Our hidden dark age

We live in a new dark age.

You don’t believe me?

The phrase “dark ages” still conjures up a particular set of images in the popular mind, typically synonymous with the time of early Christendom. We think of superstition, manipulative religious dread, oppression, and high rates of mortality, poverty, and violence. The “dark ages” are marked by backwardness, and they’re supposed to stand in contrast with the glories of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Truly, that is the default setting of many secular Westerners. They gaze in amazement upon the pre-Christian classical ancient world and the post-1600s secularism while they shudder in horror at the millennium-and-a-half (give or take) of Christianity’s dominance in the West. Yes, it’s naive, and yes, it’s propaganda.

For one thing, I at least would limit the timeframe of greatest difficulty to the 5th to 10th centuries. For another, the fall of the western Roman empire, the waves of pagan raiders, the violent rise of Islam, and a hundred other factors explain many of the ravages of that timeframe. The thing that preserved the West through collapse was the Christian faith. That is what helped our forbears to hold on, keeping alive the wisdom of the ages through the efforts of dogged monks in their scriptoria and tireless clergymen-theologians maintaining the search for truth. It set the foundational worldview and institutions necessary for the great flourishing of knowledge we associate with the late middle and early modern ages, especially when the Protestants embraced the call for universal literacy.

You see, what made the so-called “dark ages” so dark wasn’t just how hard life was in merely material terms. It was also a decline in knowledge, cutting off access to great pools of wisdom. Soon, the world of one’s grandparents seems alien in its language, its capacities, and its achievements. For example, for a late western Roman, this would look like a decline in literacy among the elite so that they couldn’t read Virgil and a decline in the servile arts such that the populace forgets how to build proper roads and aqueducts.

“Good thing we’re not like that,” you might tell yourself. Look at robotics. Look at AI, whose awesome powers can reside in the comfort of your smartphone pocket.

But prosperity and technology are actually masking a decline of knowledge that we’d associate with a truly dark age. I’ve written before about how even Ivy League students can’t read books anymore. Now we’re finding out American kids can’t do math. And Christians know that the average Westerner has a gaping hole of ignorance when it comes to the Bible, church doctrine, and Christian practice. Tyndale’s ploughboy would truly put them all to shame.

Just consider how people—especially young people—use their technological devices. They do not know how a cell phone actually functions, what it’s made of, how to construct one, and, in many cases, how programming works. No, it’s a magical device made by wizards in Silicon Valley and sweatshops in Asia. AI is but another ethereal entity, perhaps like demons and fairies of yore, and what are robots but a new variation on the homunculus and golem? Who knows when such entities might decide to unexpectedly bless you or bring down cursed mischief upon you, just like the old fairy tales?

As others have noted, we are growing more and more accustomed to sharing our world with “intelligent” beings that are not human and also not God, angels, or even demons. We are re-entering the worldview of the medieval peasant just because of what has been unleashed with our full-throttle technological innovation, our weaponized distraction, and our haughty abandonment of old paths. We cannot do elementary math or read a book, but we’re an “advanced civilization,” you see.

This is the lie that we tell ourselves. That should bother us a lot. And if you think that an uneducated populace has big political and social consequences, you’d be right.

Are Christians ready to face this problem head on? Some are, especially in circles that are big on classical learning and down on addictive technologies that replace one’s exercising of his own mind. What I think we need to rediscover are the attitudes and practices that got the Church through the supposed “dark ages” and helped her bring reform in the 1500s and 1600s: preserving a basic verbal, mathematical, and religious literacy while striving to spread that literacy effectively. There will be individual, domestic, ecclesiastical, and, yes, political aspects to this.

The good news is that we Christians have found ourselves in similar straits before. May God raise up new Charlemagnes and Alfreds, Alcuins and Melanchthons, and Dominics. And may we rally around them and support them. If there is to be a dark age, may the Church be a rare beacon of light.