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| Bertrand Russell |
Echoing the
myth of the Dark Ages, a name for the European Middle Ages invented by the
writers of the Enlightenment, Bertrand Russell wrote these words in his book
Wisdom of the West (1959):
As the central authority of
Rome decayed, the lands of the Western Empire began to sink into an era of
barbarism during which Europe suffered a general cultural decline. The Dark Ages… It is
not inappropriate to call these centuries dark, especially if they are set
against what came before and what came after.
What came
before was the Roman Empire; what came after the Renaissance.
The myth of
the Dark Ages was invented by the writers of the first half of the eighteenth
century to enforce another myth they had created, according to which at that
time we were entering a new era of reason and knowledge, especially scientific
knowledge, which they called by the name of the
Enlightenment.
In the Espasa Dictionary, 1000 great scientists
(1996) I proposed an objective procedure to quantify the relative importance of
the various practitioners of science, using measurements such as the number of
lines assigned to each scientist in encyclopedias of different countries (to
avoid the bias in favor of countrymen). Later, in an as yet unpublished work (The quantification of history and the future of the West),
I applied the same procedure to several branches of human creativity: science,
philosophy, literature, the plastic arts and music. The next figure represents
the resulting evolution of the Greco-Roman and Western science until the end of
the Middle Ages. It can be seen that:
