Using Human History as a guide Could Our Present Civilization Fall Into a New Dark Age?

[Overread]

Interestingly coinage has often arisen in many societies as a form of trade superior to bartering, because money is a neutral element to trade. Everyone can want it and everyone can use it.


Consider if your trade is farmer producing milk from cattle. In general you'll have milk and dairy produce and every so often meat/young cattle to trade. However what if your local smith is lactose intolerant and thus doesn't want your main product? Now you can't trade milk with him and meat is only going to happen infrequently. What do you do - does the smith accept dairy produce and then have to go find someone else to go trade that with for something he wants; or is the farmer going to have to go trade dairy for something the smith wants to then trade with the smith.

Such systems can get complicated - what if whilst trading for the item the smith wants, the smith finds it in advance and thus no longer requires it. Just how much time can you dedicate to wheeling and dealing in trading away from your main work.

However if you've traded your dairy for coin all year then you can pay the smith in coin. The smith doesn't need to trade away the coin to make it have value it already has value.


I would also say its possible to have a more fixed concept of relative values in relation to coinage, rather than to produce. Relative values vary a lot person to person so its going to be hard to sometimes come to agreements on what is more or less valuable than the other.






I think that its no shock that so many societies developed some form of money or cash which allowed them to help facilitate trading. Of course its not the only form and some societies did develop around herds being the pure value of a person to trade; though one notices that many of those systems often remained locked in a cycle with limited development for a very long time.

Of course coinage is best used when you've larger social groups; smaller groups are often more dynamic and amenable to more group contributions and have less need to perfectly balance trades in the moment.

 

[-K2-]

@Overread ; I'd go along with that and agree, except, when people are hungry, thirsty, or desperately need other things, the concept of money and the long term means little. Ultimately it shifts to longer lasting, universally believed things of value. Hence the appeal of gold (which granted, could be viewed as the same). Once the people don't need in the immediate sense, gold--ridiculously--has an appeal over anything used as coinage/currency due to its permanence and universal belief of its value. Even today.

I think for any currency to be embraced by the people, requires leaders of a government they trust to back it...or...some universal agreement by the people which would be a longer time coming.

Just opinion...

K2

 

[Narkalui]

Take a £1 coin as an example, the actual value of the metal in the coin is less than 50p (I seem to remember reading this somewhere), after The Fall people would clock on to this very quickly. That's even if coins are still in circulation at the time...

 

[.matthew.]

Yea, plus these days most currency that exists isn't even in a physical form - a lot of 0/1s on a computer.

As a result, the currency that does exist wouldn't be valued much and you'd need to create an entirely new one, probably on a local level, making trading with neighbours a challenge.

Then you have to remember that currency counterfieting is remarkably easy with the knowledge available today. The 'disaster' whatever it may be might hinder that somewhat but for coinage, you'd only really need a mold and the metals (which would pretty much be how it was made in the first place).

The only way to avoid that would be to use something like gold as K2 mentioned, but what are the chances of there being enough gold floating around to make enough? Plus, even gold coins can be debased by unscrupulous souls

However, in small communities it would be possible to create a currency and have transactions processed through some sort of local bank, using IOU's and having the bank track everything.

 

[-K2-]

Take a £1 coin as an example, the actual value of the metal in the coin is less than 50p (I seem to remember reading this somewhere), after The Fall people would clock on to this very quickly. That's even if coins are still in circulation at the time...

Well, worse than that... In our economy that coin might be worth 50p in metal scrap, but what value does it have when you can do nothing with it at all? More so, any work you do to it simply expends the one thing you're struggling for in the first place, food.

@.matthew. ; Just as I mentioned to Narkalui, even gold has zero value when hungry. It's only when you're past that stage--years?--and people's bellies are full enough they can consider luxuries that the appeal of gold catches their eye. Even then, gold only means something to the poor because the wealthy want it. Past filling a tooth, it's worthless in a primitive world.

Learn how to make tire tread sandals There will be countless tires around, the ground will become more harsh, and once folks bellies are full, they'll kill for shoes and leave the gold ingots lying.

K2

 

[.matthew.]

@-K2- You'd be surprised what people will do for gold. It has a unique effect on the human mind. No idea why, but it probably has something to do with its warmth and lustre, and the fact it never tarnishes. Also SHINY

I don't think gold is prevalent enough to be used but due to its already universal value, people would be willing to trade for it and it would be treated as a currency in itself. Technically worthless but people get weird around it.

But yea, as I touched on earlier, the manual and more menial workers will be most in demand, with office staff relegated to the thunder dome...

After a while, some 'key' trades like cobblers and blacksmiths would come to be highly valued, but as we both seem to agree any initial disaster will kill off a lot of people which will leave a lot of 'salvage' laying around. The dozen of pairs of shoes most people seem to posess will last the survivors many many many years. The same is true for clothes, furniture, and even property.

 

[BAYLOR]

Can't improve on Earth Abides, IMHO. Written in 1949, and one of the rare books that you can call an absolute classic with practically no dissent.

The best end of civilization novel ever written , powerful, vibrant and poignant .

 

[Vertigo]

Gold and silver have been used as currency for as long as any kind of records go back at least as far back as the earliest urban civilisation. Hacksilver in particular was long used as currency whereby an agreed sized lump of silver would be hacked off a bigger lump to pay for things. It is not necessary for the metal to have any intrinsic use, only for it to be difficult to acquire and then it's value in any one location will rapidly be determined through barter. Obviously if you are in a location where gold is easier to come by it will have less value with the reverse being true in scarce areas. The only essential for currency is that it is not easily forged and simply going by weight is the simplest form of that - there are issues of purity to be considered but there are ways to test that (was that not supposed to be the origin of Archimdes' original eureka moment).

As @.matthew. suggests, with a much reduced population the amount of scrap available - metal, glass, fabric, plastic, tinned food etc. - would make the transition period for the survivors much less serious. Compared with say bronze age humanity we would have a wealth of steel blades etc. available to us.

 

[Overread]

Also provided a few libraries survive unburnt and the skill of reading isn't lost; we can jump-start on at least some basic concepts. Heck even just knowing that you can melt rocks to make metals gives you a huge leap forward on the technology tree. The real risk is that you lose understanding and relative understanding of concepts. Even if you've got book after book on computer programming; if there hasn't been a computer for several generations, the information is quite alien even if you still use the language every day. Not to mention that often as not many concepts don't get fully explained in writing. They are filled in by reality, teachers, interaction and the fact that "everyone knows what they are anyway".

 

[sknox]

I think I said this before, but we're 17 pages along now, so I'll repeat it. We can't fall into another Dark Ages because there was never a first one. That's a construct made by some (rather poor) historians and has long been debunked.

A catastrophe would be catastrophic, that's about all we can say. We cannot see its shape over on this side of the catastrophe. On the other side, it will all seem inevitable.

 

[Overread]

Well Native Americans had one. Far as my casual reading recalls the nomadic "Indian" style Native Americans in the northern regions were the left-over survivors of a much more sophisticated and sedentary nation that collapsed. Azteks also crumbled before the Spanish invaded and the plagues they brought which pretty much wiped them out.

So there is scope for civilisations falling. Perhaps not the romantic take on the Medieval "dark age" style, but there's always been scope for civilisations to crumble and lose knowledge.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

We can't fall into another Dark Ages because there was never a first one. That's a construct made by some (rather poor) historians

I think that's, to some degree, because most historians have a strong pro-Roman bias & the "dark ages" were mainly the European face of the decline of Rome. They have a pro-Roman bias partly because they have a pro Great Big Polity bias. They usually speak of successful conquerors in approving terms. "King Gobbledygook may have killed all his siblings, imposed a state religion, and tortured his political opponents, but he left the Kingdom of Bumfukistan 5 times the size it was when he assumed the throne." As if that were a good thing.

Most historians tend to be very shallow people. They're either in the trad camp Peter Hoffer calls "consensus" who treat history like they are writing a novel woven of selected facts with "human interest" or they're in the SJW camp he calls "New History" who disguise their own fictions with a pretense of scholarship and physics envy. Serious examinations of causation are rare. Frankly, most of them aren't intellectually equipped for it.

Roman ideas of law were one of the foundations of modern civilization, but much of the more concrete [ahem, literally in some cases] achievement historians faun over can be summed up simply: "We got really good at stealing sh*t and enslaving people, built an army to do it on a grand scale, stole and enslaved far and wide, brought the swag home and built really nice buildings. Then we kicked back and wrote a lot." I'm pretty sure I have ancestors from both sides of the conflict, but I'd rather claim those illiterate, dung footed, German farm boys who whipped Roman ass at Tuetonberg. Historians may claim they helped bring on the "dark ages". Seems to me they ended tyranny.

 

[Narkalui]

Kings only get to be kings because their ancestors were a bigger bunch of murdering b@st@rds than anyone else. And when they get usurped, deposed or conquered it's not saviour from tyranny it's just replacement by another bunch of murdering b@st@rds.

that's Pratchett via Sam Vimes, not the actual quote but a paraphrase obviously

 

[.matthew.]

I think sknox is right about it in that society and technology didn't 'devolve' over that period traditionally thought of as the Dark Ages, but we didn't exactly advance much for whatever reason either. Of course, it's all up to interpretation because of the patchiness of records and what dates you use.

I will say that the causation argument is fair though, most history books seem to cover who, what, and when, and neglect the why. However, that is mostly because records get worse the further back you look and it becomes harder to assign motive... especially when the public narrative of events is far from what actually motivates leaders.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I think sknox is right about it in that society and technology didn't 'devolve' over that period traditionally thought of as the Dark Ages, but we didn't exactly advance much for whatever reason either.

I'd disagree with this statement. Even if we were to just look at Western Europe - the Middle East and the Islamic worlds, to name one area of the globe were going through their golden ages of science, technology, knowledge etc... during these dark ages - there were many advances in Western Europe as society adjusted to different conditions. Just because a famous Roman hadn't written about it in Latin doesn't mean it didn't happen. Agriculture to name one area was essentially booming during the 'dark ages', but there were also advances in lots of other areas - literature, architecture to name two.

I'd argue, although I don't have the data, that the real stagnation actually occured earlier in the late Roman period. Ever growing bureaucracy, vast resources wasted on border wars and outside threats, an ever increasing and vast demand for exotic commodities from the India and the far east, added with an Empire coming off it's apex (why change how you do stuff if the methods that conquered the mediterrean world were so successful?) led to a temporay lack of 'advancement'

Monasticism, that started out as hermits and fanatics shunning society became powerhouses and repositorties of knowledge and practical innovation in many territories after the end of the Western Roman Empire - see Celtic Monasticism for example.

 

[Pyan]

I'm locking this thread pending discussion with my fellow Moderators, because it may be in breach of the forum rules. The ones relevant to this thread are pretty straight-forward - no politics, no social politics and no religion.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Re-opened, with a reminder that we don't discuss politics and religion here, after having to remove a couple of posts that tried to.

 

[.matthew.]

Agriculture to name one area was essentially booming during the 'dark ages', but there were also advances in lots of other areas - literature, architecture to name two.

Most of the farming innovation I found (like the three-field system) came about around 1100. That was the first European advance in a long time, with major inventions and innovation occurring either in Islamic Spain (which while technically Europe, was more closely tied to Africa and the Middle-east) and China (China being the major innovator in the millenium before that).

The Italians came up with the concept of zero a little over a hundred years later in around 1202 (as a whole number in of itself and unrelated to an empty space marker like in 1202).

About 30 years after that Germany came up with the buttonhole... so that was useful I guess

And then we had to wait another 200 for the printing press in the 1430s, which I'd argue helped jump start the following centuries of rapid development which bring shame and the definition of stagnation to the preceeding years.

Basically, not much was discovered or invented during the 'dark age' period that I could find, at least not in Europe which is where it is traditionally talked about. Now I realise dark age is about how few records were kept but I really couldn't find much that we actually did over those centuries (though I'd have probably said it was between 500-1000 rather than reaching all the way into the 1500s.

 

[sknox]

Few historians use the term Dark Ages, for a couple of generations now. It's not merely an unhelpful term, it leads to a good deal of misunderstandings. Early Middle Ages is more common and more neutral.

Similarly, few historians speak in terms of "advancement" as a useful historical concept. For one thing, it tends to restrict the conversation to technology or production and so leaves out huge areas of human experience; for another, it tends to proceed from progressivist assumptions that say more about modern times than they do about the Middle Ages.

There's a huge body of literature about the early MA, going back at least half a century. Anyone wishing to know what historians think about the era can easily find more books on the topic than they could read in a decade; Patrick Geary's Before France and Germany is old but still a worthwhile starting point.

Much the same can be said about the decline of Rome. That, too, is a concept rarely voiced, for at least as long (the two--decline and fall, and dark ages--are closely related). Change and transformation are much more useful as a framework for understanding the period. What period? I (and many other historians) would put it between Constantine and Charlemagne--early 4thc to mid 8thc. There has been a great deal of very fine work on those centuries. It's also worth mentioning that the documentary record is fuller than many people suppose.

And I'm not even a specialist in this area. Talk to someone actually working in the field and you will get a much more detailed (and more current) response.

 

[Justin Swanton]

I agree that calling the post-imperial centuries in Europe 'Dark' is misleading up to a point, but there was a period when the political fragmentation following the collapse of the Carolingian Empire on the death of Louis the Pious in 840 (no more emperor, no more kings even), combined with the assaults of the Vikings, Saracens and Maygars, did make Europe an unpleasant place. There is a sense of chaos - not so much social anarchy (society was stable enough) as Europe being composed of a mosaic of petty political entities that were divided and powerless against foreign predators, at least more powerless than Europe had even been before. The civilisation of Antiquity had also run down by this time. City life had almost completely disappeared by Charlemagne. It is significant that his capitals were country estates. The chapel at Aix was thought to be a notable achievement but it was just a small church, a poor copy of the church of San Vitale in Ravenna (the place of the famous mosaic of Justinian). Illiteracy was almost universal - even Frankish priests often could hardly read enough to perform the sacraments. The Popes were at the mercy of the robber barons of Rome - the Crescentius and Theophylact families that made the Corleones look good - and were regularly poisoned, strangled or suffocated (I think the average reign of a Pope was about a year). It wasn't a brilliant time and began to end only when Otto I rebuilt the Empire in 962 and Hugh Capet founded the French monarchy in 987.

Does any of it apply to the present though? The general lesson seems to be that political fragmentation leads to rivalries and military weakness which in turn opens the door to various forms of brigandage. But would a complete collapse of any central authority be possible nowadays? Seems to me that central authority is only getting stronger and more autocratic.