(Ed’s note: The following article is amazing for its comprehensiveness, yet brief overview of two divergent philosphies that war against each other today. A MUST read.)
An electoral shift to the right, or “right-wing” influence in media, education, entertainment, business, law enforcement, the military, or medicine might be deplored as a return to the Dark Ages of superstition and repression, and a rejection of the Enlightenment, which brought science, prosperity, and freedom.
It is popularly believed that, during this dark era and the “Middle Ages,” obscurantist Christians deliberately rounded up classical texts to destroy them, everyone thought the earth was flat, and scientific and technological advancement was virtually nonexistent (tinyurl.com/yf6azpsj).
The phrase “Dark Ages” was first used to describe the Middle Ages by the Italian scholar Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374 AD). He thought that classical antiquity was the Golden Age, and that he lived in an age of decline. Some historians use the term to refer more specifically to the Early Middle Ages (c. 475–c. 800 AD), from the collapse of the western Roman Empire until the rise of the Carolingian Empire, sometimes considered the first phase of the Holy Roman Empire, in the late eighth century A.D.