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

Montero said:
And those who are entertaining, whether story tellers, singers, tumblers - will have just a little extra clout. Travelling entertainers go way back - they are the ones with more record of them. So some studies will have their uses.......:)
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Didn't medieval minstrels also spy on the side? Or, perhaps, espionage was their primary mission?

The troubadour's life worked out fairly well for Asimov's Mule's empire building.
 
Excellent points, Justin, across the board. I'd point out that most times the phrase "Dark Ages" is used, it's applied to a much greater stretch of time.

I also agree that the century after the division of Charlemagne's empire was chaotic when looked at from the point of view of central authority. But 843 to 962 comes to a grand total of 119 years, which isn't much of an Age.

My real objection is to the vocabulary of rise and fall, or of progress and regression. The ideas are baked deeply into our historical consciousness, which leads to the conversations such as this one. As if the human experience is best explained as if we were climbing a mountain or rising in a weather balloon. There can only be up or down, and level is merely a precursor to falling. There is only forward, lest we go backward. But the measures of progress are flawed and fuzzy and not especially helpful.

Many of the nobles living at the time, even in the darkest of the dark centuries, would readily call weak central control a good thing. It meant freedom. We moderns see the nation-state as the epitome of political order and then measure all previous forms against that.

So, no. In the event of world catastrophe we won't fall back. We'll fall forward, inventing new woes and recapitulating old ones.

One brilliant vision of the future comes from John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar. That's an example of how we might "fall forward." It envisions a world in which nothing works very well but works just well enough for everyone to continue in various forms of misery. No apocalypse, no dragon lords, just slow rot.
 
sknox said:
One brilliant vision of the future comes from John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar. That's an example of how we might "fall forward." It envisions a world in which nothing works very well but works just well enough for everyone to continue in various forms of misery. No apocalypse, no dragon lords, just slow rot.
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You're talking about southern Africa! My family lived through the Zimbabwe economic collapse (eventually making it to South Africa with a carload of kids and luggage and not much else). In South Africa we see the rot progressing steadily. Power cuts are now a way of life. Unemployment was about 30% before the Corona virus epidemic and I believe is floating around 50% now. I meet beggars everywhere - help who I can but you can't help everyone. It's gradually getting harder to live. In the wicked old days whites could afford a house and garden without too much trouble. Today, we have converted our own back garage into a house which is rented, and have subdivided the main house, installing a new shower to create a three-room potential flat for possible future renting. Nobody plans their life too far ahead. The only real plans we have are where to emigrate should everything go belly up. Australia is the first choice, followed by New Zealand, the US, Canada and the UK. If Elon Musk sets up a base on Mars we'll take it. (he'd better help out his fellow sah thefficuns!)
 
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Justin Swanton said:
Seems to me that central authority is only getting stronger and more autocratic.
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Unless they get too sick to do anything. We may be underestimating how fast our personal situations can change. People who have the bulk of their investments in stocks which is just paper and can become worthless over night don't generally worry about this because it is dreamed that everything propped up by paper can't all fail at the same time.

Covid is taking its time in getting around and varies in impact, and because of that, the economic damage while large, is not all happening overnight, and can take months to cause drastic change. This generates a false sense of security. There is no reason why the damage can't all be done in a week instead of a year. There is no reason why the symptoms can't all suddenly show up at the end of 4 weeks. People universally subscribe to the idea that if something doesn't happen then everything is pretty much okay, even if people know that something could still happen in the future. More than likely there are a lot of things getting passed around that people encounter everyday that do nothing.

If a lot of people got incapacitated right away, because of the technological complexity of civilization, and lack of checks and balances, the improperly managed machinery would start doing a lot of severe damage immediately which could reduce central authority's overpowering role back to how far it could physically reach on foot.
 
Robert Zwilling said:
Unless they get too sick to do anything. We may be underestimating how fast our personal situations can change. People who have the bulk of their investments in stocks which is just paper and can become worthless over night don't generally worry about this because it is dreamed that everything propped up by paper can't all fail at the same time.

Covid is taking its time in getting around and varies in impact, and because of that, the economic damage while large, is not all happening overnight, and can take months to cause drastic change. This generates a false sense of security. There is no reason why the damage can't all be done in a week instead of a year. There is no reason why the symptoms can't all suddenly show up at the end of 4 weeks. People universally subscribe to the idea that if something doesn't happen then everything is pretty much okay, even if people know that something could still happen in the future. More than likely there are a lot of things getting passed around that people encounter everyday that do nothing.

If a lot of people got incapacitated right away, because of the technological complexity of civilization, and lack of checks and balances, the improperly managed machinery would start doing a lot of severe damage immediately which could reduce central authority's overpowering role back to how far it could physically reach on foot.
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My take from history is that natural disasters like plagues do absolutely nothing to overturn a social order. The Black Death killed up to half the population of Europe, but was hardly a blip on European culture other than helping to free many of the peasants who now owned their land but lived pretty much as before (previously they had nearly all been tenants of landowners and had to pay them a tithe from their crops but otherwise were left to their own affairs).

What overturns societies are man-made disasters, the worst being the collapse of a social order, i.e. a previous loyalty to the system is replaced by a sense of every man for himself. This is what destroyed the late Roman Empire: its army remained good but its generals were pitted against the emperor and each other in an ongoing cold war that paralyzed their ability to deal with the barbarian threat.

The second worst is a war, especially a war in which the victors are a free-ranging army of professional soldiers/raiders like Huns and Mongols, rather than a properly structured state.

I would bet on a societal collapse - a loss of confidence in and loyalty to the system, leading to an every-man-for-himself situation in which warlords rise up and wreck the infrastructure, similar to what happened in China in the 1920's and 1930's and Somalia today. This loss of confidence would arise from the collapse of any common moral norms that are necessary to prop up the legal system and glue society together, combined with an economic falling-off prompted by stagnation in technological progress (already a fact since the 1970's) and rising energy prices due to increasing shortages in fossil fuels, shortages that cannot be made up by green energy. Economic collapse accompanied by societal anarchy will result in tens or hundreds of millions of deaths before the situation finally stabilises at something approximating to pre-industrial civilisation, with technology, especially powered technology like transport, becoming a privilege of the few.

Now that's worth a novel...
 
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>Didn't medieval minstrels also spy on the side?
I don't know of any specific examples. Most minstrels were essentially free agents and so weren't going to be sent *by* anyone. Moreover, for the ones I know about, their goal in life was to gain employment at a noble court, where they would remain. Also, at least a few of the trouibadors were themselves members of the nobility.

But it's a great device for fiction!
 
Maybe they were traders in gossip - but you'd have to be really careful not to besmirch a potential employer.

On the flip side, I was just picturing a travelling minstrel who was observing the towns, farms, villages as he went past, gathering at least economic data. Then I thought - hang on, a professional musician paying attention to their surroundings rather than thinking about music or practicising their fingering, or doing singing exercises while they walk/ride. Nah.
 
So, I just said they weren't spied. However, there's another model. Merchants very often would assess conditions in the places to which they traveled. Venice made a whole cottage industry out of this, with merchants or other officials delivering their reports to the Senate. In a similar fashion, the Fugger family (go ahead, snicker) had regular reports from their representatives. (these men were called factors, so they were the Fugger family factors, yes) Those reports have been collected and translated and provide interesting glimpses into 16thc Europe. They contain a healthy dose of economic reporting mixed with political reporting, as you might imagine, plus the occasional odd gem.

Minstrels, actors, and other disreputable sorts wouldn't necessarily report to anyone, but I could see one of them keeping a diary, or perhaps weaving what they saw/heard/smelled into their performances.
 
Er no, you didn't quite say they didn't do any spying, you said they were unlikely to be sent out as spies. I was postulating freelance info gathering for purposes of sucking up.

The whole thing about collected reports is fascinating. Are they published anywhere?
I've tried reading Celia Fiennes diary and was bored out of my head.
 
News And Rumor In Renaissance Europe: The Fugger Newsletters
Stupidly overpriced at Amazon, but readily available through university libraries. Or, once upon a time, in second-hand bookstores.
 
And it turns out you can get it through the County Library - or at least it is listed in the catalogue. Will see if my order arrives. Thanks.
 
Fair warning: you may find most of it rather pedestrian. But there are bits and pieces. There are also preserved speeches to the Venetian Senate, but I'm not sure if any have been compiled and published.
 
Well, I can always quit. :)
On the other hand, speaking as a former re-enactor, pedestrian can be fascinating.
 
One of my best topic thread ever. Lots of interesting conversation on this one. :cool:(y)
 
Montero said:
So, been dipping into the Fugger Newsletters at random and fascinated by the description of the plans for the wedding of the King of Poland in 1592. The bride was to travel to the wedding in a coach pulled by six white bears and six black bears. I wonder how well that went.
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Ebony and ivory,
(white is bigger, black is history)
Side by side on my piano keyboard,
oh Lord, why don't we?
 
Montero, if you've looked through those entries (and the translated, edited version is but a tiny subset), maybe you can see how blurry was the line between reporting and spying. It was really just information gathering.

Real spying was done by ambassadors, complete with secret (and coded) messages back to the home country, and specific instructions from back home. Donald Queller wrote the classic on this, The Office of Ambassador in the Middle Ages. I remember groaning when I found that one on my assigned reading list in grad school, but it was fascinating.
 
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