W E SEEM to be living in a time of incredible prosperity. Despite the huge numbers of human beings on Earth, advances in technology and health and the precipitous decline of organized armed conflicts -- more properly called wars -- since World War II, have created a situation in which the human race seems to be doing pretty okay.
Of course, that may not be your opinion if you're living in a slum in Calcutta, India, or the Heart of Darkness, as the so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo is once more (make no mistake about that). But for the human race as a whole, things have never seemed better.
If you doubt this assessment, cast your gaze back only one hundred years, to 1913. Two major world wars were just ahead of us. Huge segments of so-called "civilized" societies were about to engage in the most terrifying and prodigious slaughters the world has ever seen, armed with the technology to assure that the most horrific forms of mass murder would be made efficient, if not painless. Painless, that is, to those who dealt out the pain. Killing became an abstract concept and for a while -- a long while -- planetary-scale conflict and wholesale massacres became the normal mode of operations for most of humanity. Sectarian and religious violence took a momentary back seat to massive, machine-empowered grinding up of whole countries, and this state of affairs continued well into the 20th century.
But it began to peter out, sometime after the Vietnam war. Full-scale warfare became an impossibility simply because of one thing: MAD, or mutually assured destruction. Everyone who was anyone realized that wars on the scale of the first and second were no longer possible. Even if they were fought with conventional weapons, the terrible spectre of atomic destruction was a powerful foot on the brakes.
Simply put, even if anyone won one of these wars, there would be nothing left to govern.
Large-scale violence has been banished, but small-scale violence remains rife. Still, the so-called "civilized" nations of the world seem to have it together. There are no more episodes of brinksmanship by major powers. Rogue states like Iran and North Korea continue their petulant sabre rattling, but if either regime is under the impression that it could seriously enter into a conflict with the rest of the world and come out extant, they are seriously misguided.
Iran would be wiped off the face of the map, politically. North Korea would survive for about three days until its regime collapsed totally.
Who else is left, then, who is a major threat to world peace? Who could possibly reduce the world to a state of complete and utter anarchy, so characteristic of World War II? The answer, of course, is no one.
The reason for this is the same reason the Five Families finally settled the major mafia wars of the early 20th century. Simply put, doing business out of the barrel of a gun just didn't make sense, profit-wise.
And so it stands today.
But so it probably seemed to stand, also, about 2,000 years ago. Although the "peace" was kept by force back then and there was only one superpower, things still must have seemed to be pretty stable to most of the world. Yes, you'll have hundreds of arguments with that. Slavery was an institution. Guess what? It still is, it's just called by different names. 90% of humanity lived under the poverty level. Guess what? Their "poverty level" was our middle class today.
People died in droves of sickness, but people had always been dying in droves of sickness. Families had as many babies as they could, notwithstanding that they had little choice, since there wasn't any birth control. But probably more than 2/3rds of all children died before the age of five.
All this was
completely normal. And it sure beat swinging from the trees or living in the depths of a sweltering tropical jungle, right?
My point again is, 2,000 years ago, the world was relatively stable. One ring ruled them all, under an iron fist, but to many, it was a benevolent iron fist. Joe Average led a pretty normal life,
for back then, just like it can be argued that Joe Average in any given country in the world today leads a comparatively normal life. At least, for MOST people, that means not having to put on armour and go fight battles and die.
But, 2,000 years ago, somehow,
it all came to a crashing end. From a state of relative calm and worldwide peace -- again,
for the time a relatively livable state of affairs, life for the average human suddenly took a decided turn for the worse. And this was not just for the superpowers. The entire race of humanity was somehow plunged into one thousand-odd years of complete anarchy.
Europe became a complete, utter disaster zone. One can easily compare it to Somalia today. No one ruled. Countries, if you wish to call them that, were ruled by what can only be called warlords. Even the pope was little more than a warlord, just a richer warlord than all the other warlords.
And for the common person, life became an utter horror. Between the years of roughly A.D. 100 and the year 1400, again, very roughly, the rule of existence for humanity EVERYWHERE was chaos.
In fact, the only people who still seemed to have their wits about them were the ones the so-called "civilized" nations hadn't yet discovered. The millions of disparate tribes in "undiscovered" Africa ("We weren't undiscovered. We were there all along! You just didn't know about us.") went about their business in relative harmony. The Incas, Aztecs, Mayans -- all good there. The various North American native peoples: ditto.
But for the "civilized" Europeans and the followers of Allah? Complete, utter Hell on earth. For more than a thousand years!
Just how do you account for that? The complete disintegration of what had hitherto been a relatively stable world.
I won't go into the causes; there were many, way too many to lump into one grand Hypothesis of What Went Horribly Wrong.
But if you think about it in real terms, the people who lived back then were exactly like us. They didn't have "slightly smaller brains" or "stunted intellectual capacity." Bring any peasant British baby from some remote village in the wilds of Northumbria born in, say, A.D. 234 into a modern household in Great Britain, from birth, and he'd turn out just exactly like any other baby born today in modern Great Britain. He'd be indistinguishable in intellectual capacity from ANY OTHER baby born today.
So what in hell happened? How did humanity fall apart so hugely and completely? How, after thousands of years of progress, in a world where people had modern sewers and drinking water for all, where there were schools and even universities, grand libraries, massively complex works of art, incredible advances in science and humanities, did everything just IMPLODE as if in one massive, earthshaking collapse and reduce us to the pitiful, disparate, hungry and ignorant band of lawless thugs that we became for a thousand years?
Well, obviously I don't have the answer to that. No one has an answer, because there is no one answer. And yet, no one will dispute that THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED.
So this little essay is not predicated on a statement. It's predicated on a question, a very BIG question.
What, pray tell, is any different now that would
prevent it from happening again? Is the fact that a man has landed on the moon going to prevent it from happening again? Is the fact that two-thirds of humanity live with electricity at their fingertips every single day of their lives going to prevent it happening again, is the fact that we have decoded the human genome and discovered nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and now have mass world travel going to prevent it from happening again?
Yesterday, a meteor hurtled in from space and exploded with a few sonic booms and broke a lot of glass and injured a bunch of people. Two years ago an earthquake came
thsclse to obliterating one of the largest cities in the world.
A few years before that, something called H1N1 came a-calling, but luckily was in a hurry and didn't hang around town too long. Too many other worlds to conquer, maybe. Who knows?
No, I'm not hoarding dried food like I was in 1999 -- Y2K ring any bells? No? Aww, how quickly we forget!
But I think very, very few people actually realize what a thin veneer separates us from the Dark Ages. A veneer as thick, perhaps, as Earth's atmosphere, which if reduced to the size of a billiard ball, would be the thickness of a coat of paint.
All I'm saying here is, think about it. Take one minute out of your busy life and
think about it.
Note: I had 24 hours to think about it and the answer came to me in a blinding flash. It literally accounts for everything I asked "why" to here. The Dark Ages for European humanity began at, well . . . the birth of Christianity.
