"The Dark Ages are coming back fast… "

[T'ai Chi]

The end of the 11/10/06 commentary was interesting:

"The Dark Ages are coming back fast… "

It doesn't really seem like that at all IMO. Of course, "Dark Ages" is just obvious exxageration, probably emotional at that, but it seems like we've lost the Dark Ages and have been moving away from them as a whole for a while now.

Is a "Dark Ages" image/scenario necessary to keep the skeptical movement and organized skepticism afloat?

 

[Jekyll]

Absolutely, the organised sceptical movement is composed entirely of sheeple who must be kept in constant fear, so that they do not look within and discover the secret cabal of lizard men who run it.

 

[CBVan]

Oh noes! The Lizard men have heard you, Jekyll, run for it! Lols.
Gave me a chuckle. I think it was a joke, myself.

 

[wahrheit]

The end of the 11/10/06 commentary was interesting:

"The Dark Ages are coming back fast… "

Um, just a figure of speech, more or less.

 

[Horatius]

Absolutely, the organised sceptical movement is composed entirely of sheeple who must be kept in constant fear, so that they do not look within and discover the secret cabal of lizard men who run it.

I thought we agreed never to tell him about the lizards! Way to go and ruin it for everybody!

At least keep quiet about the Crab People, okay?

 

[Jekyll]

I thought we agreed never to tell him about the lizards! Way to go and ruin it for everybody!

At least keep quiet about the Crab People, okay?

Oh it will be fine. Just keep your latex face mask on and no one will believe me. We can double bluff our way out of this...

 

[CaptainManacles]

The end of the 11/10/06 commentary was interesting:

"The Dark Ages are coming back fast… "

It doesn't really seem like that at all IMO. Of course, "Dark Ages" is just obvious exxageration, probably emotional at that, but it seems like we've lost the Dark Ages and have been moving away from them as a whole for a while now.

That could be said of the times before the dark ages the last couple times they happened. The advance of technology has more of an up and down then people generally like to believe. We even have pockets of it within our community, in fact, being anti-science is the one thing that almost all extreamist groups can agree on. If evolution were thrown out the window, horoscopes were used by public officals and businesses to make decisions, psychics became the primary source of investigation by police and considered valid parts of the court proccess; things would go to crap pretty quick, and many of those things are already gaining a foothold. It's unlikely, but more likely then I'm comfortable with.

That being said, I do think the skeptical community blows it out of porportion sometimes. The latest court case on evolution is a good example. Skeptics are disgusted that we have to go through something like that, but not long ago the same kinds of trials were being held over the required teaching of only christian creationism and the creationists won. Here we're talking about injecting ID into schools along side evolution and creationists lost. We've come a long ways.

 

[Foolmewunz]

"The Dark Ages are coming back fast… "

Now, now... everybody stay calm. It just seems like things are getting darker at a greatly accelerated pace - - every year around this time, when you readjust the clocks in countries with daylight savings.

Why, before you know it, the winter solstice will be here and the days will start getting longer, again! And then pretty soon the birds will be chirping and the crocuses will be.... well, whatever it is crocuses do after the thaw.

It's okay, everyone, no panic! We'll get through this one, together.

(Wait'll you see what I can do with an eclipse! )

 

[CFLarsen]

Is a "Dark Ages" image/scenario necessary to keep the skeptical movement and organized skepticism afloat?

What "skeptical movement" and "organized skepticism" are you talking about?

You keep referring to this, but you never say what you mean.

 

[wahrheit]

What "skeptical movement" and "organized skepticism" are you talking about?

You keep referring to this, but you never say what you mean.

Well said. My impression was, that most skeptics would rather take pride in _not_ being part of a "movement" or "organized" something. Speaking of myself, this would contradict some of my principles, going into a huddle with other skeptics because we are skeptics.

 

[T'ai Chi]

Is appealing to a present-day Dark Ages or a Rising Tide necessary for the organized skeptical movement?

 

[CFLarsen]

Is appealing to a present-day Dark Ages or a Rising Tide necessary for the organized skeptical movement?

What "organized skepticism" are you talking about?

You keep referring to this, but you never say what you mean.

 

[ceo_esq]

Few modern historians use the term "Dark Ages" any more, and when they do, it tends to be in a qualified and nonjudgmental way. What bothers me about Randi's use of this term is that he almost invariably employs it in a pejorative manner (as with almost any reference he makes to the medieval period), and unfortunately his historical prejudices in this regard appear very bound up with his anti-religious prejudices. I don't recall ever reading anything in the Commentaries that suggested that Randi knows much about what actually happened during the Middle Ages or why.

 

[sackett]

Randi and the Middle Ages

Are those prejudices, or convictions based on observation and judgement? Does Randi condemn out of hand, or after reasoned consideration?

“Early Middle Ages” sounds nicer than Dark Ages – but they were dark ages, when Europe lost perhaps half its population. (At the moment I’m reading John Kelly’s The Black Death, a popular history but one that includes citations and other scholarly apparatus.) Literacy was almost the sole property of the Church in those long centuries, and so was ignorance.

The later Middle Ages were no better, certainly in terms of dealing with disaster. The various responses to the Black Death on the part of laity and Church, learned and simple, illustrate the helplessness of medieval society: They lit bonfires, rang bells, prayed, inhaled the scent of herbs (or latrines, a competing theory), flogged themselves bloody, and massacred Jews. One superstition was as good as another; the word “credulity” had no meaning in such a culture.

I’ll concede that Randi, who writes for as popular an audience as he can, uses easy phrases too often, and it makes his flourishes a bit predictable. But his gist is plain and sensible: He does not want the world to slip back into a medieval mentality, in which nothing is known and everything is believed.

And neither do I, by God.

 

[CFLarsen]

You. Do. Not. Want. To. Be. Living. Back. Then.

 

[CaptainManacles]

 

[ceo_esq]

Are those prejudices, or convictions based on observation and judgement? Does Randi condemn out of hand, or after reasoned consideration?

I am inclined to suspect that they are prejudices. At the very least, it's hard to say on what objective observation and judgment they are based, since (as I suggested earlier) contemporary historians don't appear to share his views about the period in question. The way in which Randi speaks about the Middle Ages appears to me to reflect his having internalized the same historical myths and biases about which scholars in this area so frequently complain.

“Early Middle Ages” sounds nicer than Dark Ages – but they were dark ages, when Europe lost perhaps half its population. (At the moment I’m reading John Kelly’s The Black Death, a popular history but one that includes citations and other scholarly apparatus.)

I assume you're referring to the pandemics of the mid-6th to late-7th century, rather than the late medieval pandemic known as the Black Death. Yet I expect you'd agree that that has little to do with why Randi speaks of the Middle Ages as "dark".

Literacy was almost the sole property of the Church in those long centuries ...

It's true that following the breakup of the empire there was a decline in education, which the Church helped to counteract and eventually reverse, but for the sake of accuracy - as J.W. Thompson noted in the chapter on the early medieval period in his classic The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages - "[t]he common and widely accepted belief that in the Middle Ages no one not a cleric was able to read or to write Latin, is a gross exaggeration."

... and so was ignorance.

I'm not sure what you mean when you suggest that ignorance, like literacy, was almost the sole property of the Church.

The later Middle Ages were no better, certainly in terms of dealing with disaster. The various responses to the Black Death on the part of laity and Church, learned and simple, illustrate the helplessness of medieval society: They lit bonfires, rang bells, prayed, inhaled the scent of herbs (or latrines, a competing theory), flogged themselves bloody, and massacred Jews.

Though I agree there wasn't a great deal that could be done to combat the disease effectively, I think that your summary might paint a misleadingly (and exclusively) irrational picture. According to Prof. Darrel Amundsen's article entitled "The Medieval Catholic Tradition" in the anthology Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions (Johns Hopkins UP, 1998):

The church's reaction to the Black Death of 1348-1349, the most horrible pestilence ever to afflict Europe, is well illustrated by the actions taken by Pope Clement IV as soon as the plague hit Avignon, then the seat of the papacy. In addition to taking various measures to hinder contagion, he hired physicians to care for the afflicted, gave special indulgences to encourage the clergy to minister to those stricken, and instituted a special mass to implore an end to the plague. Medical care was viewed as an immediate need to counter this affliction ... [and] was by no means regarded as inconsistent with the equally important effort to approach God through a special mass.

One superstition was as good as another; the word “credulity” had no meaning in such a culture.

...

[Randi] does not want the world to slip back into a medieval mentality, in which nothing is known and everything is believed.

But is that really a fair characterization of a specifically medieval mentality? As the eminent historian of science Edward Grant has written (God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge UP, 2001)):

[T]he Age of Reason began in the Middle Ages. … Modern philosophy did not have to undertake the struggle to establish the rights of reason against the Middle Ages; it was, on the contrary, the Middle Ages that established them for it, and the very manner in which the seventeenth century imagined that it was abolishing the work of preceding centuries did nothing more than continue it. …

If modern science has progressed almost unrecognizably beyond anything known or contemplated ... in the Middle Ages, modern scientists are, nonetheless, heirs to the remarkable achievements of their medieval predecessors. The idea, and the habit, of applying reason to resolve the innumerable questions about our world, and of always raising new questions, did not come to modern science from out of the void. Nor did it originate with the great scientific minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton. It came out of the Middle Ages ... It is a gift from the Latin Middle Ages to the modern world, a gift that makes our modern society possible[.]

Grant's point, of course - which has also been made in various ways by a great many of his colleagues - is that the reputation of the Middle Ages as an era of unreason and superstition is unmerited. A "medieval mentality" should arguably refer to "the idea, and the habit, of applying reason to resolve the innumerable questions about our world, and of always raising new questions". Instead (as used by many, including Randi), it's usually intended to convey the opposite.

 

[sackett]

Applying reason to the questions of this world is something humans do, if left to their own devices. The !Kung San of South Africa apply reason when reading tracks; so do I, when I’m out in the wilderness. What kind of reason was the faculty of the Paris medical colleges using when they attributed the plague to an unusual conjunction of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter? What kind of reason did the Flagellants apply when they lashed themselves bloody? When the crowds watching them cried “Save us! Save us!” were they using reason in a way we can recognize?

I can forgive medievalists for sticking up for their period. It’s proverbial that medieval studies are like a jungle: once you plunge in, you may never come out again. But when Randi deplores some modern manifestation of unreason as medieval or threatening to bring in a new dark age, I know what he means, and I agree.

I hope that’s not prejudice, that is, a pre-judgement on my part, but rather the result of a lifetime of reading – desultory and unsystematic reading to be sure, but not entirely to no purpose, nor so superficial as to impart no facts at all.

(About my reading: I dragged in Kelly’s book because I was in a hurry to show that I was getting my facts from some other source than my fundamentality.)

 

[ceo_esq]

Applying reason to the questions of this world is something humans do, if left to their own devices. The !Kung San of South Africa apply reason when reading tracks; so do I, when I’m out in the wilderness.

Certainly, in a broad sense, but I think we understand that's not what Prof. Grant was referring to.

What kind of reason was the faculty of the Paris medical colleges using when they attributed the plague to an unusual conjunction of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter? What kind of reason did the Flagellants apply when they lashed themselves bloody? When the crowds watching them cried “Save us! Save us!” were they using reason in a way we can recognize?

I understand what you're saying, but what is specifically medieval about that? Medical astrology, for example, began with the Greeks, and was almost certainly more popular at the beginning of the 17th century than it was during the so-called "Dark Ages".

As another example, when Slovenia recently passed legislation favorable to homeopathy, Randi suggested that the country was backsliding to "medieval days", although homeopathy is a fairly modern invention we ought properly to associate with its peak in the second half of the 19th century (at any rate, medieval doctors would have rejected homeopathy as antithetical to Galenic principles). In the same breath, I recall that Randi also lumped homeopathy in with bloodletting as "medieval", despite the fact that phlebotemy was more enthusiastically pursued by 18th and early 19th century doctors than by medieval ones.

I think one is justified in interpreting this as at best an unconscious bad habit, and at worst a deliberate effort, to associate such things with the medieval era specifically (as opposed to the 4th century, or the 16th century, or the 19th century as the case may be). Perhaps a bigger concern, though, than the fact that historical myths aren't worth anyone's time by themselves, is the fact that they tend to keep very bad company (bigotry and so forth).

I can forgive medievalists for sticking up for their period. It’s proverbial that medieval studies are like a jungle: once you plunge in, you may never come out again. But when Randi deplores some modern manifestation of unreason as medieval or threatening to bring in a new dark age, I know what he means, and I agree.

I know what he means, too. People generally get the gist of remarks based on even the crudest stereotypes. However, it just encourages others to become more confirmed in the same historical prejudices that apparently led Randi to say such things in the first place - and the well-documented pedigree of those prejudices reveals why we have terms like "Middle Ages" and "Dark Ages" to begin with. They were coined as cultural criticisms, and promoted by people with various, essentially ideological, interests in disparaging the culture of the era.

 

[sackett]

Even if the Middle Ages were no worse than quaint (and they were much worse, immeasurably worse than quaint), the ideas current then have to be called obsolete today. If Randi uses “medieval” to describe modern attempts to promote exploded modes of thinking, that’s an acceptable kind of rhetoric. He objects to those who would slip backward and downward into magical, irrational thinking.