Insanity versus the business cycle

https://www.britannica.com/event/Dark-Ages

From Encyclopedia Britannica, a paragraph on the time between the fall of Rome and the rise of feudalism in Europe. Approximately two thirds of the paragraph is dedicated to a description of the time and place. That's history. The rest of the paragraph is given over to instructing the reader to avoid saying things that someone might possibly presume could be imagined to be offensive to a person who lived in that bygone era. That's insanity. And then, the link to the site calls that time and place the Dark Ages. That's funny.

Dark Ages (historiography)	Early Middle Ages

Dark Ages (historiography)

This article is about the history of the concept. For a history of the period, see Early Middle Ages.

Early Middle Ages

The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages, that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.

The period saw a continuation of trends evident since late classical antiquity, including population decline, especially in urban centres, a decline of trade, a small rise in global warming and increased migration.

We are told that the term "Dark Ages" is unsatisfactory because it implies it asserts "demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration". We are also told that the Early Middle Ages actually saw population decline and a decline of trade. But "a decline of trade" IS economic deterioration. And "population decline" IS demographic deterioration. So where's the problem?

In addition, they go too far by using the word "asserts". Implies is the most one could say.

What I really don't understand is the attempt to prevent anyone from saying that things might be better now, or 100 years ago, or in the year 1200 for crying out loud, better than things were in the Early Middle Ages. The Early Middle Ages -- the Dark Age -- was a recession in the massive business cycle that I call the Cycle of Civilization.

Things are better in the boom than the recession. That's a given.

The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records). The concept of a "Dark Age" originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the light of classical antiquity. The phrase "Dark Age" itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries. The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance; this became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment.

The Early Middle Ages was labelled the "Dark Ages" in the 19th century, a characterization based on the relative scarcity of literary and cultural output from this time.

It seems that our lack of knowledge about that period is the only acceptable meaning for the word dark in the label "the Dark Ages". If this is true, then it is our knowledge that is dark, not that age of trade and population decline. However, if there was a "relative scarcity of literary and cultural output" from that time, as the Early Middle Ages article states, it's not correct to say that our lack of knowledge is the only acceptable meaning.

I'm also not clear now on whether the Early Middle Ages was labelled the "Dark Ages" in the 19th century, or in the 18th when it "became especially popular".

I think of world history in terms of the Cycle of Civilization, an economic cycle similar to the common business cycle and the Kondratieff, but bigger and slower moving. This makes economic forces the most significant factor in human history, which is in my view how it should be.

Try it sometime.