‘There’s something terribly wrong’: Americans are dying young at alarming rates

[jeezusisacasual]

This is true, and it is a problem... Russia is paying women to have kids, for instance:

Why Putin is paying women to have more children... Inside Russia's super families
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...uper-families/

There was a general NPR report on this as well:

When Governments Pay People To Have Babies
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2...to-have-babies

Israel is a bit different... it is a combination of Honor and Dignity culture, so extended family, religious institutions, etc, help with raising children, so having 5, 10, 15 kids becomes possible.



I think that is probably true, Neo-Liberalism is going to die; and most likely, at least for a while, either left, or right populists movements will take its place. If we manage to pull out of the nose dive we are in, what comes after is up in the air.

However the "Meaning" gap is still there; economy is only part of solving the issues we have. Nihilism itself is spreading in the West. An interesting book you can read is:

Man's Search for Meaning
https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-M.../dp/080701429X

I ordered the book as i am running out of solid nightly reading material. I think that more governments should push forward policies and cost allowances to provide an easier barrier to entry for people to have children but at the same time not punish those who chose not to have children.

[PC2]

This is only true if elections create change. If they maintain the status quo or make things worse, violent shift in power become more probable. And before you say "GDP" I am not talking about purly economics.

I don't think it's probable though, violence is for idiots and if some group tries to get violent the majority of peaceful people will put them down.

It only doesn't make sense if it's about you... ie, if its a selfish search. A universal meaning existed for thousands of years, and continues to exist in various cultures, but is dying in the West...

When they invented religion they had only thought they found absolute meaning and explanations... You can't take unfalsifiable theories seriously.

which is also seeing the West lose its identity at the same time.

One of the main things the West is about is creating new ideas, so as long as the West does that then it will prosper and identity won't matter.

[Mayhem]

Sure you can... one, I can argue it's not unfalsifiable; thought not here because its a forbidden topic, and two, even if its is unfalsifiable, if it "works" to keep humanity "alive" and "evolving" it is at least psychologically/evolutionary true.

Hindsight is 20/20. Also, ignoring the dark ages are we?

New ideas that have zero inherent meaning will not save the west from an identity crisis...

Or and here me out on this, maybe stray away from something that is responsible for or facilitated the majority of wars throughout history and try a different approach for change.

[Theodarzna]

Hindsight is 20/20. Also, ignoring the dark ages are we?

What about them?

[Cthulhu 2020]

Indeed that's why I'm in the pro-natalism camp and I try to counter anti-natalist arguments when I see them on the internet. As well as the related issue of Malthusian fear-mongering.

We created a society where a single working parent could support a family of 3-4. These days, it's hard for a working couple to even support themselves until at least their mid 20's. Children are a huge time and money investment to have and raise. If you want people to start having more children rather than opting for abortions, the GoP should start creating a society where a single parent can once again support an entire family while the other parent is able to be a home keeper. After all, one of the biggest complaints from conservatives about kids getting more rotten, spoiled, and turning to crime as well as worse jobs is lack of parenting.

But they'd rather just keep watching people get poorer and poorer, then preach that they should have children like responsible citizens while working a collective 100 hours between both parents to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps".

[Mayhem]

What about them?

Here's a quote from one of the founding fathers:

"The age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system. There was more knowledge in the world before that period than for many centuries afterwards [and] we have now to look through a vast chasm of many hundred years to the respectable characters we call the ancients. Had the progression of knowledge gone on proportionably with that stock that before existed, that chasm would have been filled up with characters rising superior in knowledge." - Thomas Paine

In essence, after the fall of the roman empire and before the renaissance Christianity took over all educational facilities, the ability to read and write declined up until only the clergy was able to do so and hindered almost all secular progression.

"The losses in science were monumental. In some cases, the Christian church's burning of books and repression of intellectual pursuit set humanity back as much as two millennia in its scientific understanding.

The Church burned enormous amounts of literature. In 391 Christians burned down one of the world's greatest libraries in Alexandria, said to have housed 700,000 rolls. All the books of the Gnostic Basilides, Porphyry's 36 volumes, papyrus rolls of 27 schools of the Mysteries, and 270,000 ancient documents gathered by Ptolemy Philadelphus were burned. Ancient academies of learning were closed. Education for anyone outside of the Church came to an end.

[Pope] Gregory the Great [590-604CE] also condemned education for all but the clergy as folly and wickedness. He forbade laymen to read even the Bible. He had the library of the Palatine Apollo burned 'lest its secular literature distract the faithful from the contemplation of heaven. The Fourth Council of Carthage in 398 forbade bishops to even read the books of the gentiles. Jerome, a Church Father and early monastic in the fourth century, rejoiced that the classical authors were being forgotten. And his younger monastic contemporaries were known to boast of their ignorance of everything except Christian literature.

Monastic libraries, the only libraries left, were composed of books of devotion. Even the most significant monastic libraries carried little aside from books about Christian theology."

[kujena]

Sounds like a sad story...

[Sodia]

Yeah it is called obesity...

[Cthulhu 2020]

Right... they can be good if the alternative is not working.

If the current system isn't working, you don't throw your lot in with an even worse option. There's stagnation, and then there's regression. You do realize a dictator gets to do what they want, completely unchecked? If you think Trump being dictator would be a good thing because he'd "get things done" then you should probably check out his history of executive orders that were struck down in courts. Islamophobia, enriching himself. The only "good" thing I see coming out of a dictatorship is a couple of shitty decades for the country where we fall into ruin until people realize how awful things have gotten, overthrow the dictator, and only get along because they have a common enemy. Then once we recover several decades after that, it's back to division.

America has always been a divided nation on ideologies. But there was one constant: the truth. We are living in a post truth society, where many people are disconnected from the reality of what really is happening, and what they believe is happening. They refuse to accept blunt and direct evidence. We don't want a kim jong un, we don't want a Vladimir Putin, we don't want a Xi Jinping. And I would certainly never want a Democrat dictator. It would make half of the country miserable.

If your only metric for a good government is "it gets things done" without measuring the effects of those things on the society as a whole, you're fallen far too deep into a pit of philosophical trance. Wanting the government to "get things done" with one deranged lunatic at the helm, without even considering the affects of what the potential of those things are is absolute folly. Trump has "jokingly" (heavy quotes emphasis) said that he thought it was pretty nice that other dictators could simply kill journalists. Shall we applaud Trump "Getting something done" if it suddenly becomes illegal to make negative press about Trump, just because he got something done?

[Theodarzna]

Here's a quote from one of the founding fathers:

"The age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system. There was more knowledge in the world before that period than for many centuries afterwards [and] we have now to look through a vast chasm of many hundred years to the respectable characters we call the ancients. Had the progression of knowledge gone on proportionably with that stock that before existed, that chasm would have been filled up with characters rising superior in knowledge." - Thomas Paine

In essence, after the fall of the roman empire and before the renaissance Christianity took over all educational facilities, the ability to read and write declined up until only the clergy was able to do so and hindered almost all secular progression.

"The losses in science were monumental. In some cases, the Christian church's burning of books and repression of intellectual pursuit set humanity back as much as two millennia in its scientific understanding.

The Church burned enormous amounts of literature. In 391 Christians burned down one of the world's greatest libraries in Alexandria, said to have housed 700,000 rolls. All the books of the Gnostic Basilides, Porphyry's 36 volumes, papyrus rolls of 27 schools of the Mysteries, and 270,000 ancient documents gathered by Ptolemy Philadelphus were burned. Ancient academies of learning were closed. Education for anyone outside of the Church came to an end.

[Pope] Gregory the Great [590-604CE] also condemned education for all but the clergy as folly and wickedness. He forbade laymen to read even the Bible. He had the library of the Palatine Apollo burned 'lest its secular literature distract the faithful from the contemplation of heaven. The Fourth Council of Carthage in 398 forbade bishops to even read the books of the gentiles. Jerome, a Church Father and early monastic in the fourth century, rejoiced that the classical authors were being forgotten. And his younger monastic contemporaries were known to boast of their ignorance of everything except Christian literature.

Monastic libraries, the only libraries left, were composed of books of devotion. Even the most significant monastic libraries carried little aside from books about Christian theology."

The Founders didn't know a whole lot about history of that era. I know its a great talking point of the Fedora Tippers, but the Medieval European world wasn't really some incredibly backward time. For example Witch Burnings began in the Renaissance, as well as a lot of what we would call strict Biblical fundamentalism. The Library of Alexandria by the time it was finally torched for good, barely existed anymore. People often credit this as some massive destruction but in truth, almost nothing remained of that original Library and what was there was some scientific manuals or anything of particular use.

While the idea that the world would somehow be vastly different if the Great Library had been preserved is a cute one, it has very little basis. Firstly, the size of the Library was greatly exaggerated by ancient writers, with fanciful numbers of the books in it ranging from 400,000 (Seneca) to 700,000 (Gellius). Some modern writers have taken these numbers seriously, but there is no way the Library could have housed anything like this number of books. It is far more likely that its collection numbered in the tens of thousands of scrolls, which still made it the largest library in the ancient world.

But the idea that the loss of the Great Library somehow set back human progress is not based simply on the size of the collection but also on the idea that it was somehow unique and that it contained works not found elsewhere. There is no evidence to support this. As far as we can ascertain, the Library's collection included more or less the same kind of works we find elsewhere in the ancient world. And there is nothing in those works to indicate that the Greeks and Romans were somehow on the verge of some kind of scientific or technological revolution. So the idea that the loss of the Library's collection somehow led to the loss of unique advanced information found nowhere else in the world is pure fantasy.

The third reason this idea is fantasy is that it assumes a very modern and recent connection between speculation/science and technology that didn't exist in the ancient world. With a couple of notable exceptions, Greek and Roman philosophers who did "natural philosophy" (what we call science) rarely made any connection between it and something as practical as technology. Philosophy was for the learned elite, who were usually aristocrats or associated with them. Technology, on the other hand, was a matter for builders, architects, artisans and armourers and other lower class people who got their hands dirty and was not the kind of thing to interest a lofty student of science. Most Greek and Roman era science was done in the form of thought experiments and contemplation of ideas rather than practical empiricism. It was not until the later Medieval Period that we see the first glimmering of practical, experimental science and not until the Sixteenth Century that genuine empirical science made the connection between science and technology fully possible. So the idea that this (supposed) lost unique knowledge in the Great Library would have led to much earlier advances in technology doesn't fit the evidence - ancient science didn't work that way.

There are a number of myths about the Great Library, several of which revolve around its destruction, with various versions of the story being perpetuated with a variety of villains. The almost certainly mythical story about its destruction by the Arabs still gets passed on uncritically in some quarters, but the version that seems most popular is the one that has the Library being destroyed by a Christian mob in 391 AD. This story lends itself nicely to a Whiggish fable about ignorance triumphing over knowledge and is usually told with a warning about how this incident "ushered in the Dark Ages" and is often linked to this popular but nonsensical idea that "we'd have long since colonised Mars if the Library hadn't been destroyed". Edward Gibbon first peddled this version of the story and its been popularised more recently in a garbled version by Carl Sagan in his series Cosmos and by the recent movie Agora.

In fact, there is zero evidence that the daughter library that was housed in the Serapeum, the temple that was destroyed by a Christian mob in 391, was still in existence when this occurred. None of the five accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum mention any library and an earlier description of the Serapeum by Ammianus Marcellinus refers to the library it had housed using the past tense. The Great Library itself seems to have been destroyed centuries earlier anyway, either by a fire caused by Julius Caesar's troops in 47 BC or in another fire which destroyed the entire Bruchreion quarter, where the Library was located, during the sack of the city by Aurelian in 273 AD.

While a vast amount of ancient knowledge has been lost and while copies of many of those lost works would have been held in the Great Library's collection, what has come down to us gives no indication that the Greeks and Romans were on the verge of some kind of scientific revolution. On the contrary, by the time Aurelian was burning the Bruchreion and (probably) the Library, science and learning generally had already been stagnant for some time and the following centuries of civil war in the Roman Empire, economic decline and barbarian invasions led to a further decline. When these pressures led to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, virtually all intellectual pursuits were abandoned apart from what was preserved by the Church and huge amounts of knowledge was lost.

In the Eastern Empire and in the parts of the east converted to Nestorian Christianity, a great deal of ancient science and knowledge was preserved. These Christian scholars passed it to the Arabs and it then eventually made its way back to back to Europe via Muslim Sicily and Spain where it sparked the great revival of learning in Medieval Europe in the Twelfth Century. So while a great deal was lost, what survived came back into western Europe at the time that saw the rise of the first universities and laid the intellectual foundations of the later Scientific Revolution and its application in technology.

The idea that the loss of the Great Library set back science and technology by centuries is a nice fable, but not a viable historical idea. The Greeks and Romans were not on the verge of a scientific and technological revolution such as the one seen in the early Modern era - that required a number of unique circumstances which were simply not present in the Roman Era. It's a cute story but it's essentially nonsense.

The short rub of it is that Thomas Paine didn't know much about the history he was talking about but was instead engaged in a Whig fable. The Medieval World wasn't really like that.

[Cthulhu 2020]

What I fear is not Trump, but what comes after him, should the nation continue to get worse, and the animosity continue to grow.

Trump is compared to Hitler, but he is not. He never really tapped the unconscious of the nation, more like stumbled over it. If someone actually competent and ruthless comes into power, then it's time to worry. People like Trump are a precursor of what's to come if the issues in the nation are not remedied.

We had a criminal president, Nixxon. And guess what happened? The two parties worked together to get the cancer removed. End of story. Why are the Republicans not working with Democrats to get Trump removed, so we can move on to everyone working together, hmm? Why do the Democrats needs always work with Trump because the "nation needs to heal"? Is it always the responsibility of the Democrats to kowtow to incompetent tyrants and let Trump get away with criminal behavior?

You realize what kind of message that sends, right? If you're worried about America after Trump, perhaps you should be considering saying that Republicans should be working with Democrats to remove Trump. It would show bipartisan solidarity. Just ignoring crimes sends a precedent to future would-be tyrants that they can be tyrants. The two parties banding together to remove criminals shows any would-be tyrants that breaking laws out in the open, for everyone to see, shows them that this country's checks and balances are working properly. Just doing fellatio on Trump may get "something done" but it's also not guaranteed to be good.

https://www.propublica.org/article/p...n-post-q-and-a

Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration at least 63 times over the past two years, an extraordinary record of legal defeat that has stymied large parts of the president’s agenda on the environment, immigration and other matters.

Trump has tried to legislate from the oval office, which is not what the executive branch does. Everything he's wanted to do has ranged from an overly expensive border wall to destroying the environment with a bare bones EPA that allows more pollution and carbon emissions, to many human rights violations. Getting things done for the sake of getting things done is a horrible idea. Lest we forget that Trump already went into his election bearing animosity towards Obama, wanting to destroy everything Obama built that was actually good for this country, and even more animosity towards Democrats. You think this started with Democrats showing animosity for Trump, when it's really the other way around.

Kowtowing to Trump would have meant getting on their knees and going "Yes lord and savior, we were wrong for wanting to save the environment and helping the people, please prop up a failing coal industry so we can spew coal dust into our air and water," among many other things that would have been the antithesis of good governance.

But back to the original point, licking the boot of a wanna-be dumb dictator would have accomplished very little, as you also seem to have forgotten that most things Republicans as a whole don't want to see passed, die in the Senate. Moscow Mitch has a stranglehold on legislative policy, so licking the boot of Trump wouldn't have gotten anything done anyway, and would have sent a message to future wannabe dictators that they can get away with what they want. Of course, this will fall on deaf ears if you're squarely in the camp that genuinely believes Trump has done nothing wrong - when his administration has churned out more indicted criminal fall guys than any presidency in history.

[Cthulhu 2020]

I agree with some of this, mostly that we are living in a post truth “Iron age” of man cycle.

However you are speaking in ideals here... what “should” happen.

Ideals almost never materialize...

We have a post here:

https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...nchecked-power

That shows you where we are going if things don’t improve.

History shows this to be a pattern. Currently, Russia and China are good examples.

Archetypically monarchy is the default for humanity.

Be it King David and Solomon in Jerusalem, King Arthur in Camelot, or the modern Monarchs of Islam, that is the default when all else fails.

Current monarchies are either monarchies in name only (look at European countries, where the king or queen is just a figure head and a parliament runs everything) or places that have extensive human rights abuses. If America wants a dictator, let it happen at the will of the people, so those people can be thoroughly humiliated when something horrendous happens and we can bury that train of thought.

Personally, I'd love a complete restructuring of our constitution that accounts for modern issues, rather than things drafted anywhere from 50 to nearly 250 years ago. Some of the most modern constitutional Republics/Democracies tend to be the most successful simply because they are not running on outdated "source code". But that of course requires some asshole coming in and striking down our constitution, only for us to overthrow it and write a new one, and that process would require at least a couple of decades and severe pain for the nation as a whole, which I am not for.

You're right about one thing, as things stand currently nothing of substance will happen. While Democrats haven't helped the situation, there's very clearly one side that is to blame. Obama tried to barter in good faith many times to a party that said "We will make everything you touch, fail." You lament that our country gets nothing done, and yet at the same time, every time you decide to post on this issue, you insist that it must be the Democrats who bend the knee.

Perhaps you realize that the Republicans are too pig headed to ever be actors of good faith, but I will thoroughly disagree that it should be Democrats who fellate the other side simply for the sake of getting things done.

Under Obama, the Democrats proposed many bills that included concessions for Republican desired issues in them as well, very generous ones at that. The Republicans refused to let any of them happen, as their policy was to blockade anything and everything, to make Obama appear as the most ineffectual president. That, my friend, is how we got into our current situation, that and many other factors of an ever more aggressive and hostile GoP.

If your only proposed solution is to implement a dictator not beholden to the laws of the country, I'm going to wholly rebuke that train of thought until there are literally no other options left. Our country still operates well enough, even if at a snail's pace legislatively. I'm sure the last thing you want to see is the minimum wage abolished, all progress for LGBT rights torn apart, rights protections and safety nets for the disabled removed, unfettered corporate power, and a drastic increase in evangelical laws. That is the country that awaits a dictator beholden to the alt right.

- - - Updated - - -

If I go off on Republicans it will accomplish nothing. For that matter, at this point, going off on Democrats will accomplish nothing either. I am here, mainly, to read...

The issue is that when a Nation is as split up as ours is in its political class... only decline happens long term...

And yet, your knowing that preaching at either side will accomplish nothing, you still choose to preach that Democrats should be the ones to cave. Two decades ago and before, Democrats and Republicans tended to work together more often than not. Perhaps you should be preaching that Republicans should be accepting the bills of bipartisan concessions and compromise be accepted by the right, rather than telling the left they should bend the knee and wholly accept what the right wants without any concession?

After all, Pelosi offered many opportunities for Trump to have his wall, if he accepted that it would come with something Democrats wanted as well. They did not appeal to his ego directly, but he could have had his wall and boasted about it. Instead, he chose to reject bills with something for everyone. Despite the growing animosity, there are still bills with bipartisan concessions in them drafted by Democrats. Bills that die on Moscow Mitch's desk.

[Mayhem]

The Founders didn't know a whole lot about history of that era. I know its a great talking point of the Fedora Tippers, but the Medieval European world wasn't really some incredibly backward time. For example Witch Burnings began in the Renaissance, as well as a lot of what we would call strict Biblical fundamentalism. The Library of Alexandria by the time it was finally torched for good, barely existed anymore. People often credit this as some massive destruction but in truth, almost nothing remained of that original Library and what was there was some scientific manuals or anything of particular use.

While the idea that the world would somehow be vastly different if the Great Library had been preserved is a cute one, it has very little basis. Firstly, the size of the Library was greatly exaggerated by ancient writers, with fanciful numbers of the books in it ranging from 400,000 (Seneca) to 700,000 (Gellius). Some modern writers have taken these numbers seriously, but there is no way the Library could have housed anything like this number of books. It is far more likely that its collection numbered in the tens of thousands of scrolls, which still made it the largest library in the ancient world.

But the idea that the loss of the Great Library somehow set back human progress is not based simply on the size of the collection but also on the idea that it was somehow unique and that it contained works not found elsewhere. There is no evidence to support this. As far as we can ascertain, the Library's collection included more or less the same kind of works we find elsewhere in the ancient world. And there is nothing in those works to indicate that the Greeks and Romans were somehow on the verge of some kind of scientific or technological revolution. So the idea that the loss of the Library's collection somehow led to the loss of unique advanced information found nowhere else in the world is pure fantasy.

The third reason this idea is fantasy is that it assumes a very modern and recent connection between speculation/science and technology that didn't exist in the ancient world. With a couple of notable exceptions, Greek and Roman philosophers who did "natural philosophy" (what we call science) rarely made any connection between it and something as practical as technology. Philosophy was for the learned elite, who were usually aristocrats or associated with them. Technology, on the other hand, was a matter for builders, architects, artisans and armourers and other lower class people who got their hands dirty and was not the kind of thing to interest a lofty student of science. Most Greek and Roman era science was done in the form of thought experiments and contemplation of ideas rather than practical empiricism. It was not until the later Medieval Period that we see the first glimmering of practical, experimental science and not until the Sixteenth Century that genuine empirical science made the connection between science and technology fully possible. So the idea that this (supposed) lost unique knowledge in the Great Library would have led to much earlier advances in technology doesn't fit the evidence - ancient science didn't work that way.

There are a number of myths about the Great Library, several of which revolve around its destruction, with various versions of the story being perpetuated with a variety of villains. The almost certainly mythical story about its destruction by the Arabs still gets passed on uncritically in some quarters, but the version that seems most popular is the one that has the Library being destroyed by a Christian mob in 391 AD. This story lends itself nicely to a Whiggish fable about ignorance triumphing over knowledge and is usually told with a warning about how this incident "ushered in the Dark Ages" and is often linked to this popular but nonsensical idea that "we'd have long since colonised Mars if the Library hadn't been destroyed". Edward Gibbon first peddled this version of the story and its been popularised more recently in a garbled version by Carl Sagan in his series Cosmos and by the recent movie Agora.

In fact, there is zero evidence that the daughter library that was housed in the Serapeum, the temple that was destroyed by a Christian mob in 391, was still in existence when this occurred. None of the five accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum mention any library and an earlier description of the Serapeum by Ammianus Marcellinus refers to the library it had housed using the past tense. The Great Library itself seems to have been destroyed centuries earlier anyway, either by a fire caused by Julius Caesar's troops in 47 BC or in another fire which destroyed the entire Bruchreion quarter, where the Library was located, during the sack of the city by Aurelian in 273 AD.

While a vast amount of ancient knowledge has been lost and while copies of many of those lost works would have been held in the Great Library's collection, what has come down to us gives no indication that the Greeks and Romans were on the verge of some kind of scientific revolution. On the contrary, by the time Aurelian was burning the Bruchreion and (probably) the Library, science and learning generally had already been stagnant for some time and the following centuries of civil war in the Roman Empire, economic decline and barbarian invasions led to a further decline. When these pressures led to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, virtually all intellectual pursuits were abandoned apart from what was preserved by the Church and huge amounts of knowledge was lost.

In the Eastern Empire and in the parts of the east converted to Nestorian Christianity, a great deal of ancient science and knowledge was preserved. These Christian scholars passed it to the Arabs and it then eventually made its way back to back to Europe via Muslim Sicily and Spain where it sparked the great revival of learning in Medieval Europe in the Twelfth Century. So while a great deal was lost, what survived came back into western Europe at the time that saw the rise of the first universities and laid the intellectual foundations of the later Scientific Revolution and its application in technology.

The idea that the loss of the Great Library set back science and technology by centuries is a nice fable, but not a viable historical idea. The Greeks and Romans were not on the verge of a scientific and technological revolution such as the one seen in the early Modern era - that required a number of unique circumstances which were simply not present in the Roman Era. It's a cute story but it's essentially nonsense.

The short rub of it is that Thomas Paine didn't know much about the history he was talking about but was instead engaged in a Whig fable. The Medieval World wasn't really like that.

Got it, so book burnings, wiping out knowledge and keeping the population uneducated is a step forward in human evolution.

- - - Updated - - -

Human rights abuses come out of the idea that human rights are God given. Outside of that, saying "Human rights are just a Western Idea" (which is what people have been saying here) is the goto...and are dismissed. Civil rights in the US(and the West really) have always been Religious movements. Remove religion, and "Human rights" are not worth the paper they are written on.

Remove religion and you'd have fewer human rights abuses.

[Theodarzna]

Got it, so book burnings, wiping out knowledge and keeping the population uneducated is a step forward in human evolution.

Most of the great "book burnings" during the Medieval period were the result of warfare and the sacking of cities. As for education? The Church didn't really focus on education, indeed there was zero education for the masses before the Fall of Rome and there was zero afterwards, you act as if before the rise of Christianity or before the Roman Empires collapse there was a functioning system of public education and kids went to school. Before Rome was sacked and after the level of education for 95% or more of the population remained the same. If anything, the Monastic system allowed greater class mobility in education since anyone could join the church and become educated, where as before education was solely the domain of a single class of people. As for the closing of the library of the Palatine Apollo, well it wasn't a library, it was actually a Temple, so again, the knowledge in there, if any, was prophetic texts and mystical writings. Not instructions on rocketry. None of the stuff you describe were like public schools or secular in the sense we think of the word today, Alexandria for instance didn't even exist by the time of the Temple complexes closure, and it was a Temple complex as was the Temple of Apollo which is what was closed.

As for the content of Monastic libraries, we know that this is untrue because of the actual texts produced by monastic libraries such as those in Ireland, and Britain which included the only accounts of Pre-Christian lore of Celtic speakers and legal documents.



The very phrase "Dark Ages" isn't an age of relative ignorance in terms of thinking. Medieval man knew the world was round, didn't believe in Witches (Actually their Pagan or recently Christianized Pagans who weren't too Christianized tended to be the ones who believed in Witches), and to a certain extent the social status of Women was better than in the previous Roman era or in the Renaissance when Biblical literalism and fundamentalism came into vogue where as the "Dark Ages" were largely dominated by ethnic tribal customs and laws often derived from ancient customary thought which goes back to who knows when. Life expectancy was indeed higher in this age as for most of it there was much smaller scale warfare as opposed to the early roman period with its mass deportations, genocides and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of people.

Here is something about Women in the Medieval period, granted focused on Britain, but still:


In the end, the circumstances of the era "kept people uneducated", as one can see across the Earth, the idea that education was of any particular value to the masses is a relatively novel concept. Before the Medieval period; and well before it, education was the privilege solely of the aristocracy. And in the Medieval world the Aristocracy was solely landed warriors whose main job was protecting the population of a small parcel of land. Education wasn't really all that needed since a landed warriors main job was professional soldier and tactician/commander. Even a King had little need to read, which was true even in Roman times and antiquity. The average person didn't have the free time, nor the pressing need to be educated since education took time, required teachers and your agricultural laborer had little need of it, nor was most schools practically useful. The field of technology was largely the work of artisan craftsmen and lower class people, and most education focused on mystical and spiritual topics, time keeping, law, medicine (Which admittedly the peasants had better knowledge of via experience, which was branded as Witchcraft in the Renaissance) and thought experiments.

As for "Progress" well, our age of progress has brought us to the point were we either have adopt a hyper ascetic way of life in order to avoid an apocolypse brought on by the fruits of our technical and scientific progress, or embrace a self imposed nightmarescape as we continue to terraform our own planet with our use of technology.

[Toppy]

Oh good, book burning apologists and propagandists are out today.

[Theodarzna]

Oh good, book burning apologists and propagandists are out today.

I am terribly sorry to interject nuance and actual information on the period. I mean; your assertions, as was Mayhem's really don't have much backing.

As a fun point of fact, most destruction of books happened as paper was recycled and reused for some other task. Older manuscripts would be scratched off and the paper reused and bound into another book.

[Mayhem]

I am terribly sorry to interject nuance and actual information on the period. I mean; your assertions, as was Mayhem's really don't have much backing.

As a fun point of fact, most destruction of books happened as paper was recycled and reused for some other task. Older manuscripts would be scratched off and the paper reused and bound into another book.

The fact that the Islamic world leaped ahead in science and math based on greek and other translated texts into Arabic is testament enough for the negative impact of the church.

[Wilfire]

Millennials just live shitty lifestyles with no physical exercise and constant boozing and drug abuse. Of course they're dying young.

[Mayhem]

Millennials just live shitty lifestyles with no physical exercise and constant boozing and drug abuse. Of course they're dying young.

Yup, that's it. Also, the only Millenials there are live in the US.

[jeezusisacasual]

Yup, that's it. Also, the only Millenials there are live in the US.

I mean who could have thought that a lack of upward mobility saddled with debt that is impossible to offload that is pushing them to start families later in life along with graduating into the worst economic times since the great depression, must not be that its the those damn Iphones.