The Third Dark Age is upon us. We live in the modern equivalent of the final days of Rome, waiting for the sack that finishes off the Empire once and for all. Like the Huns and their Bronze Age counterparts, invaders run rampart in our towns and cities, not only not stopped by those who claim to lead us, but actively supported by them. Meanwhile, alleged academics want to banish all knowledge of the past, for fear of the masses recognizing our decline.
Can we halt our decline? Probably not, as far down the path as we’ve come so far. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work to ensure that it is as short as possible, and that our descendants are not left in a centuries-long era of regression and barbarism.
Awakening
Out of the Greek Dark Age came legends: Homer and Exodus, mythic tales of people overcoming the great and powerful with more than a little help from their chosen deities. By the time the dust had settled, the world had changed irrevocably, a full break with the past. Gone were the Hittites and Trojans and Canaanites, while Darius and Alexander were still hundreds of years away.
It was a long road back, but we got there in the end. Eventually, rational thought returned to the Western world, largely confined to Greece at this stage. Philosophy was born, and with it the awakening of wisdom, of reason.
Much, much later, the fall of Rome and rise of Islam brought the Medieval Dark Age to Europe, all but extinguishing that light. And while the cultural and technological and even scientific knowledge of the West rose from the mire after only a relatively few generations, the higher purpose of wisdom, of the kind of knowledge that creates civilizations and jump-starts human progress, lay dormant far longer. Instead, Europe looked to religion, to mysticism and myth, for another few centuries.
Only when science had advanced far enough to prove the fairytale stories of Jewish scripture demonstrably false could the Enlightenment begin. And only when it began was Europe able to cast off the last of the darkness.
That didn’t start until the early 17th century, with great thinkers like Galileo and Bruno to start, followed later by those such as Newton and Spinoza. Eventually, the Enlightenment even began to fracture, different regions going their separate ways. The French Enlightenment, for instance, gave us the rational philosophy of Descartes and the like: ways to look at the world that didn’t invoke the supernatural. The English and even Scottish, on the other hand, contributed the wisdom of politics, economics, and the "hard" sciences. Last, but most important, was the American Enlightenment, bringing the liberal (in the classical sense) values of French thinkers together with the moral imperatives of free speech, free markets, and freedom of religion that came from their rivals across the Channel.
In that sense, then, there were still bits of darkness in the world as late as 1800. (Really, not all of them left, but I digress.) Even though Europe didn’t have wandering hordes of invaders anymore, we in the West still needed a thousand years after Charlemagne to truly return to the glory days he was trying to emulate.
And that pairs up well with the Greek Dark Age. Yes, Homer was writing his epics in the ninth or tenth century BC, but they were the beginning, not the end, of Greece’s rise. Most of the great thinkers we associate with the Greek school of philosophy came much later, in the third and fourth centuries BC. In other words, almost a full millennium after the invasions of the Sea Peoples. In a very real sense, then, the path from darkness to light was longer for medieval Europe.
Learning from the past
We must do better than that. The effects of our Third Dark Age can’t last for a thousand years. We’ve come too far as a species to allow ourselves to be dragged back into the darkness, no matter what the "traditionalist" right and "inclusive" left wish for us.
So how do we do it?
First, we must keep knowledge alive. True knowledge, the wisdom passed down to us and created in our own time. Digital collections such as Library Genesis are a good thing—the fact that elites hate them so much is a pretty good indication—but they have the downside of being, well, digital. If the Third Dark Age collapse is too great, ubiquitous computing won’t be a given. In addition to distributed, censorship-resistant online libraries, then, we need open, secure libraries in the physical world. The Library of Alexandria, except there’s one in every city, and their shared goal is to archive as much knowledge as possible, in ways that it will endure even the harshest decline.
Second, those of us who are awake to the peril must continue to share that knowledge. Within our family, our community, and our country (in that order), we should be training others in the skills we possess, while also passing down what we have learned. And this includes the greatest lessons of all: that the world is not some divine mystery; that humanity is inherently a good and positive force; that science is not reserved to the elite, or those with the right credentials, but is something every one of us experiences every single day.
Third on the list is a greater focus on that community. The post-collapse time of the previous Dark Ages was a reversion to a heavily decentralized world. An anti-globalism, or a "localism", if you will. In modern times, I can foresee that creating a multitude of city-states; we’re already pretty close to this with New York, London, and a few others. But even rural areas will have to become more self-reliant as the Third Dark Age brings a fall of the American Empire. We can’t do that if we don’t know our neighbors. (We also can’t band together to resist invasions without that sense of brotherhood, so this strengthening of community has more than one beneficial effect.)
Fourth, reconnecting with our past, in the sense of doing useful work outside of the internet. This can be writing books, building a shed, or just anything. The key is that it has a physical presence. It’s a physical manifestation of our knowledge, which matters more in a world that will come to see that knowledge as worthless in itself. I’m not saying to become a prepper—that might be more useful in other collapse circumstances—but to prepare for a major shift in what society deems important.
Above all, we need to remember, to preserve, to teach the world that the coming darkness is not eternal. There is a light beyond, and it is not the light at the end of the tunnel. It is the dawn of a new day. Working together, recognizing what we are losing and why, we have the chance to bring that new dawn faster than in our ancestors’ previous two attempts.
If knowledge is power, our job is to be a generator. And that’s what you need to keep the lights on in a disaster.