Is This A New Dark Age?

Morford speaks for many of us.

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Is This A New Dark Age?
Little proof to the contrary that we are indeed in a very long, bleak tunnel. Is there any light?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, March 25, 2005

Then come those times when you read about a 16-year-old girl slashing the throat of a 75-year-old woman for no apparent reason, a woman who was merely walking with her husband near a Berkeley public garden and it's right next to the one about the 16-year-old kid smiling and waving and donning a bulletproof vest before shooting nine people and himself to death in a remote, poverty-stricken region of Minnesota and you can feel the numbness like a wave.

And alongside that is the morbid and insipid case of poor Terry Schiavo and the equally insipid Bush evangelicals who trumpet the backward morality of maintaining her vegetative brain-dead state and the sad, tormented parents who can't face reality and the insidious GOP that has zero shame in using her decrepit body as a political football and that kowtows to its pseudo-religious contingency by making humiliating and rather illegal congressional maneuvers to try and keep a feeding tube in place and you just go, oh my God just stop already.

And it all seems to line up with one of those weird phases when everyone in your own life seems to be getting hit by something tragic or sad or somehow ridiculously painful -- a sister with a neck trauma, a best friend going through major depression, a parent struck by illness, certainly almost everyone on the progressive Left feeling sucker-punched and morally eviscerated -- friends and family and loved ones all seeming to suffer in ways you don't want to imagine and it's all against a backdrop of more war dead and more violence and the most bleak and Bush-ravaged era in recent American history and you say to yourself, what the hell is going on?

Because something in you knows. Something in you senses there is more at play right now in the world than mere depressing coincidence, that all the war and disease and brutality has more surrounding it than mere chance or fluke. Do you think? Do you feel it?

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The question is what is causing it? It's as though we are determined to march back to feudal times, allowing the Church to re-establish it's reign of terror Inquisitions.

It's becoming more and more obvious that this is the target era of dominionists. Their goal is nothing short of a new Feudal Age under the oppressive shroud of the Demonic Perspective.

If we do not provide opposition, if our democratic leaders continue to roll over on their bellies every time the going gets tough, we are indeed headed for a return to the Dark Ages, IMO.



--- here's a book from on the subject --


Dark Age Ahead
by JANE JACOBS "This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book..." (more)

Editorial Reviews (from amazon.com)
From Publishers Weekly
Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities forever transformed the discipline of urban planning by concentrating on what actually helped cities work. Unencumbered by generations of fatuous theorizing, Jacobs proposed a model of action that has left a positive mark in neighborhoods all over the world. Her latest salvo, Dark Age Ahead, is, despite the pessimism of many of its conclusions, also positive, less a jeremiad than a firm but helpful reminder of just how much is at stake. Jacobs sees "ominous signs of decay" in five "pillars" of our culture: family, community, higher education, science and "self policing by the learned professions." Each is given a detailed treatment, with sympathetic but hard-headed real-world assessments that are often surprising and always provocative and well-expressed. Her chapter on the decline of the nuclear family completely avoids the moral hand-wringing of the kindergarten Cassandras to place the blame on an economy that has made the affordable home either an unattainable dream or a crippling debt. Her discussion of the havoc wrought by the lack of accountability seems ripped from any number of headlines, but her analysis of the larger effects sets it apart. A lifetime of unwasted experience in a number of fields has gone into this short but pungent book, and to ignore its sober warnings would be foolish indeed.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description:
Visionary thinker Jane Jacobs uses her authoritative work on urban life and economies to show us how we can protect and strengthen our culture and communities.

In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation and government; and self-policing by learned professions. The decay of these pillars, Jacobs contends, is behind such ills as environmental crisis, racism and the growing gulf between rich and poor; their continued degradation could lead us into a new Dark Age, a period of cultural collapse in which all that keeps a society alive and vibrant is forgotten.

But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Jacobs draws on her vast frame of reference -- from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to zoning regulations in Brampton, Ontario -- and in highly readable, invigorating prose offers proposals that could arrest the cycles of decay and turn them into beneficent ones. Wise, worldly, full of real-life examples and accessible concepts, this book is an essential read for perilous times.

for me it's a combination of things.

a society built on consumerism/materialism.

the spiritual having given way to the superstitious and controlled and manipulated by corporatism.

the response is a return to progressive rationality -- and the end to american exceptionalism.

just think how bad it would be then (humor)

I'm still searching for a word to describe what is going on. 'Dark Ages' doesn't do it for me as we have had no collapse (yet) of the ruling civilization. The huns and goths are not running amok pillaging and looting the great cities, learning and knowledge has not come to virtual stop.

The emergence of rational humanism in the 1600's, an outgrowth of the great blossoming of the renaissance, became the enlightenment of the 1700's. It is from this period that 'modernity', the current world culture, directly evolves. And it is the enlightenment that is coming to an end. But what is it called when civilization starts to reject rationalism and progress and humanism and adopts instead, deliberately, irrationalism, magical thinking, supersition instead of science? What is the word for anti-enlightenment?

Peace prosperity and lack of violent deaths in a large population it really seems that the real dangers are off to the side of awareness and the crisis in culture is the major spiritual danger to the nation and world. The REAL collapse into a Dark Age has not happened as much as the stage is trying to be set. Grinding humiliation is that this society, as insufficient and duplicitous as it is is at its peak, the seeds of its eventual destruction at least in debate if remote from the daily lives and thoughts of the majority of misinformed citizens.

The elements of a true dark Age. The RW would love to gut the education system into an elitist "formation" school for world rulers. Even science would be grunt work and arrogantly outsourced as mad as that would be.
As the world descends, pushed into chaos and decline the rulers do the one thing the nukes(and the meager application of hi-tech oneupmanship militarily alone) enable them to do. Maintain vampirish control of their own manipulation of power. That is not sustainable anymore than the oil but learning from history is only for honing techniques of oppression among these semi-humans.

Economic collapse and social disintegration that would turn any happy island of small town America into a vulnerable oasis looking for local protection of any sort.

The environmental plagues catch up and destroy America according to the historically unprecedented level of danger.

The American Taliban, anarchy, ignorance, riots, enslavement and unemployment REALLY dominate everyday life instead of the uncomfortable show at the top disgustingly paraded before helpless majorities.

The collapse of world wide communications that alone seem to bind civilization together from an untimely, awkward and doomed repetition of the worst of the past.

And how dark were the Dark Ages? It actually was the period when empire and communication and travel collapsed and the threat of permanence really was due to the race against time to copy decaying documents that would forever lose the advances of the past. The Church was supplying at that time a shadow government crossing kingdom borders, the remnants of law and Empire.

What will happen this millennium is absolutely unique and a turning point where history itself(starting from the LAST Ice Age) will end as it has existed before and homo sapiens as well. Birth pains or death throes. The decision hangs probably on a thread despite the unprecedented conjoined consciousness of the majority of mankind. Unless the masses exert themselves against the spiteful, ignorant obsolete machinery of the past it will entail more suffering and change than mankind has known, most of it if not avoidable at least crying out for a united civilized effort. For which almost all the leaders and institutions on the planet are mentally and morally criminally unfit.