More Shit For Creatards To Swallow

[Hatshepsut]

Oh, the Dark Ages was pretty dark in a socio-political setting, too.  The Moors overran Iberia.  The various barbarian tribes which overran the Western Roman Empire were settling their individual quarrels, there were 3 centuries of Viking raids, there was a climate collapse in the mid 6th century, but always the nobles and the fucking church were there scarfing up whatever they could from the commons. One of the underlying causes of the Crusades was to get bickering nobles out of Europe and off killing muslims instead of xtians.

These facts all agreed. Yet what if you were a farmer in Iberia when the Muslims blew in? Your farm might have been destroyed if it lay in the path of an army. If pagan, you might have been forced to convert to Islam at swordpoint. Between then and the Reconquista you merely paid tribute to a different master. At least the Muslims didn't hold Inquisitional courts to examine your inner conscience.

Not much different than the way it had always been from the time the first states arose. And not much different from the following Renaissance era which saw the stranglehold of the Hanseatic League, the frightening rise of the Hapsburgs, and the Spanish Armada, or the Enlightenment that began amid the Thirty Years' War and reached its peak with Robespierre kneeling at his own guillotine. Europe never got over its constant wars until after World War II, and the current prevailing peace may well be a temporary respite. Our next world war, likely to be fought with nuclear weapons over secular causes, will dwarf anything Charlemagne accomplished in the death department.

Meanwhile, instead of priests and nobles scarfing everything up we have the CEOs and bankers atop our global financial empires doing the same thing. The only blessing we really have is the hike in technology that has allowed everyone at each level to live better during the last 150 years or so.

[robvalue]

What's so good about the dark ages?

Why are so many people trying to go back to it?

I quite like the not-dark state of affairs.

[Hatshepsut]

What's so good about the dark ages?

Nothing. But we look at them in our rear-view mirror all smug as if we're somehow grown up now. We've gotten better in a lot of ways, but frankly medieval society wasn't as Darwinistic as ours. They had a doctrine of noblesse oblige we have discarded; today the rich are seen as owing no consideration at all to their lesser brethren, except what they choose to give by way of charity. Medieval villagers, burghers, noblemen, and priests never would have accepted our "everybody for himself" mentality. Arguably we could have an even poorer and more desperate society than they did were our technology and political sophistication at their level.

[Minimalist]

These facts all agreed. Yet what if you were a farmer in Iberia when the Muslims blew in? Your farm might have been destroyed if it lay in the path of an army. If pagan, you might have been forced to convert to Islam at swordpoint. Between then and the Reconquista you merely paid tribute to a different master. At least the Muslims didn't hold Inquisitional courts to examine your inner conscience.

I agree completely, the peasant doesn't really care which hand holds the whip.  His life sucks anyway.

The point is, there was still a whip.

[Hatshepsut]

The point is, there was still a whip.

As there is today, even in the USA. Physical cruelty by authority is less common but hardly unknown. We relegate people to jails where they will get butt-fucked for the minor offense of having a bag of drugs in their pocket, and to homelessness in a cardboard box if they can't pay their rent. Police have guns and don't hesitate to use them. We have mechanized warfare far deadlier than anything they could imagine. World War II killed almost as many people as all the earlier conflicts in history combined.

[abaris]

These facts all agreed. Yet what if you were a farmer in Iberia when the Muslims blew in? Your farm might have been destroyed if it lay in the path of an army. If pagan, you might have been forced to convert to Islam at swordpoint. Between then and the Reconquista you merely paid tribute to a different master. At least the Muslims didn't hold Inquisitional courts to examine your inner conscience.

Do you have any idea how the muslim reign in Iberia actually looked like? Obviously not. Otherwise you would know that it was the most tolerant territory of the Middle Ages. Jews actually fled there to be rid of prosecution.

Also, as for your noblesse oblige comment in the other post. Do you have any idea what noblesse actually looked like in the Middle Ages? Again, obviously not.

I strongly recommend to consult a history book at some point.

[Minimalist]

As there is today, even in the USA.

Don't you mean, especially in the USA?  We have yielded our right to claim the leadership of the free world.  We are fast yielding our right to be considered a first-world nation.

[Hatshepsut]

I strongly recommend to consult a history book at some point.

That's always good advice and I don't resent it... 

I don't claim a scholarly level of knowledge on anything I post here: A historian can name the primary source documents for Moorish Spain, and talk about the relative strengths and weaknesses of each one. Muslim occupation lasted about 700 years, during which the quality of the regime varied. (Or regimes, as hardly one fella was always atop everything.) Muslim rulers did have a reputation for relative tolerance by the standards of the day, perhaps being more interested in commerce than religious contretemps. But the initial Berber invasion was brutal and it took quite a while for things to settle down. As was the later Ummayyad suppression of the Berbers.

Noblesse oblige is the kind of ideal we humans usually honor in the breach. But it had a restraining influence. The early Middle Ages didn't feature the hordes of vagabonds clogging the roads in the 15th century when the system was breaking down. I imagine that was because villages and fiefs were taking better care of their own than they would do later. The commons was open through the early Middle Ages; the really  serious attempts to fence it off didn't occur until after the Black Death. Closure of the commons can be considered a first step toward the private property state we so love today.

Modern education and social security systems are forced concessions from elites concerned more with the spectre of communism or national strength for a next war than with expressing high ideals, yet I wouldn't deny the latter helped lubricate things.

[ignoramus]

Yep they are shitting themselves and you know what they are going to say god put that there and or you guys made at up.
Interestingly enough some of us actually do have neanderthal DNA.

Maybe God’s a Neanderthal…never know! 

The bible might start to make sense if that was true!