Re: ****ny Happy Caliphate

On Thu, 15 May 2008 00:51:17 +0200, Matthias Warkus wrote:

> mimus schrieb:
>> On Wed, 14 May 2008 18:10:47 +0000, Gene wrote:
>> 
>>> Matthias Warkus <Warkus@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in 
>>> news:g0eg2i$13ku$2@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>
>>>>> So what does this revisionism about the seemingly well-
>>>>> merited title "the Dark Ages" amount to, exactly?
>>>>
>>>> OFCS just read up. Something called the Mediaeval 
>>>> Agricultural (and Industrial) Revolution happened then, enabling
>>>> Europe to vastly increase its population, for example.
>>>
>>> True. Another factor was that the term didn't seem appropriate to the
>>> High Middle Ages anyway.
>> 
>> We're still talkin' a serious dearth of independent intellectual
>> analysis from the time here, are we not?
> 
> Well, not really. For one, much of the foundations of occidental
> philosophy as we know it today were laid during the Middle Ages.

We seem to've ****fted the subject from the "Dark Ages" and
non-aristocratic non-priestly lit'rature here . . . .

> What 
> most people call Aristotelicism, for example, is Aristoteles filtered 
> through a dozen generations of scholastics, which did some pretty 
> innovative stuff. There was an awful lot of productive intellectual work

> happening in all areas, like people codifying law or writing 
> dictionaries, inventing double bookkeeping, banking and the modern 
> concept of busy townsfolk as opposed to the idle, slavering citizens of 
> the classic polis.

Um . . . under the Roman "Republic" (plutocracy), anyway, the Roman "mob"
was principally composed of those Roman citizens and their descendants who
had been driven off their lands by the patricians in the course of their
establishment of the slave-estates.

And who were of course then and thereafter subjected to the usual
invective by the apologists of slavery, like Cicero (you saw the same
thing with the dispossessed and disemployed resulting from the
"enclosure movements" in the British Isles, as well as the dispossessed
and disemployed of the American antebellum Slave South, the latter
characterized then and thereafter as "white trash", "crackers" and so on
by the apologists for and beneficiaries of slavery-- and of course
encouraged to substitute despising the slaves for overthrowing slavery).

> Of course there was no scientific method and no critical philology in 
> the modern sense (if you don't count Occam's Razor), but it's not like 
> they had that in the classic age.
> 
> Then, there's the phenomenon that you harder you try to nail down when 
> the Middle Ages turned into the Renaissance, the more seamless that 
> transition seems to become.

The "citizens" (slaves-- it was really really ugly by then, sons required
by law to take up their fathers' professions, permission needed to travel
from town to town, everything crumbling from oppressive State stupidity,
etc.) of the Western Christian Empire seem to've greeted the coming of the
Goths with some relief, at least that's the impression I get from the
admittedly often unreliable Gregory of Tours.

Even though they were only trading Christian Imperial and Theocratic
oppression for Gothic Aristocratic and Christian Theocratic oppression . .
. .

Sort of like having the Nazis thrown out by the Soviets or vice-versa back
about seventy years ago or so.

-- 

You don't know what I see back in this Country.  Bribes,
Impersonations, Land Fraud, Scalp-stealing, Ginseng Diversion.
Each Day brings Spectacle ever more disheartening.

< _Mason & Dixon_