Dark Ages

Several times in human history, a great civilization has flourished, made great technological, political, and other advances, and then collapsed into a Dark Age.  These dark ages seem to last for 800 to 1000 years, whereupon a completely different civilization, often with dim memories of the old one, may arise.  The two archetypical examples are the fall of Mycenae in around 1177 BC and the rise of Greece and its inheritor Rome, about 1000 years later, followed by the fall of Rome in 476 and the Renaissance, which began in around 1300.

What is a dark age?  Mostly, it is dark in comparison to what came before.   During civilization, the value of civilization seems obvious.  Trade is relatively unencumbered by banditry, roads are built, technological advances come frequently and spread fast.  Authority is relatively stable and widely respected.  Cities don't need to have walls.  During a dark age, travel is dangerous and banditry is expected.  There is little or no agreed authority and people and groups vying for power are constantly trying to kill each other.  Cities and the homes of wealthy people are strongly guarded, with walls and soldiers and those defenses are frequently tested.  Invention is still happening, but they tend to be isolated and advances spread relatively slowly.

Dark ages are never completely dark.  Writing was invented around the time of the fall of Mycenae and was constantly developed and improved during the ensuing dark age.  Much of the strength of the books that survive from those times is precisely that the newly literate peoples had a dim memory of the ancients, carried by oral traditions, and had enlarged and exaggerated the greatness of those old stories, until by the point they are written down, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Beowolf, David, King Arthur, and many others are impossibly great warriors with magical powers and frequent interactions with the gods.  Once they are written down, it's impossible for real people to match the great deeds, and during the dark age, the old civilization can only be conceived of as impossibly wonderful.  This hero worship tends to infect the dark age and makes it more difficult for the new civilization to emerge.

What causes dark ages?   Sometimes, there is an active decapitation:  after 1492, Europeans made their first successful footholds in the Americas.  They brought with them new types of weapons and tools, horses, and most significantly, new diseases which the natives didn't have defenses for, the most important of which was smallpox.  Less than 30 years after Columbus, Mexico was so devastated that Cortez was able to capture it and impose Spain's peculiar brand of fundamentalism, and 130 years later, the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts to discover cleared but empty fields and groups of natives too small to eke out a living on them and willing to teach the new settlers how to grow native crops in the new fields.  The native cultures were systematically destroyed. Smallpox did most of the work, but the survivors were made slaves and for the most part not allowed to participate in the new civilization unless they completely abandoned the old one.  The places that remain substantially native: the reservations in the US and the countless villages in Latin America, especially those which had Spanish fundamentalism imposed on them, are indistinguishable from their counterparts in dark age Europe.

Far more common is the local rise of religious fundamentalism.  Rome had been very multicultural and tolerant, and this was central to their success, but 100 years after they embraced Christianity, they began persecuting other religions and even small deviations from what Christian leadership determined was "correct" Christianity were persecuted.  There were other causes too, but the great historian Edward Gibbon argues persuasively that Christian Fundamentalism so weakened Roman culture that it could not survive.

Not long after Rome collapsed and not too far away, another great civilization was rising.  It was powered by Islamic expansionism but in a few places, most importantly Baghdad and Cordoba, great centers of learning were being established.  Like all great centers of learning, they embraced other cultures and religions enthusiastically and made many advances in many fields--mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy and many others.  They collected as much as they could of their recently deceased neighbor.  But they too collapsed because of religious fundamentalism, and much of their world continues to be held back by it--by the Wahabbi Saud family, by the Ayatollahs, the Taliban, and so forth.

The Renaissance arose where and when it did because dark age traders, mostly from Florence and Venice, were interested in Islamic cultures and traded with them--commercial products mostly, but also books.  Cosimo de Medici, one of the greatest bankers to ever live (he invented double entry bookkeeping) and the richest man in Italy that was not the pope, collected every book he could--bought it if possible, had it transcribed if he couldn't, and his heirs continued this legacy.  Many of the books were Arabic translations of Roman and Greek books whose originals had been lost or intentionally destroyed by the Christian fundamentalists. That this was happening just as Islamic fundamentalism was arising and so soon after the crusades gave the fundamentalists a target for their anger.

Western European culture that began with the Renaissance and expanded to North America appears to be embracing another round of fundamentalism and anti-multiculturalism.  It is being helped along by Russian trolls no doubt, but there would be no traction were there not a fertile opportunity,  Fundamentalism is the civilization killer.