I can’t stop thinking about a series of blog posts by Eleanor Janega I read a couple of months ago. The first is called There’s no such thing as the ‘Dark Ages’, but OK, where she writes:
The medieval period was not a period of stagnation, it was a time of progress.
Wait, what? That’s not what I thought! This is novel information! Tell me more...
The actual phrase ‘Dark Ages’ itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, which Caesar Baronius – a cardinal and Church historian – came up with around 1602. He applied the term exclusively to the tenth and eleventh centuries. However, and very significantly in his use of the term, Baronius was not decrying a state of scientific malaise, or a particularly turbulent political period – he’s talking about a lack of sources surviving from that time. Indeed, Baronius sees the cut off point for the dark ages to be the Gregorian reforms of 1046, following which we see a massive increase in surviving documentation.
So:
Is there a time that historians use the term ‘Dark Ages’? Yeah, we do use it to talk about source survival rates. It’s not a term we use as a value judgment, however. We just mean that we don’t have a lot of evidence to go off of.
This whole time I’ve been using “Dark Ages” and I didn’t realize that it’s a slur. I had sort of believed in the propaganda that when the glorious Roman Empire fell, all of Europe slipped into some dystopian nightmare where progress was halted for more than a thousand years out of sheer stubbornness. But wait...wasn’t the Roman Empire, ya know, an Empire? Are those typically...good?
Late last year Eleanor argued that this weird belief in the Roman Empire is a contrarian history, despite being popular. In the post, she replies to a reply-guy in her comments:
It is contrarian to argue in defence of a system which steals from workers to give to a vanishingly small segment of a wealthy population. It is contrarian to refuse to learn about a subject and still think your opinions on it are valid. It is contrarian to ignore experts when they correct your profound and deep-seated misunderstanding.
However this man, and the legions of those who will go to bat for a violent and oppressive Empire, do not see themselves as contrarian because they are not engaging with actual history, they are engaging with a hegemonic historiography. They believe in the glory of the Roman Empire and its inherent good because they themselves currently live inside a violent empire that exists to funnel money to a wealthy elite. If you begin to question whether Rome was bad for the average person – if you start to ask why there was money for some people to have underfloor heating, while there wasn’t enough to adequately feed the population of Brittania – you may start asking questions about what is happening around you.
Through these posts I felt like a sprawling network of rusty, spider-webbed cogs had begun to turn in my mind. Someone had planted these ideas in my head about the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages when I was a kid, but I’d never thought about the people who were ruled beneath and lived through it. Along the way I had internalized some propaganda and never questioned it, propaganda that made me think less of people—seeing them as sub-human dummies. That’s millions of people over thousands of years! And what? They were willing to let their cities go to hell and forgo all the wonders of Empire because of laziness?
This reminds me of a great lil book I read recently by Becky Chambers called The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. The novel is set hundreds of years into the future, humanity is a spacefaring civilization and works alongside dozens of alien species. The world isn’t perfect and there’s all sorts of petty conflicts and problems, but that’s not the word folks use—alien—to describe their compatriots in the stars. They call them people. Everyone is people.
There’s no us, there’s no them. There’s just people.