American Thinker: Is A New Dark Age At Hand?
Tacitus has written previously of the negative consequences of the loss of body consciousness and of the use of technology. I thought this piece was provocative.
Wow. Thought-provoking piece. I can’t say that I disagree with much (if any) of what Murray has said. We’ve become a very hollow, gullible, passive, superficial society.
Thanks for the post.
This brings to mind an incident that convinces me the Dark Ages are close, if not already here.
A few years ago, I ran into a young woman, early 20s, who literally doesn’t know how to talk. I kid you not.
When we asked her to place an order for building materials we needed on site, she was mute. Why? The server was down and she couldn’t do anything. We actually needed to prompt her into talking to the guy sat opposite her so he could place an order over the phone.
She looked at him as if she didn’t know how to… you know… open your mouth and talk? It’s weird, but that was the impression I got. The blank look of confusion on her face, not a sound from her lips.
She’s a woman, for God’s sake! A woman doesn’t know how to talk?
We had to do it ourselves and then we heard a beep-beep. Her phone. She had a text message. Her face becomes alive and animated, her thumbs blurring over the keypad at a speed faster than the eye can follow. The message sent, she then lapses back into her comatose state.
All the time, not a sound from her. My colleague, a self-confessed Luddite who despises modern technology, was livid, convinced that he witnessed the beginning of the end of civilisation. I was a bit shaken at the first real evidence I’ve seen of a major social malaise taking hold and I had to admit he had a point.
Thank God for pheromones, is all I can say. A technology that encourages you to leave your cyborg existence behind, go out there and interact with your fellow man? Bring it on.
Musk
Well said! I’ve experienced the same thing with people from about 30 and younger (and I’m not exactly old) who have never been taught how to ‘unplug’ and communicate from person to person. Frightening.
Well, I get the impression that this article is playing on feelings more than looking at the facts. It is being a voice for the fears living in middle aged underbellies.
Every bit of technology has positive and negative effects. The grammophone robbed Uncle Eddy of an audience for his mediocre guitarplay, but gave us the opportunity to listen to Jimmi Hendrix after his death. Youtube gives Uncle Eddy a new audience, perhaps one or two people on the other end of the globe that love to hear someone play their favorite songs, even if done unprofessionally. On one hand, his nephews were a physically closer audience, related by blood, on the other hand, they were hardly hiding their boredom. What is more meaningful?
Technology isn’t evil, it is a tool. What you do with it is up to you. Plenty of people under 30 read and read a lot. Some of them write. Some people are glued to the television or numbing their minds with idle chatter, others are learning something from a documentary or discussing something profound over email. It is all up to the individual and the choices he makes. It is not like dumb people are going to read Plato or go to the opera if you take away their TV-set, mobile phone and computer. They are more likely to chat with a dumb friend, pick a fight at a seedy bar, have unprotected sex, get conned playing cards or just goof about.
About darkness and the Dark Ages:
Wars are cruel and violent and terrible and destructive, but they are also part of the natural cycles of life and fertile breeding grounds for new technologies and ideas. Trying to stay alive when the odds are bad makes people very inventive , trying to find hope in the grittiest, darkest, most desperate times makes people courageous. In the greatest darkness, new light is born. Destruction gives us the opportunity to build something new, something better but it also oblitterates things of beauty. Violence marks and guards boundaries, physically and ethically, it breeds more violence and can also end violence. The coldest darkest winter is the beginning of a new year and also ends life for many animals and plants, some humans too. Is is good, bad, both or neither?
A lot of the ignorance and intolerance we associate with the middle ages is a natural companion to the spread of monotheism. It required destruction of the old structures, but Judaism, Islam and Christianity, even today, give structure to the lives of half the people on this planet. There was probably some reason why they were seen as desirable at the time. An education promoting free thought is not going to coexist with blind faith, and monotheism happens to demand just that. Migrating peoples were able to invade Roman territory because, at least in the area of warfare, they were able to do things the Romans could not. Barbarians or not, they evidently had their strengths, even if they did not have the order and the education the Romans had. Rome could not have fallen if it did not have weaknesses. Invaders were often people whose lands had been invaded before. There were no refugee camps back then, they needed to conquer to survive. Constant wars and brigands made the countryside unsafe for travel, so goods and ideas could no longer be exchanged. A series of plagues furthered deurbanisation so that more people were cut off from centers of learning.
It was an unfortunate that the rise of monotheism and an age of war coincided, so that there was a cut-off from both the past and the wider world. Islam by the way, kept better trade connections and exchange of knowledge but pagan works were destroyed with more fervor. It was not that people became stupid, shallow or anything like that. Simply lacking access to a free stream of information and being unable to compare views with others beyond the town walls causes people to keep believing in silly things. If anything, the internet helps prevent something like this from happening again. You can burn libraries, but once something is on the internet, you’ll never get it off.
Pffft ,
Stupid article.
Would like love to hear what you, Quirk, think about it all…
Fantastic (and yet all too believable) story Musk, and good point about value of pheromones as a social and emotional learning tool.
Butterfly - fair point, reminiscent of Tyler Cowen (of marginalrevolution fame).
I do think that society tends to ebb and flow between periods of strong social cohesion (Ibn Khaldun called this asabiyyah) and periods of fragmentation/disintegration. The second stage performs a necessary function in destroying institutions and patterns that are no longer adaptive and prepares the way for a new period of growth. But at the same time it might not be so pleasant to live through.
Here is what Marc Faber wrote on this topic -
If only we could be sure that were true. The net is robust, but perhaps not as robust as one imagines. I do not think we are entering in to a dark age globally for a while. But eventually, one will come along. And servers require much more caring for than books. The power consumption alone is staggering.
While I think some unpleasant changes can happen in the future, comparison with the fall of Rome is a denial of the gravity of Rome’s problems in the three centuries before the actual fall. It was not just any one problem that led to the dark ages, but rather 300 years of constant financial crises, constant political crises and anarchy, several epidemics that killed a substantial part of the population, constant attacks on the borders of Rome, plus a host of other problems. If I look back at the past 100 years, that is not what I see in the world, in Europe or even the US. I do think we can learn a lesson from how the Romans tried to solve their problems and what the consequenses of those decisions were. We can apply that thought to our own, less intense problems.
Rome fell gradually. Most of what we consider to be typical of the dark ages was already a reality for the Roman citizen before the Barbarians took over. A few examples:
When the empire stopped growing, the supply fresh slaves ended and jobs were left undone. The chosen solution was not to mechanize and get work done with less hands but to motivate the poor citizens to pick up the pail. This chipped away at the basic citizen rights, caused large scale uprising and eventually caused the lower classes to be apathic to invasion. Had the choice been made to build machinery, serfdom may not have happened, there had been less civil war and the peasants that formed the lionshare of the army had more motivation to protect the land.
As emperors became of lower quality and were assasinated shortly after seizing the throne, yet remained in absolute power, decisions where made with the short term in mind, the government grew less and less reliable and taxes grew less reasonable. Those who could afford it moved into the country on something like a self sufficient plantation with a private army, stopped paying taxes or participating in the national economy. They essentially created their own little duchies inside the empire. They would not have been able to do this without the poor fleeing the cities with nothing to trade but their labour. Inside those little self sufficient economies, trading goods was th natural thing to do. Hyperinflation did cause people in the cities to also start bartering, but that alone would not have caused a feudal economy. Ancient economies also did not bounce back as quickly as modern ones can.
When the dollar collapses it could be a slow drop followed by a stabilisation, which means that Americans will have less access to cheap foreign goods and either own less or produce more or it could be something like Argentina’s situation. The latter scenario is pretty unpleasant, but hardly the dark ages.
Ah, yes. These things do take a long time to play out. But to recognize that is not to say that the problems didn’t arise from decisions and shifts in the mood of society and culture that started to occur fairly early in the difficult period, well in advance of the fall itself, and yet proceeded down an inexorable path that was hard to leave once the journey began Catabolic phases are not a straight line collapse into the bottom of the ocean - we see decline, crisis and then some kind of stabilization and recovery that might last some time before the next episode of decline begins.
Yes… but were these originating causes or somewhat symptoms of a decline in the organisation and cohesion of the empire? There were pressures from other peoples from the early days yet Rome did not succumb to them till it was weakened.
Clearly, amongst other things, periods of cooling in the climate have contributed throughout history to epidemics, economic crises and barbarian invasions (since the cooler it is the lower crop yields tend to be). Certainly in the next thirty years one can expect a phase of cooling related to cycles in ocean temperature (such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation). After that possibly it depends on solar activity - let us hope we are not in a new Dalton minimum, or worse.
Ah, but I am not asking whether extrapolating our recent experience points to a more difficult period ahead. I wonder rather whether one can see similarities between prevailing conditions and those that existed very early on in the decline of great civilisations. I do believe the answer is quite clearly that we do. It is easy to confuse technological progress with social progress, but I believe that the former can coexist in the short term with declining social conditions. An example might be our experience since 1996 with the tech and then credit bubbles, where there was without a doubt a transformational shift related to technology and globalisation that even so did not stop growing disorganisation in the structure of the economy.
I do hope so. I wonder however to what extent the lesson from their experience (and that of other civilisations, many of which have experienced several episodes of darkness and light) is that decline at some point is inevitable, and that one should be careful not to get carried away with a Whiggish view of human history as linear progress. Maybe human history is a spiral - ebb and flow is inevitable, even if we do progress over millenia. Possibly recognizing the inevitability of decline once it sets in will lead us to make wiser decisions than would trying at all costs to preserve the status quo. I do think we are still in a period when we will be able to find solutions to our problems, but it would be better to face up to them sooner.
Possibly we are not many decades away from hyperinflation. As you say, one motivation for escaping the cities was the excessive tax burden (levied in kind) and need for protection once the state no longer existed in that role. Now we are very far away from this situation presently, but is it not a question of degree?
Is this based on some permanent change in human nature? Or more contingent on particular institutions and circumstances? Many emerging market economies have been less than resilient when very badly governed.
Possibly the route to an Argentina situation would be via an incredible dollar rally first, and it would be the policy response to the deflation that sets us up for genuine hyperinflation. You’re right that it’s not exactly the dark ages. As, I said I don’t expect anything like that soon (not really, in my lifetime). But it would be one more step along a road that historically (after maybe a century or two) has led in that direction. The real problems are ones of spirit and culture. Once a society has lost belief in the values, institutions and myths that led to success, I think it is very difficult for it to reorient itself in the right direction without destruction and then rebuilding.
Here are some perspectives on this that I enjoyed reading
ContraHour: Martin Armstrong: Is It Time To Turn Out The Lights?
A theory of history
World of Contradictions
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/06/07/Kotlikoff.pdf
from founder of Paypal
Notes from Peter Thiel’s Singularity Summit Talk (2009) | Leveraging Ideas
Pheroquirk,
I understand you do not believe in a coming Dark Age but you do see an impending decline of some magnitude. Would you care to elaborate on what you expect the situation to be like in 30 years and in a century?
That is an interesting point to consider. I think growth that comes from technological advance mainly causes linear or exponential progress over the long term. Every invention of importance creates a jump, but over the course of a century it all smooths out. For example: It may take me a week to sew a dress by hand, but only a day with a sewing machine. So if me and Lucia from the 2nd century spend 5 hours a week on sewing for ourselves, I will have a fuller closet. I think the growth that comes from power works more in terms of ebb and flow. If Lucia manages to force a girl to spend 35 hours a week sewing for her, her closet will be as full as mine. Her slave increases her production as much as my machine. I can also use power to gain wealth in a more indirect way. I can buy a dress that takes me 10 hours to make for money that takes me two hours to earn. Someone else is oppressing a girl in a far away place, much like Lucia had her slave. Both oppressed girls may at some point gain power or protection. You can argue that we have the same to lose or that I will be left with more than Lucia. Power changes can be seen as big sine waves on top of the upward curve.
Where do you think we are at compared to the Roman empire? What sort of solutions do you envision?
I did some reading there and while I don’t normally read much about economy, I found them quite fascinating because of the connection to history.
interesting link reaper, but not so sure of the direct connection with prospects for long term decline of western civilization…
incidentally, I do think political changes can appear as if the result of some vast conspiracy, but I don’t think in actuality conspiracies are very influential. possibly it is rather that individual politicians acting in accordance with the spirit of the age and with what they believe to be their best interests are led to favour certain emergent tendencies in policy.
Well, the bankers and world leaders want us to be subservient. Think about the last time you had a power cut. You were probably at a loss with nothing productive to do. Likewise, ever went to the supermarket and got really pissed off because they didn’t have something you were looking for?
We are all too used to our life of comfort and convenience. Just on time delivery means that we only ever have 3days worth if food and fuel at any one time.
Last of all, in Britain we have what we call an underclass that relies entirely on welfare but lives just as good as the middle classes. Free cars, no rent, subsidised utilities. Most of them are obese. You see them struggling to push their trolleys in the supermarket. What would happen to these people if the system failed for one week? I once took one woman’s trolley full of groceries while she was rummaging around in her purse. She couldn’t chase me, she just stood there crying and screaming. I left the trolley at the other side of the car park. A member of staff had to retrieve it for her. I was disgusted.