[OT] [I mean totally OT] Re: What can you "new"

Jarrett Billingsley jarrett.billingsley at gmail.com
Sun Mar 29 15:27:56 PDT 2009


On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Joel C. Salomon <joelcsalomon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Speaking of which (damn ranting and subject changing!) I think the
>> Medieval Ages were a stain on our history. I read somewhere how at the
>> beginning of that dark time there was actual *loss* of technology: they
>> had these aquaducts and pumps and mechanisms and whatnot from the Romans
>> and didn't know how to repair them anymore, so they just let them go
>> decrepit. Very scary.
>
> Jerry Pournelle defines a Dark Age as a time when not only is the
> knowledge of how to do things forgotten, but even that these things are
> possible.  Usually folks’d ascribe some large construction (like the
> pyramids, the walls of Crete, &c.) to magic or the gods or some such.

Indeed.  The European Dark Ages were dominated by views that humans
were inherently flawed; that everyone was born a sinner; that you were
predestined to go to either heaven or hell and there was nothing you
could do to change that.  There was pretty much a complete loss of
faith in the capabilities of humanity itself.  It wasn't until the
renaissance that humanistic thought made a return and caused politics,
science, and technology to simply explode in development.  Heck, even
most of the work of the ancient Greeks and Romans was lost, either
unavailable to the public at large due to a lack of printing
technology and literacy, or simply disregarded as heresy.  Some
incredible writings had the ink stripped off the pages and were reused
in copying the Bible or other liturgical works.  Incredible.



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