Who needs subtle when you're dealing with a homicide bomber? As for the media, they're telling you what they want you to hear.

No, but some would prefer that we did. They see the march of progress as an afront to God. Progress, in their view, is man's attempt to usurp God. They view the modern age as the least moral, least virtuous, and most self-centered era. The last 30 years has seen more scientific advancement than in all the previous years combined. This makes some very uncomfortable. They just can't cope with the implications of our new-found knowledge (e.g., genetic manipulation, etc.).


Ron

I imagine there are quite a few atheists/secular humanists who see it that way, too.

Most of the Middle East that I have been to looks that way. Afghanistan especially.

What do you mean by "regressing back to the Middle Ages," George?

There is no doubt when the Arab conquest resulted in the destruction of North Africa and the end of the circum-Mediterranean trade, the Classical institutions of the Roman Empire disappeared, to be replaced by the institutions of feudalism that we associate with the Germanic kingdoms. And with the supply of paper ended, it became too expensive to copy most of the literature of the time, and as the paper rotted in the humid, northern climates, much learning was lost.

But much that was valuable survived, and developed. Were "the Middle Ages" all bad? Are there any buildings on earth that surpass the ensemble of Medieval cathedrals? Is there lyric poetry any better than the work of the Provencal troubadours? Is there a painting more glorious than the Isenheimer Altar?

And would not a return to the qualities of honor and loyalty, the knightly way described in the Nibelungenlied, be desirable?

By "our" society I guess George means the USA, or Western society in general.

? the middle ages - the time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the age of Discovery / High Renaissance around 1500 was a time of industry, discovery and growth.

'In the Middle Ages, drunkedness was so common, it went unnoticed. They were called the 'Middle Ages' because you couldn't get home unless you were between two other fellows.' - W. C. Fields

Thanks, Jonathan. The "Middle Ages" are often unfairly maligned. The XXth century was far worse by almost every measure.

Okay, although it's fascinating to see how different people interpreted my question, it's obvious I wasn't clear, and the Middle Ages wasn't a proper reference. I withdraw the question.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

While the Middle Ages are very often maligned the 20th century still has them beat on almost every measure. I don't know a single person who knows anything about what life was really like during that time period who would give up all the benefits of our current era to live in the Middle Ages. It might be a great era to visit. But you really wouldn't want to live there.

I can't think of a single thing that the Middle Ages has beat over the 20th Century.

It was also an era of ignorance, superstition and the supression of knowledge. It took centuries to reclaim much of the technology and science that had been lost when the Roman Empire collapsed.

You do understand that the Nibelungenlied is just a story. It really didn't happen. The Chivalric Ideals expressed in this sort of literature were incredibly popular in the Middle Ages. But in no way reflected how the warrior and Noble classes really lived and behaved in that era.

It would be akin to believing that the world portrayed in "Leave it to Beaver" actually existed and was indicitive of life in the mid Twentieth Century.

Hi Payne,

Anyone who has read Marc Bloch's magisterial work, Feudal Society, will easily recognize how much easier life is today, and how much better everyday life is today, thanks to the industrial revolution and the development of a free market - in both goods and ideas. However, for ignorance, suppression of knowledge, mass murder, worldwide warfare, attempted genocide, I don't think you can out-do the XXth century.

You are right, however, about the disaster that befell the civilized Mediterranean world when it was overrun by the jihad. And it did take centuries for the backwards, neglected northern fringes of the Roman Imperium to recover their economies and establish themselves powerfully enough to build the new world that you and I both love on the foundations of the ancient Greco-Judeo-Roman civilization.

No reason to withdraw the question, George. It's a good question, and a good subject for thought and discussion.

A century where elected officials spoke of willing and legitimate rape, legally condoned racism, teaching magic in science classrooms and ... Which century us that again?

What makes centuries 20-21 different is the potential for almost instant communication across the planet. People in China and Australia can groan about an online post just seconds after it was typed in Brazil.

I, nor most historians would call the expansion of the Islam at this time a disaster, nor a jihad in the modern sense of the word. This was the Golden Age of Islam and a time of great learning.

"The Islamic Golden Age is an Abbasid historical period lasting until the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258. The Islamic Golden Age was inaugurated by the middle of the 8th century by the ascension of the Abbasid Caliphate and the transfer of the capital from Damascus to Baghdad.[2] The Abbasids were influenced by the Qur'anic injunctions and hadith such as "the ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr" that stressed the value of knowledge. During this period the Arab world became an intellectual center for science, philosophy, medicine and education; the Abbasids championed the cause of knowledge and established the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars sought to translate and gather all the world's knowledge into Arabic. Many classic works of antiquity that would otherwise have been lost were translated into Arabic and Persian and later in turn translated into Turkish, Hebrew and Latin. During this period the Arab world was a cauldron of cultures which collected, synthesized and significantly advanced the knowledge gained from the ancient Roman, Chinese, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, and Byzantine civilizations."



Yes, but if it were not for these Muslim scholars much of that precious Greco-Judeo-Roman civilization would have been lost forever. Many of the writings of Plato and Aristotle are still with us because they had been preserved by Muslim Scholars. Those Cathedrals in Europe only made possible by the mathematical advancements made by Muslim mathematicians. The number system we employ today was invented by them. The renaissance was given a tremendous burst when the knowledge from Moorish Spain made it's way into Europe after its fall in 1492.

All of this advancement came to a standstill when Religious Fundamentalism took over and the ruling class looked upon knowledge and inquiry as less than desirable traits. Something we see happening on an extremely limited form in parts of Western society today. If I was forced to live in the Middle Ages I would definately want to be in the Civilized Moorish areas rather than the unelightened northern Europiean countries.

Difference being, we have the power to protest such statements. If we don't utilize it, that's our bad. But in the Middle Ages, you didn't argue with the reigning Lord unless you wanted your lands confiscated and your very life and/or liberty at risk.

I think the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas would have a wee bit different opinion on the nature of attempted genocide in the 16th Century. The World was a lot smaller back then so escapades like the Crusades were just as devastating as any World War. The Thirty Year War killed 70% of the population of southern Germany. So mass murder isn't a recent development.

Suppression of Knowledge is virtually impossible since the advent of the world Wide Web. So people are only as ignorant as they choose to be.

Extraordinary rendition?

http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/viewt......um=32&13

Hi Payne,

I am aware that this is a controversial topic, and I am aware of what most of the XIXth century historians wrote about the glories of the Islamic Golden Age.

In 1937, the magisterial Belgian historian of the middle ages,Henri Pirenne's treatise Mohammed and Charlegmagne was posthumously published. His analysis of the economic history of norther Europe showed that the conquest of Rome by the Germanic barbarians in the 5th century had no effect on trade or on the economic life of Europe.

In fact the Germanic kings did not dismantle the Imperial institutions at all, and their rule left almost no trace on the languages or culture of the Empire. They lived as a ruling class above it all, but they maintained the governmental and judicial forms of the Empire, and trade continued to flourish.

The collapse of the European economies, with the near complete disappearance of gold and silver coinage, and a disappearance of trade goods from around the Mediterranean, did not occur until about the middle of the 7th century. It appears that the economic collapse was the result of the jihad, that is the Arab conquest of the Middle East and North Africa. That conquest ended Mediterranean trade, with disastrous results for Europe. And I think that the Arab conquest of the Levant and of North Africa would have certainly been recognized by its perpetrators as the jihad - something of which they would have been entirely unashamed.

Pirenne's thesis has been recently re-evaluated in the light of archaeological evidence unavailable in the first quarter of the XXth century, by Emmet Scott in his book, Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited, (2012). He shows that the barbarian kings, for example, continued to issue coinage bearing the image of the Roman Emperor (in Byzantium) until at least 640, and that the severe soil erosion which ended North Africa's reign as the Granary of the Empire can also be dated to the latter half of the 7th century.

For example, although large-scale buildings can be dated to the 5th and 6th centuries, there appears to have been little if any building in Europe from the 7th until the 11th century - indicated a severe economic depression such as we can only imagine. The disappearance of paper (i.e. Egyptian-made papyrus), which I mentioned in my earlier comment, was a severe blow. The substitution of much more expensive parchment was insufficient to preserve the libraries of northern European cities, where the damp climate quickly rotted the paper. The destruction of the library of Alexandria on the orders of Umar would not have been so devastating a blow, had not paper disappeared from northern Europe at the same time.

Another check on the economies of Europe was the slave trade, which resulted in the kidnapping of tens of thousands of Europeans and their transport to the galleys and bagnios of the Caliphate. A trade which by the way continued until the defeat of the Barbary Coast city-states by the U.S. Navy and Marines. In the early middle ages, the Vikings in particular had a huge business delivering slaves to the East. In fact, our word "slave" is derived from the fact that most of these slaves were of Slavic origin. English, Irish, and Scottish slaves were also sold to the East.

Moreover, there is no archaeological evidence for the vast cities that supposedly developed in the Caliphate in the 8th and 9th centuries. The great Golden Age of which you write consisted mainly in the translation into Arabic of extant Greek and Latin works that were in fact well-known in Europe at that time, with little further development. It took 500 years, but once the Northern European states and statelets had rebuilt their economies, European science and industry overtook a culture that had settled into ignorance and apathy, convinced that it already possessed all the true knowledge that there ever could be.

I also think you are exaggerating the extent of deaths attributable to the Thirty Years' War; I think that 25 to 40 percent of the population of the German states died during that period, not 70 percent. In certain more limited areas, the death toll may have reached 70 percent or more, but not for all of Germany, and certainly not for all of Northern Europe.

Finally, the final collapse of the last Moorish kingdom in Spain, Granada, in 1492 was not a major factor in the dissemination of knowledge throughout the rest of Europe. Granada had been the only surviving Emirate in Iberia for 100 years, and its fall competed a 700-year-long process of the reconquest of Spain. The classical works that had been translated into Arabic were well known in Europe for centuries before then. The Jewish philosopher, Maimonides wrote his Aristotelian treatises in the 12th century, and St. Thomas, his commentaries on Aristotle in the 13th century. Although the dispersion of the Spanish Jews after 1492, and their welcome into the Ottoman Empire, were certainly important in impoverishing Spain by eliminating an important element of its middle class, and in enriching the cities controlled by the Sublime Porte, I think that most of the science and philosophy whose survival is often attributed to Islam were already well established in Europe by 1492.