004ish onwards is likely still accessible. For example here is a random CNN article from 2004: CNN.com - Bush campaign to base ad on Kerry terror quote - Oct 11, 2004

Also, even for things like blogs the Internet Archive (Internet Archive: Wayback Machine) is storing much of it.

[donnie_darko]

@Jas09

Just about any link to a news article from about 2004ish onwards is likely still accessible. For example here is a random CNN article from 2004: CNN.com - Bush campaign to base ad on Kerry terror quote - Oct 11, 2004

Also, even for things like blogs the Internet Archive (http://archive.org/web/web.php) is storing much of it.

What if there’s a solar storm tomorrow? Or the Internet Archive runs out of money?

I think digital information is more susceptible to “rot” than physical information. The 20th century will likely be better recorded and understood than this current century.

[Jas09]

I’m sorry, but in my opinion that is madness. Obviously time will tell, but neither of us will be around to know about it.

I don’t see any current evidence for a “dark age” in the near future (and certainly not one right now). Outside events could change that, but the only two (related) forces I see currently that are strong enough are global warming and a potential end of economically available fossil fuels.

And, of course, widespread nuclear war, but that possibility was far more likely 30 years ago than it is today, IMO.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@donnie_darko

Back in the pre-Internet days (up to about 1994 or so) knowledge was much harder to come by, but the stuff that was available, you could generally be fairly aware of its veracity. Excluding things like political propaganda, but even that is in some ways worse now with things like Fox News.

How is Fox News worse than Pravda or Der Sturmer?

@Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus

I am troubled by the state of scientific literacy these days. Just a day or two ago we were watching some old sci-fi movie on TCM, the introduction to which was a brief documentary-style discourse on the beginning of the universe, moving on to the origin and evolution of life on Earth. The latter was described pretty much as paleontologists’ and other scholars’ theories of the time had it. Today, I’m not sure anyone producing a film for the American mass market would dare to put that in, for fear of offending audiences and exhibitors in the Bible Belt.

ETA: They might put something like that in after all, but in such a way that it could be skipped as required by local sensibilities.

Don’t be ridiculous. Are you sure we live in the same America, where comedy shows on FOX like Family Guy or Simpsons (and TV is a far milder medium than film) directly mock creationists? http://www.websophist.com/Creationist_Chart_Obama_FamilyGuyO.jpg

@lekatt

I disagree the Internet is bad. Eventually it will find its feet.

The dark ages were due to religion and the intense practice of
doctrine and ritual law.

The new dark ages will be due to science and the intense practice of
scientific principles and rituals.

The truth still evades us.

Please elaborate.

@Condescending_Robot

Electronic data has proven far less persistent than physical. Any book you publish will go to the LoC and hundreds of university libraries across the world no matter how obscure (many more ULs than that plus the public libraries and bookstores if anyone is actually interested in it). A webpage goes on one server, and when that server goes away, it’s gone. Try following a link to something from before 2011 and tell me how it goes.

Wayback Machine:

http://archive.org/web/web.php

@donnie_darko

What if there’s a solar storm tomorrow? Or the Internet Archive runs out of money?

What if Washington DC is attacked by a nuke tomorrow destroying the Library of Congress?