The term “dark age” came into
popular usage among intellectuals during the 18th century, but the term itself
was actually coined by Petrarch. He was an early Italian Renaissance scholar in
the 14th century. It was originally used to describe a certain period of time,
but eventually became synonymous with the period between the fall of the Roman
Empire and the Renaissance. The assumed lack of human progress, due to the lack
of records and demographic decline, was a dark time for humanity.
The term began to fall
out of usage as scholars gained a better understanding of the middle ages. The
period described as dark, in terms of human accomplishment began to recede,
eventually covering just the period immediately after Rome. Eventually the term
fell out of fashion altogether, first because it was not terribly accurate and
then because the usual suspects got involved. The image of dark versus light
was seen as problematic, so now using the term is a microaggression.
That’s a good point to wonder if the West has not already entered a
new dark age, in which superstition rules over rationality.
The concept of the microaggression is something superstitious people living in
a dark age would have understood. After all, a microaggression is the idea that
certain words and phrases, incantations, will cause a miasma to develop around
the people saying and hearing the words. This miasma or evil spirit will cause
those exposed to react involuntarily and uncontrollably.
In fact, everything about
political correctness and multiculturalism relies on oogily-boogily that people
in the dark age of Europe would have found ridiculous. The people of Europe in
the middle ages may not have had a sophisticated understanding of the natural
world, but they did not think the dirt had magical qualities. Magic Dirt Theory
would have struck them as laughably ridiculous. They may not have understood cognitive science, but they
knew the apple does not fall far from the tree.
This twitter thread from
last month is a useful example. It is primitive howling at the moon, but the
source is someone claiming to be a scientist. Granted, anthropology is now just
a dumping ground for girls, who could not find a husband, but the fact that
such a thing exists in a college campus suggests a shadow is now hanging over
at least part of the West. If you look at the twitter profile of that person,
you’ll note she has her pronouns listed. These are the talismans of the modern
academy.
Mx.
Townsend is not some isolated example. She is a milder form of what is becoming
quite common in academia. Cordelia Fine wrote
a whole book denying that there are two sexes or even that sexes exist. She was
carried around from campus to campus, celebrated as a great thinker. Her book
is complete nonsense. It is now a race to see who can most completely deny
observable reality about humans, in order to please some undefined spirits that
will usher us into the age of equality.
It’s tempting to dismiss the
madness we see in academia as trivial or temporary, but this has been going on
for several generations now. Stephen J. Gould, for example, spent
his life trying to shrink the stock of human knowledge. While his motivations
can be debated, his purpose was not. This deliberate effort to pull down the
shades and plunge the intellectual space into darkness has been going on for
generations. We are just now seeing the shadows creep across the college
campus.
A dark age is always imagined to be a period when the stock of
human knowledge stagnates or even declines. Another way to think of a dark age
is one in which the people are unable to manage the complexity bequeathed to
them. As a result, society goes through a period of retrenchment. It devolves
into something simpler that can be managed by the available human capital. A
dark age is one in which the people rebuild the floor of their society, so
future generations can build on it
Somewhere in the last
century or maybe the prior century, people in the West began to lose the
ability to control their institutions. By control, it should be understood to
mean the knowledge of how they work and why they were created. It is one thing
to know how to use the toilet. It is another thing to understand public
sanitation and the reason it is a vital public service. People in the West no
longer seem to know why their institutions exist or how they must be maintained
in order to properly function.
That’s why the college campus
is a good place to examine, when thinking about the crisis in the West. In
theory, the people running the society of tomorrow are now being trained on the
colleges of today. Yet, they are being taught things that are laughably false
by people who are often suffering from mental illness. In other cases, they are
taught by people who hate them and hate the West. A people who understood why
these institutions were created would never have permitted this to happen.
There is another aspect of the term dark age. We often use it to
describe a time when it is unacceptable to be curious about things. Everyone is
forced into a conformity of thought and belief. It is associated with primitive
superstition. Of course, the usual suspects always apply this to whites and
Christians. Within living memory, they would portray Christians as
closed-minded bigots, who were obsessed with stifling curiosity and free
expression. The victims were always the usual suspects.
That’s just another part
of the blood libel against the Occident and it is this blood libel that is
steering the West into a dark age. In a frenzy to eradicate all that is white,
they are stamping out what it means to be white. Since curiosity about the
natural world is an implicitly Western trait, enforced conformity around a body
of anti-knowledge is seen as the solution to whiteness. In this context,
the dark age is not the result of a natural process or an accident of history,
but the goal of the people who rule over us.
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