The New Dark Ages
A history of the upcoming end of the world (and how we might imagine a better one)
No matter where on the political spectrum you stand (or slump, exhausted) it is likely that you have some sense of an ending of things. Probably you feel that we cannot, as a contemporary society, continue on in this way for very much longer. Nearly every single structure, institution, or system feels unsustainable, scammy, exploitative, fragile, and on the edge of collapse.
Perhaps you imagine that the overthrow or at least the utter delegitimization of the government is inevitable by whichever group you think is most dangerous. Or perhaps you are pretty confident that the unprecedented planetary crises wrought by climate change will render moot the endless cycles of inaction and debate that paralyze our public conversations and politics. Or perhaps you suspect that the widening gulf of inequality and the ascendancy of late stage capitalism will yield some species of futuristic techno-dystopian AI Gilded Age.
These all seem like reasonable concerns! It is not great right now!
As a historian, I’m always curious about how this moment compares to other moments folks have navigated in the past. After all, instability and injustice have existed at large scales before, and many of the problems we are facing - although they are certainly intensifying - are not new. So why are so many of us ricocheting between a white-hot rage and grey, listless despair? What’s different about this moment?
It’s worth examining to see what metaphors we reach for when we feel on the brink. There’s one that I’ve noticed popping up again and again: the Dark Ages.
The Curious Case of Boris Johnson at the Colosseum
Take, for example, Boris Johnson (please, our transatlantic friends might say). In the fall of 2021, the then-Prime Minister was touring Rome while in town for a meeting of the G20.
At the Colosseum, a reporter asked him for the odds on meaningful action on climate change coming out of the COP26 summit in Glasgow that year - six out of ten, guessed Johnson. But then he added:
Civilisation could go backwards and history could go into reverse. Here we are in the Colosseum of Vespasian, the Roman Empire, they weren’t expecting it and they went into reverse. We had a Dark Ages. It’s important to remember that things can get dramatically worse.1
Now, you can pretty much always count on Boris Johnson to say something that is absolutely wrong yet somehow fascinating and generally racist. It’s like watching a car crash. This was no exception. He continued, both confidently and incorrectly:
When the Roman Empire fell, it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration. The empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east, all over the place, and we went into a dark ages, Europe went into a dark ages that lasted a very long time. The point of that is to say it can happen again. People should not be so conceited as to imagine that history is a one-way ratchet.2
Johnson was doing something very specific here, something that probably feels familiar to many of us. He was reaching into an imagined past for a metaphor that seemed to match the scale of the moment.
And he’s certainly not alone in this impulse. When progressives decry attacks on the rights of women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people, they say: we are being pushed back into the Dark Ages! When people want to characterize something as generally backward or obtuse, like a bungled governmental response to a global pandemic, they shout: this is positively medieval! And when white supremacists want to invent an origin story for whiteness, they too reach back to the medieval past to seek legitimacy for their hatred in stories of castles, Crusades, and a history invented from whole cloth. When everyone seems to be reaching for similar metaphors about our current global situation, this one recurs with distressing frequency.
When we describe what’s happening in the present moment in these terms, we’re gesturing to an overwhelming feeling of decline, the sense of hurtling from order into chaos, into a world-ending uncertainty filled with disruptive violence and general unpleasantness that characterize our current reality.
There’s a sense that we are tumbling headlong from a settled, civilized, and intrinsically better past into a messy, violent, potentially unwashed but almost certainly less enjoyable future.
Well, Actually…
The so-called actual historical Dark Ages (generally imagined to be something like the fifth through the twelfth, or the thirteenth, or the fourteenth century) were nothing of the sort: they were an era of change and continuity, creativity and catastrophe.
Calling that period of time the Dark Ages is a surefire way to detect any historians in your immediate vicinity, because we are constitutionally incapable of not rushing over and saying, well ACTUALLY you shouldn’t call them the Dark Ages and then going on and on about trade routes and pottery and elite networks of Latinate letter-writing and the deliberate use of an imperial Roman legacy of the Byzantine Empire until you, the listener, remember that you have a pressing appointment literally anywhere else and flee.
The short version is something like this: Renaissance humanists invented the idea of a Dark Age so that they could contrast the brilliant light they believed they brought (#blessed) with what came before, and so that they could align themselves with a more glorious (in their opinion) Roman past.3 But no matter what PR maneuvers were underway in the Renaissance - and there were many! - something definitely happened between the fourth century and the twelfth. There is no denying that Europe in those intervening centuries underwent a whole range of events and shifts that fundamentally reshaped some of the basic pieces of society. Governments, economies, faiths, and the ground-level assumptions people had about what they owed to one another, how the world worked, what you could count on and what you couldn’t, all changed in ways that were both continuous with and a departure from their classical Roman past.4
Here's the important bit: the mental model of the Dark Ages as a time of uncivilized chaos and disorder isn’t just inaccurate and annoying to historians, it’s also often wrong in a very specific way that can conceal a much uglier truth about our present.
Mateusz Fafinski, a specialist on late antiquity and the Middle Ages, has very correctly pointed out that evoking barbarian hordes pouring in to destroy the empire is and always has been a fundamentally racist trope.5 When Boris Johnson is talking about those people who came in and displaced us, it is clear that the Prime Minister imagines himself as a patrician Roman in this alternative invented past, not a Goth or a Hun or even just a regular old tenant farmer in the Gallic countryside.
This is a framing that feeds hard right fantasies of a coming apocalypse brought on by others (i.e. almost always nonwhite people, and/or folks who don’t look, think, believe, or relate to the world like you do). It’s the they: they are coming for your guns, they are ruining society, they are horrible people, they are corrupting your children. Do you know who they are? They’re everybody who isn’t us.
Talking like this is not just irresponsible and wrong, argues Fafinski: it stokes hatred, anti-Semitism, racism, and is outright dangerous.
So Why Does This Metaphor of the Dark Ages Keep Recurring?
Johnson is only one of many invoking the Dark Ages these days - indeed, this is a pattern of discourse consistently observable across the public conversation, and one that has been articulated very neatly by historians Matthew Gabriele and David Perry in their recent work The Bright Ages. They say:
The myth of the “Dark Ages,” which survives quite ably in popular culture, allows the space for it to be whatever the popular imagination wants. If you can’t see into the darkness, the imagination can run wild, focusing attention on and giving outsized importance to the small things you can see. It can be a space for seemingly clean and useful myths, useful to people with dangerous intentions.6
[T]he particular darkness of the Dark Ages suggests emptiness, a blank, almost limitless space into which we can place our modern preoccupations, weather positive or negative. The Dark Ages are, depending on the audience, both backward and progressive, both a period to abhor and one to emulate. It is used as whatever one whats, as a “justification” and “explanation” for those ideas and actions because they supposedly go so far back in time.7
Seeing into the darkness is hard, and there is no denying that we are at a moment that feels quite dark, so it’s perhaps not surprising that we reach for this comparison. But I would add to Gabriele and Perry’s rationale - not only does deploying the myth of the Dark Ages make room for whatever specters we want to conjure, it also lets us off the hook.
It’s true that to invoke the Dark Ages is to invoke the weight of centuries, and to assume the mantle of a past inheritance (whether accurate or not). But it’s also a way of throwing up your hands and saying, well, what can any of us really do? Once the slide downward has started, it’s not like we can fight gravity.
This is a very bad way to think about the past and an even worse way to think about the present. It is a mental framework that relinquishes all our historical agency in the face of tremendous opportunity for change.
Right, But It Feels Pretty Dark Out There
When we talk about the the present in terms of the Dark Ages we aren’t talking about the past at all, but about what’s coming.
We’re talking about how it feels to be balanced on the edge of an unknowable and often frightening precipice. About the intuition that things are getting worse, all the time, and that nobody’s going to do anything about it until it’s too late. About the decline, as Edward Gibbon would say, and the fall.
There are no shortage of explanations for why it feels particularly bad right now, and most of them are probably right to some extent. Maybe it’s that we’re living in a world suffused in fear, maybe it’s learning to live through a climate crisis, maybe it’s polarization or fascism or the politics of national despair, maybe it’s the ways in which racism and white supremacy and policing and capitalism and ableism and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia are all mutually reinforcing systems that oppress people and make our more painful, more unfree, and more cruel.
Or hey, maybe we’re just all insecurely attached. (Ed. note: it is not this last one.)
Whatever the most apt explanatory mechanisms, it seems unarguable that we are living through what climate futurist
calls a discontinuity: a moment where, because of overwhelming and systemic change that outpaces expectations, the experience and expertise you’ve built up over time cease to work.Discontinuity isn’t the end of everything, or the end of the planet, or even the end of humanity. But it is the end of systems and practices and structures that have existed for a very long time. Because this is a transformation happening on a planetary scale, says Steffen, there is nowhere to stand outside of it.
The hard part about the New Dark Ages is that this discontinuity, the collapse of things as we know them is going to happen over a fairly long period of time. It will almost certainly last longer than any of our lifetimes. It’s not terribly likely that some single cataclysmic event will occur or that we’ll all be existing suddenly in some Mad Max dystopian future.
Humans are very, very good at responding to immediate, personal emergencies right in front of us. We are very, very bad at even recognizing, let alone responding to, long-term systemic challenges that require us to shift our fundamental mindset about how the world works.
We are undeniably entering a period of profound change, when old, often unjust, and calcified systems will shatter in the face of overwhelming pressure. This is why we see a tremendous growth in reactionary movements, in an effort to move backward to an imagined better time. Those movements tend to be either “corrective,” seeking to preserve certain elements of the current order in the face of change or challenge, or “restorative,” seeking to recapture an imagined past (make [whatever] great again).8
I would argue that there is tremendous cause for hope in these New Dark Ages. It is unquestionably difficult living through the collapse of global systems, but it is also a tremendous opportunity to make something better. The sooner we accept that the society many of us were born into and raised to believe was inevitable is gone forever, the sooner we can start to apply ourselves to real solutions.
We don’t have the benefit of hindsight yet to know how things will work out. But it is my belief that we can can work to build a world that values creativity, personhood, dignity, curiosity, freedom; that values living in balance with the natural world and our relatives in nature. We can build a world that lifts up the human spirit and our collective well-being, one that is not founded on the continual oppression and exploitation of some of us for the benefit of a very few. This is possible. Plenty of folks are already working hard on what that might look like.
We may be living through the New Dark Ages, and that is a future none of us particularly wanted. But instead of looking into the darkness with despair, I think we can begin to make out in the distance the prospect of a better, more humane, more equitable, and more just future. None of us know exactly the shape of that future, but it’s certainly one worth working very hard to imagine and bring into being.
Gavin Cordon, “Boris Johnson warns of new ‘dark ages’ if global warming is not confronted,” Evening Standard, 30 October 2021.
Peter Walker, “Cop26 failure could mean mass migration and food shortages, says Boris Johnson,” The Guardian, 30 October 2021.
You can generally blame Petrarch for some of this Dark Ages foolishness - he was hyping up his own poetry in the face of what came before, but in fairness to Petrarch, everybody did that: Dante’s invocation of his dolce stil novo (lit. “sweet new style”) almost a century earlier was basically the same move.
The “Dark Ages” sobriquet itself hails from a late 16th century historian and Catholic cardinal named Caesar Baronius (sick name) who called the late ninth through the mid-eleventh century period a saeculum obscurum (lit. “Age of Darkness”) because he didn’t have access to a lot of historical sources and he thought the writers he could find were pretty lame. He said:
“...nouum inchoatur saeculum, quod sui asperitate ac boni sterilitate ferreum, malique exundantis deformitate plumbeum, atque inopia scriptorum appellari consueuit obscurum.”
“…the new age that was coming into being could well be called the Age of Iron for its harshness and barrenness of good, the Age of Lead for its evil and its overflowing ugliness, or indeed the Age of Darkness for its dearth of writings.” Caesar Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici, Vol. X. Roma, p. 647 (1602).
You could also translate obscurum as “secrets” because while it means dark, it also means hidden or concealed, and that makes sense because Baronius is saying that we don’t really know much because there aren’t any written records (or at least, not any that he had access to). It would have been pretty cool if we called it the AGE OF LEAD or the AGE OF SECRETS instead of the Dark Ages, but it’s probably too late to change it now.
For insight and structural detail into what actually happened in the late antique and early medieval periods, see Chris Wickham’s magisterial The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 (Penguin 2009) which traces the shifts in social, political, and economic structures. See also Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (HarperCollins 2021) Bright Ages, which argues convincingly the perspective that in fact, Rome didn’t fall at all - it just changed shape.
Mateusz Fafinski, “Boris Johnson’s Roman Fantasies,” Foreign Policy, November 1, 2021.
Gabriele & Perry, The Bright Ages, p. xiv.
Ibid, p. 251.
Credit goes to Juan Gabriel Tokatlian for this very helpful framework: see more in his “Populists With A Plan: Welcome To The Age Of Reactionism,” Worldcrunch (March 19, 2023).