> I had not heard this position claimed before (almost always, it was "the > Romans were smart, but collapsed, and there was a period of intense suck > until either 'the Renaissance' or the 'Age of Enlightenment'...", or > according to others, "the Protestant Reformation", since the idea is that the > Catholics have fallen into a state of heresy or apostasy). > > however, granted, history isn't really my strong area..
The guys who really unraveled the three common memes you described above (renaissance, enlightenment, reformation) took a deeper approach to scholarship. Peter Brown and Garth Fowden are two luminaries who have written approachable books on the subject. (no need to read/write ancient Greek & Latin and medieval Greek & Latin). "Empire to Commonwealth" by Fowden can really rephrase how you think not only of Rome, but the British Empire. You can think of it this way, after WW2 the center of the English speaking world moved from the sacked rubble of blitz out London to New York. (Rome to Constantinople). British civilization gave rise to a new power America (Byzantium) and a host of petty kingdoms like Canada and Austrailia (Papal States), and radically alter the language and culture of many places like India (Gaul, I mean France). We wouldn't say post the WW2 the world entered into a new Dark Age, because we are more familiar with the post war history even though some OBE types will pine for the glory days of drinking gin and keeping India British. We do the same thing when it comes to AI btw, we let our cultural and personal biases denigrate the achievements in the field at the same time ignoring the very simple reality that human intelligence just isn't that high of a bar to cross. We are after all just a streaming pattern recognition engine with reflective capabilities run amok. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
